Page 6 of Speak of the Devil

And…bupkis. Delia didn’t pretend to be infallible, but she’d been doing this for more than ten years now, ever since she was eighteen and had walked into a condo her mother was about to put on the market and had sensed the presence of something she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t feel a single thing in the house.

Which was good, right? If she couldn’t get even the slightest hint that the boy’s spirit remained in the home, then that meant he’d moved on and there was no reason in the world why Marti Fields couldn’t put in an offer, secure a short escrow since she was preapproved and had twenty percent to put down on the place, and start a new life in her new house.

Even though Delia doubted she’d sense anything, she went into the smallest bedroom as well, a spot barely ten feet by ten feet. She couldn’t imagine actually trying to fit a bed in there, but she supposed it would work fairly well as an office.

Just as she began to close her eyes and reach out for any ghostly vibes, a terrified shriek came from the kitchen, followed by the unmistakable grinding sound of the garbage disposal.

“Help!Help!”

Delia bolted out of the bedroom and ran to the kitchen, where Marti’s head had been smashed against the counter by invisible hands — and it looked as if those same hands were trying to drag her into the sink, where the garbage disposal whirred away.

Holy shit.

She smashed the switch that activated the damn thing, but it kept going. So much for that idea.

Instead, she grabbed Marti by the shoulders and pulled her away from the sink. For just a moment, Delia could sense some kind of resistance, as if whatever had caught hold of the other woman had no intention of letting her go.

But then it disappeared, and she stumbled backward, sent off balance by the sudden release of pressure. Gasping, Marti put her hands on the Formica countertop and straightened before looking around her with wide, staring eyes, eyes made even paler and frantic by the black mascara that had been smudged all around them.

“You couldn’t pay me to live here!” she spluttered, and, hanging on to her purse’s shoulder strap as if it was some sort of lifeline, she ran from the room.

Seeming to sense she was gone, the garbage disposal abruptly shut off.

Delia planted her hands on her hips. She knew what she needed to do next…and wasn’t looking forward to it.

“The ghost attacked Ms. Fields?” her mother asked, sounding shocked, and Delia nodded as best she could with her iPhone wedged under one ear.

“Sure looked like it to me,” she replied, fishing around in her purse for what she privately thought of as her ghostly first aid kit.

Except in her particular case, it was more about getting ghosts to move on rather than fixing what was wrong with them. She wasn’t the ghost-whisperer, just someone with a real estate license who used her weird talent to sense spirits and then encourage them to try a new plane of existence so she could sell the property they’d been haunting.

Although she couldn’t see her mother right then, Delia had to believe she was shaking her head. “We’ve never had a ghost get violent like that.”

No, they hadn’t. Oh, sure, there had been spirits that knocked on the walls or turned the water on and off, or that picked up random objects and moved them from one room to another. In all those cases, though, it had felt much more as if the ghosts were just messing with people rather than trying to cause any real harm.

Whereas she was pretty sure the ghost in this house would have been just fine with turning Marti Fields’ face into hamburger.

Delia tried her best to banish that horrible image from her mind.

“It’s kind of unusual,” she said, fingers closing around what had used to be a purse-sized first aid kit and which now held the kind of small, white candles usually employed in those Swedish angel chimes people used to decorate at Christmas, a tiny vial of holy water, a chunk of palo santo wood for cleansing the air, and a small glass ashtray she’d stolen from Caesar’s Palace years earlier while still going through her rebellious stage. “And I think we lost the sale.”

Her mother released a breath. “Well, I’m not happy to hear that, but I suppose it’s understandable. Just get the place cleared as best you can, and we’ll have to hope the next showing has a better outcome. It’s a good thing that houses in Sunrise Manor are moving quickly right now — I’m sure we’ll find another buyer soon enough.”

From some people, that might have been optimism without any real foundation in reality. Coming from Linda Dunne, it was pretty much a certainty. Delia knew she might have been a little biased, but although Las Vegas boasted plenty of first-class realestate agents, she had yet to meet anyone who scrutinized the town’s sales trends and housing data the way her mother did.

“Oh, sure,” she said, then shifted her phone to her other ear, since it was starting to grind the backings of her multiple piercings into her skull. She’d gotten all those earrings back when she was the lead singer for Final Girl, the band she and some friends had played in during their senior year of high school and the first couple of years of college, and had never bothered to get rid of the rows of little garnet studs even though she dressed a lot more conservatively now that she was selling houses.

“But I have a showing at four,” her mother went on, “so I need to get out of the office. Are you going to be all right there by yourself?”

A very good question. The ghost didn’t seem to have directed any of its ire toward her so far, but Delia knew better than to allow herself a false sense of security. Spirits could be capricious.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just about to get everything set up, and then I’ll see if I can convince this guy that it’s time to move on to the next world.”

“I’ll call to check in after my showing,” her mother told her, and Delia allowed herself a small roll of her eyes since she knew Linda couldn’t see her.

Maybe one of these days, she’d realize her daughter was a grown woman of twenty-eight and had been doing this sort of thing for almost a decade.

“Okay,” she replied. “But I’ll probably be done by then.”

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