Chapter 4
Four
She felt foolish calling the sheriff’s department for something so trivial, but if someone was squatting in her house, she wanted to know, and she didn’t want to be the one to go looking.
She could have called Samson, she supposed, but he’d already done enough for her last night. More than she could repay him for.
The young deputy, younger than her, probably, tall and lanky, pulled up in front of the house. She watched through the window as he stepped out onto the street and looked up at the house a long time before opening the gate and coming up the walk.
She stepped out on the porch to greet him, and he hesitated halfway to the house.
He lifted his hat just a bit in greeting, enough to give a glimpse of his sandy hair. “I’m Deputy Thibodeaux. You having some trouble, Ms. Benoit?”
“I just...” How to explain herself without seeming like a hysterical female, something she definitely was not?
Too late to have second thoughts about his visit now.
“Just some odd things going on, and I want to make sure I’m the only person living here.
The house has been empty a long time, and, well. I don’t want any unwelcome guests.”
He resumed his stroll, in no hurry. “What kind of odd things?” His brow creased as he mounted the porch, his gaze on her dead serious.
She explained about the light switches, and the picture, as she led the way into the house.
“So you want me to look around and make sure no one is here,” he said, clarifying.
She nodded, and motioned for him to lead the way into the living room, to the left of the entryway.
She followed, not too close, but not too far.
He walked the perimeter, pushing aside rotted drapes to check the windows, ensuring they were locked.
He gave a strangled yelp and jumped back at the last window.
She retreated to the doorway, not wanting to look away in case she needed to run to his rescue.
“What is it?” she demanded, pressing her hand to the center of her chest, trying to regulate her breathing.
He pushed the decaying drape farther aside to show her a spider as big as her palm.
The house was yards away from the swamp. She had already done a thorough spider inspection upstairs because she didn’t want to meet any of these guys when she was waking up, but she hadn’t checked down here. She would open the window and relocate this guy later.
After her heart stopped threatening to jump out of her chest.
The deputy circled the room, inspecting the fireplace with his flashlight. “Need to get this cleaned before you use it,” he said.
“I don’t see that happening for a very long time.” If she was here that long.
He stopped at the boarded-up entry to the solarium, and pulled on the edge of the plywood to make sure it wasn’t loose.
“Why’s this boarded up?”
She took a couple of steps into the room.
Even though the solarium wasn’t visible now, she could see what it had been like when she was young.
“From what Daisy told me, the glass in the solarium had some issues and my grandfather couldn’t afford to fix them, so he just boarded it up.
” So many summers she’d sat in that room, reading under the big dual-headed ceiling fan, hiding in there when she was even younger, when her parents came to take her home. .
Deputy Thibodeaux gave the back windows a more cursory perusal after his encounter with the spider, and he was about to leave the room altogether, when she motioned to the furniture covered in sheets.
“What about here?”
He gave her a look, his eyebrows drawn together. “You really think someone is hiding under there? Right now?”
“Well, I mean.” Clearly no one was, but she didn’t know what was hiding under there, and she’d rather find out with a man who was carrying a gun.
“No. But can you help me?” But she didn’t want to yank them off herself and discover who-knew-what, so she motioned for him to take one end of the fabric, and she’d take the other.
“On three?” she asked, and his mouth twisted in a grimace.
Their grappling stirred up so much dust that both of them started coughing, and that was what startled the rat to run out in her direction, toward the fireplace.
Her shriek echoed off the walls, and he yelled too, but probably because of her and not the rat, which disappeared into a fissure in the wall behind the fireplace.
Great. Just great. Something else she was going to have to deal with.
She bundled up the sheet and tossed it on the settee, one she’d never been allowed to sit on when she was a kid. She never could understand why her grandparents kept furniture they refused to use, antique or no, especially since now it was ruined and needed to be thrown out.
She persuaded the deputy to help her remove the other sheets, all without incident, thank God, before they moved into the dining room—she made him open the doors of the buffet, still filled with dishes—and then into the kitchen.
