Page 17 of Speak of the Devil

“But there are haunted ones.”

The note in his voice was almost pleading, sort of like a kid asking his parents to reassure him that Santa Claus was real.

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “More than you might think. Las Vegas is a big town, so it’s going to have its share of murders and suicides and overdoses.”

“So…ghosts only haunt a house if they’ve died violently?”

He looked genuinely interested, and Delia found herself smiling again.

Damn, he was cute.

“Not always,” she said. “There’ve been cases where one spouse has passed away and the other was still alive, and a spirit lingers because it doesn’t want to move on without their partner. And sometimes — sometimes they stay for reasons we can’t begin to guess.”

Like the ghost of the elderly woman who didn’t want to leave the condo that had been her home for forty years. She never did anything malicious, but if the new residents tried to set up the furniture in arrangements she didn’t like or hung pictures in places she didn’t approve of, everything ended up in a big pile in the middle of the living room.

Needless to say, that particular condo had buyers shuttling in and out until someone finally contacted Delia to help the woman move on. She’d been a stubborn ghost, refusing to listen to any of Delia’s persuasive arguments…until she finally explainedthat the home wasn’t hers anymore and that what the ghost was doing was next door to trespassing. The woman must have been the extremely law-abiding sort when she was alive, because as soon as she heard that interpretation of the situation, she promptly disappeared, never to be seen again.

“You can handle any of that, though, right?” Caleb asked. “I mean, what’s your success rate?”

“One hundred percent,” Delia said proudly, even as she thought,So far.“That doesn’t mean it’s not harder to dislodge some spirits than others, but eventually, they all realize that they’re not meant to stay here and vacate the property.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “So, what’ve you got in inventory right now?”

“None of the properties Dunne & Dunne are handling are haunted,” she replied.

Her mother had told her when she came in this morning that the Sunrise Manor house already had three offers on it…and besides, the ghost of the owner’s troubled son had obviously moved on, so Delia knew it didn’t fit Caleb’s parameters. And since she’d run into plenty of kooky requests — including a house with a basement for a dominatrix who wanted to work from home and several clients who insisted on specific house numbers because they were lucky — she wasn’t going to worry too much about someone who wanted a haunted house.

As his expression began to fall, though, she added, “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few here in Las Vegas. Let me get my folder on that.”

She turned away from him so she could lean down and open the file cabinet next to her desk. Maybe it would have been smarter to keep all this information online, but she liked having physical printouts of the various listings so she could hand them over to a client to look at more closely.

Inventory was always low after the holidays, but now, two weeks into the new year, things were beginning to pick back up a bit. Still, she only had two houses that she knew for sure were haunted, and two others that had sounded promising but which she hadn’t had a chance to personally investigate yet.

“I have these four,” she said, sliding the folder toward him. “All of them are single-family residences, which I assume is what you’re looking for?”

“I’d prefer it,” Caleb replied, dark eyes scanning each listing as he shuffled his way through the papers she’d provided. Then he paused and pushed one back toward her. “This place looks like it might work.”

He had a good eye, that was for sure. Located in Paradise Palms, the house was a mid-century gem — or at least, it would have been if it hadn’t been partially gutted, the flip unfinished.

“What’s the story?” he added. “Ghosts chase off the contractors before they could get the job done?”

Delia allowed herself a smile. “Something like that. The house was tied up in probate for a long time because the owner didn’t have a will. The heirs — the man’s niece and nephew, since he didn’t have any children of his own — finally sold it to some house flippers, but they only got partway through the reno before they abandoned the project, claiming that tools and supplies kept getting moved or hidden, and that work they’d done would be torn apart when they came back to the job site the next day. I guess once you’ve retiled the same bathroom three times, you’re ready to throw in the towel.”

“I can see that,” Caleb said, dark eyes glinting with amusement. “Have you tried to work with this particular ghost?”

She hadn’t, mostly because the listing agent, one Paige Loomis, thought that Delia’s ghost-cleaning side business was nothing more than an elaborate fraud.

Joke was on her, Delia supposed, considering the place had now been on the market for almost a year and the flippers who’d bought it were climbing the walls despite lowering the price multiple times. All it would have taken was Paige giving her a call — well, and paying a modest fee — and Delia could have taken care of the problem in an afternoon.

However, while Paige Loomis might not have approved of Delia’s methods, the other agent couldn’t prevent her from showing the property. If Caleb liked what he saw and decided to buy the place, then she’d come in, take care of whatever spirit had taken up residence in the house, and call it a day.

“No,” she said. “But that won’t stop us from taking a look.” She paused there, deciding she’d better be clear about what Caleb was getting himself into. “There’s a lot of value to be had in the place — once it’s fixed up, it’ll easily fetch at least a million, probably more. But it needs a ton of work. Have you ever flipped a house?”

“No,” Caleb said, looking cheerful. “Have you?”

“A few,” Delia replied. That was going on five years ago now, when it had been easier to purchase distressed properties, make some judicious improvements, and then earn a decent return on your investment. She and her mother had both decided, once inventory began to shrink and interest rates started to inch up, that it was better to get out of the flipping business and concentrate on just selling houses.

But even though the experiment hadn’t turned into a permanent sideline, it had still earned them a tidy chunk of change, and Delia knew she was much more familiar with the process than a lot of other real estate agents out there.

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