Page 5 of Speak of the Devil

“You want to know where I’m going?” he asked, and Brooke gave a very small nod.

Maybe the tiniest hint couldn’t hurt.

“Someplace warm, Mom,” he replied.

“Someplaceverywarm.”

Chapter Two

“Is it haunted?”the woman in her too-loud polyester shirt and overly tight jeans asked, and Delia Dunne had to force herself not to roll her eyes.

Kinda can’t tell for sure until we’re inside,ran through her mind, although she kept the snarky words to herself. Snark generally didn’t help when you were dealing with antsy clients.

“Let’s go in and find out, shall we?” she replied, knowing she was over-compensating and now sounded way too perky.

But her client — Marti Fields, a recent divorcée who was parlaying some of her settlement into buying a new house — didn’t seem to notice anything off about her tone. “All right.”

Marti’s lack of enthusiasm was obvious…even though she was the one who’d been insistent on this quickie showing…but Delia pushed any doubts aside. After all, it was pretty normal to feel nervous about walking into a house that might or might not be haunted.

She already had the code to the lockbox, so she entered it, pulled out the keys, and then opened the front door. A waft of cool air drifted out to meet her, telling her that someone had forgotten to turn off the air conditioning. Wasteful, especially since temperatures on this early January day were floatingaround in the upper sixties and there wasn’t any need for the A/C. Either the house cleaners or the people who’d come in to clean the carpets had forgotten to shut it off.

Well, she’d turn it off once they were done here and then let her mother know, since it was her listing and she’d need to tell the cleaners to be more careful next time.

Delia was at the house in more of an adjunct capacity.

Technically, the state of Nevada didn’t require sellers or listing agents to disclose when someone had died on a property, but a lot of them did anyway, figuring it was better to be open about such things. And even when people tried to be tight-lipped, the information often got out there anyway, thanks to several websites where all you had to do was enter an address to discover whether there had been a death in a house.

In this particular case, the home was a cute one-story in Sunrise Manor where the previous owner’s troubled son had overdosed in the spare bedroom. She’d put the house on the market almost immediately following the funeral, telling Linda Dunne — Delia’s mother and the listing agent — that she couldn’t stay there another moment.

“I want to believe Troy has moved on,” the woman had said during a tearful meeting with mother and daughter agents. “But I keep hearing strange noises, and I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Privately, Delia thought the source of those noises was probably packrats or other rodents, since the house backed up to a golf course and the neighborhood was already known to have a critter problem, but she’d dutifully agreed to check it out. However, houses in that development were going like the proverbial hotcakes, and she hadn’t had a chance to come by and scope the place out on her own before Marti called the real estate office and asked for a showing.

Linda had explained the situation, but Marti was insistent, so Delia agreed to be the one to do the showing…and check for any ghosts who might have decided to take up residence in the modest Spanish-style home.

She had to admit that her first impression was of a place that was very neutral and didn’t have the slightest whiff of anything supernatural about it. Then again, a 1990s-vintage tract home in suburban Las Vegas was the sort of setting that didn’t exactly lend itself to the spooky or arcane.

“Everything seems fine so far,” she told Marti, who had followed her inside but was also hanging back, obviously ready to let Delia take the full force of any ghostly attacks that might occur. “Why don’t you take a look at the kitchen and the great room, and I’ll check out the bedrooms and bathrooms before you go back there?”

“That’s a very good idea,” Marti replied at once, clearly relieved. She had bleached hair with obvious roots and wore way too much mascara, but she had a friendly smile. “And maybe I’ll take a look at the backyard, too.”

In Delia’s opinion, there wasn’t much to look at — the previous owner hadn’t bothered with anything in terms of landscaping, so there were a couple of palm trees in desperate need of trimming, a bunch of gravel, and not much else — but possibly Marti wanted to see if there was enough room for a pool or something.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll be just down the hall if you need me.”

The other woman nodded but turned away almost at once, intent on taking a look at the amount of storage the kitchen offered. Delia thought that seemed like the perfect opportunity to head toward the bedrooms and make a quick assessment.

Even though she knew the overdose had happened in the larger of the two secondary bedrooms, she headed for the main suite anyway. Ghosts didn’t always stay in the exact spot wherethey’d died, and besides, this was her first chance to get a good look at the property. Although their mother-daughter team shared responsibilities equally and Delia often handled listings that didn’t have anything supernatural going on at all, Linda normally would have passed this one on to her daughter, thanks to the death that had occurred in the house. However, Delia had been out doing a showing when the owner of the Sunrise Manor house came in to get it listed, so her mother had taken care of the paperwork.

Not much to see in the master suite, that was for sure. As far as Delia could tell, the only thing really wrong with this place was that it was stuck in the late ’90s and desperately in need of an update. The white tile in the bath and beige carpet in the bedroom had probably been installed when the house was built, along with the garden tub that took up too much space in the bathroom and the cramped fiberglass shower surround that, while clean, had some stains that even the most dedicated scrubbing couldn’t get out.

Dutifully, she stood in the middle of the bedroom and closed her eyes, even as she held her hands at her sides, palms facing slightly upward. She couldn’t say exactly why, but that position always seemed to work best when she was trying to determine whether a house was inhabited by spirits who didn’t know it was time to move on.

Nothing at all here, though…at least, not in the main suite.

While she didn’t exactly sigh, she did allow herself a breath before she headed over to the secondary bedroom where the boy had died. He’d only been nineteen, and Delia wondered if someone who had so much life remaining might have left more psychic residue than a person who’d departed this plane after a long and happy existence.

Impossible to tell whether the boy had put his personal stamp on the small, square room when he lived here, becausenow it wasn’t much more than a white box with beige carpet. Once again, she paused in the middle of the space and allowed her mind to be still so she could see if she was able to pick up on any ripples in the energy of the bedroom, anything to show that he lingered here.

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