His skepticism was palpable as she made him open every cabinet door.
“I read this thing once, online, the worst thing I’ve ever read because it haunts me to this day—about people who squat in other people’s houses while they’re living there.
They hide in the walls or the attic, and come out at night while the owners are asleep, or during the day while they’re at work. Have you ever heard of that?”
She didn’t know why she felt the need to explain her fear to the deputy, but it seemed a likely scenario, since her grandfather hadn’t lived here for a few years.
He shook his head, and headed toward the study. She closed the cabinet doors behind him and followed.
The room smelled terrible, the air heavy with the lingering odor of her grandfather, the decaying odor of the books that still weighed down the shelves, coated with dust. She studied the heavy oak desk her grandfather had once ruled behind, where he took care of town business a few hours each day.
Some days she’d come in, just to sit with him, and color at the edge of his desk, or curl up in one of the chairs and read, just wanting to be near him.
She could almost see him superimposed over the decay.
The leather of his blotter and of his chair were rotted.
She would need to throw those out, in addition to many of the books that had probably mildewed in the humidity.
Behind the desk was an arched window looking out on the back porch, and beyond that, the bayou. She’d always wondered why he had his desk turned this way, and not where he could look out on the bayou he loved.
“Don’t see nothing in here,” the deputy muttered, checking the window for a latch, but it didn’t open.
This time she was the one to open the cabinets at the base of each bookshelf, too small for a grown person to hide, but for some reason she didn’t want the deputy looking, touching. She couldn’t say why.
She would look in the desk drawers later.
“So I have a question,” he ventured as they walked out of the study and toward the stairs. “Your last name is Benoit, but this house belonged to your mama’s parents.”
“My mother kept her name when she married. The idea was that sons would get my father’s name and daughters would take my mother’s. There were no sons. But Benoit is a good professional name.” She would have changed her name to it, anyway.
“I guess,” he said, not convinced.
“How long have you been with the sheriff’s department? And where is it, anyway? I didn’t see an office or anything in town.”
“We’re not. We’re in Beaullieu, other side of town. Little bigger than Phantom Bayou, but not much.”
“And you live there?” Maybe she could look for a job there.
“Nah, I live in Maillard. More options.”
“What’s there to do in Beaullieu? I mean, more than here, I guess?”
“Not much. Again, why I live in Maillard.”
“Places to work?”
He glanced over from the window in the upper hallway. “Nobody hiring.”
She was grateful he had his back turned so he didn’t see the sag of her shoulders.
None of the four bedrooms revealed anything.
They removed the sheets from what furniture they found in there, too.
She didn’t know why she was compelled to uncover it, since she didn’t know how long she was staying, and what she’d do with it, anyway.
But she felt better having it uncovered.
The place felt more like home, and less like a stopover on the way to whatever was next.
She tossed the sheets over the stair rail to the floor below. She’d deal with them later.
Then she and Deputy Thibodeaux stopped at the foot of the stairs to the attic.
“You have a flashlight?” she asked. The long attic had a couple of windows, but they were at either end of the space.
“I do.” He looked over at her. “You been up here before?”
“Not since I’ve been back,” she admitted.
“If we find anything, this will be the most likely place.”
She thought about asking him to call for backup. That would be the smart thing, right? But she was determined not to be the hysterical female. She wasn’t even sure he would have backup available.
“Now or never,” she muttered, and took the first step.
The steps here were dustier and creakier than the ones leading to the second floor.
Clearly her grandfather hadn’t been up here much, nor had Daisy.
That was reassuring, though, because if the dust was undisturbed, that meant someone hadn’t entered the house from the attic and come downstairs to torment her.
No person, anyway.
She sucked in a breath when the door to the attic swung inward—mistake because that meant she drew in a lungful of dust which made her cough, obscuring her initial impression of the room.
She should have brought up a couple of bottles of water to wash the dust from their throats.
Neither moved from the doorway. Deputy Thibodeaux turned on his flashlight and shone it around the room.
Boxes and boxes and boxes—some modern, cardboard and stamped with the name of a big box store, some ancient and crumbling at the corners—were piled the length and width of the room, and the space smelled even worse than the study.
“Oh man,” the deputy breathed. “What a mess.”
She wanted to cry. Cleaning all this up was all her responsibility. All because her grandfather had loved her.
If someone was squatting, though, this would be an ideal place to hide. She moved closer to the deputy as he edged toward the west end of the house, swinging the flashlight from one side to the other.
“Got some water damage,” he said in a whisper, as if he didn’t want to startle anything that might be living up here.
He pointed with the beam of the flashlight to a box weak with dark stains.
He trailed the beam up to the roof, and sure enough, an irregular circle of dark wood revealed the roof had a leak.
Despair threatened to weigh down on her, but one thing at a time. She wasn’t used to operating that way, but necessity, and all that.
They reached the window at the west end of the house without encountering anything living or dead, and when he tested the window, they both saw it was swollen shut.
“No way anyone came in through here.”
She made him follow a different path through the boxes to the other end of the building, at the same time knowing that if someone was up here and heard them, they could have easily moved to avoid them. She supposed she and the deputy could split up, but she didn’t have a flashlight of her own.
Or courage.
They were more than halfway to the other end of the attic when a loud thump sounded behind them and she shrieked, jumping forward and clinging to Deputy Thibodeaux’s sleeve as he swung the flashlight around to aim it at a box that had disintegrated and spilled its contents—more books—into the path they’d just passed.
Her shoulders relaxed as the deputy let out a relieved laugh.
She didn’t let go of the deputy’s sleeve, however, until they reached the east end of the room and he pulled free to check the window.
Which opened easily.
The windowsill wasn’t dusty, either.
“Probably just kids playing pranks,” he murmured. “You’d best get a new lock up here.” He flicked the loose metal latch.
She looked out the window past him, to the steeply pitched roof. Someone would have to be very determined to get inside this way. And why? Just to scare her?
She followed the deputy downstairs to the front door.
“Thank you,” she said. “Come by Rumrunner’s tonight, and drinks are on me.”
He gave her a funny look. “You’ll be at Rumrunner’s? No wonder you were asking who was hiring.”
She squared her shoulders, trying not to be defensive about her new job. “I’ll be working close every night, so make sure you come by after ten.”
His expression was inscrutable, but he nodded, tipped his hat and headed out to his car, talking into his shoulder mic as he did so.
She closed the door behind him and leaned against it. At least they hadn’t found evidence of someone camping up here, but starting tomorrow, she was going to start cleaning this place out.
After she got some locks.
When she’d lived in New York, she’d had these little metal locks that screwed into the window frame. Those couldn’t be too expensive, right, and they were easy to install.
But she had a lot of windows. She hoped Old Man Duval had them in stock.
Driving to Maillard, since Duval didn’t have locks,, and taking the time to put the locks on every downstairs window, took much of the rest of her day.
She hesitated a bit on the landing outside the attic before opening the door.
She bounced the little metal locks that seemed too small to keep out someone who was determined to get in.
But right now, this was what she had. She pushed open the door, and looking neither to the left or right, walked to the window that had no lock, attached the metal screws, and scrammed out of there as fast as she could.
Once outside the attic, though, she looked at the flimsy door.
On the landing were two bookcases, both stuffed with, yes, more books.
She tried to slide one in front of the door, but it was much too heavy, so she unloaded all the books, huffed and puffed, then wrangled the case in front of the attic door.
Even though the door itself swung inward, the shelf blocked the frame.
Once she had it where she wanted it, she returned the books to the shelves.
Hands on her hips, sweat running down her back, she inspected her fix. No one would get through this door.
But now she had to get ready for work.
On her way out, she looked at the framed picture, still on the floor facing the wall, and set it outside on the porch. Tomorrow she’d take it to some charity, or the dump, or something. But for now, she couldn’t say why, but she wanted it out of the house.