‘Suit yourself. Though I hope you’re not planning on pocketing a souvenir or two from your glory days with… What was your little friend’s name?
‘Lucy.’
‘Right. Lucy.’ His eyes rested on her face. ‘Go on, have your look around.’ He shooed her out of the kitchen. ‘There’s a nice view of the bay from the front bedroom upstairs, though I guess you’d remember that.’
Relieved he wasn’t going to trail her round the house, Erin escaped into the front hall. No fool, the man would see straight away she’d never been here before. She peeked into the living room, gloomy with heavy drapes and a distinctive musty smell. A yellow and green crocheted Afghan was draped over a faded chintz sofa. A thin layer of dust coated the walnut sideboard. Sliding glass doors led onto a wooden deck out back, stained black on the edges with mould. Mr Gilbert appeared to live in the house alone. There’d been no mention of a wife.
An alcove off the living room contained a narrow bed, a cracked leather recliner, and an ancient television, boxed in a fake mahogany veneer. A well-thumbed paperback mystery, with a raven-haired woman in a ruby dress on the cover, lay on the bedside table. Black-capped chickadees swooped around a feeder hanging from the branches of a dogwood tree, its white petals ghostly in the mist. She held her breath. Other than the ticking of the grandfather clock, the house was silent as a tomb.
As she climbed the stairs to the upper floor, she counted the steps, trying to picture Tim, his mind intent on the deed to come, approaching the bedroom where his sisters slept. She reached the landing to find all the doors closed. On a scalloped-edge table, a vase of dried flowers gathered dust in the stillness. When she blinked, the crime scene flashed like a strobe light in her head. The sisters laid out on the twin beds in the room to her left, blood covering their chests.
A shadow passed over her like a living presence, and she grabbed the bannister. Don’t be stupid. There was nothing behind that door. No evil in the air, or traces of the horror. And certainly no ghosts of the two girls in their white summer nightgowns. Erin placed her hand on the tarnished brass knob, cool under her damp palm. The hinges squeaked when the door swung open. Bunk beds pushed against the wall, a poster of a hockey player and a rock band she didn’t recognise. She breathed out and shut the door.
The other bedroom had pale pink walls and a white bookcase filled with children’s books. A stuffed giraffe lay on the pillow with its legs splayed. An empty stage set, waiting for the actors to appear. Directly above her head, something scraped along the ceiling. Faint at first, then growing louder. Scritch, scratch, punctuated by an unearthly yowl, and the scrabbling of fingernails on the floorboards. She held her breath and waited. A desperate whimper erupted from above, then faded into silence. Her instinct was to bolt.
A man’s voice boomed from below. ‘Find what you’re looking for?’
22
Mr Gilbert stood at the bottom of the stairs, his neck stuck out like a snapping turtle. Erin shrank from his blunt stare. It was time to make a hasty exit.
In the kitchen, she retrieved her bag and pulled on her jacket, not bothering with the buttons.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said, moving towards the door. ‘But I should be going now.’
He rinsed a coffee mug in the sink and dried it with a tea towel. ‘Notice anything different from when you were here before?’
‘Not especially.’ She gripped the strap on her bag.
‘Well then,’ he returned the mug to the cupboard and swivelled to face her, an amused flicker in his eyes. ‘You might want to get yourself checked out by a doctor. The house that used to be here was destroyed in a fire.’
Her cheeks flushed. Destroyed? He’d known all along she was lying.
‘Six months after we bought the place,’ Gilbert said, running a damp sponge over the countertop, ‘the whole thing went up in flames. The police suspected arson. My wife didn’t care either way. A blessing in disguise, is what she said, and that if the old Indian gent hadn’t banished the bad spirits from the house, the fire surely did.’
Indian gent?
‘You’d make a terrible poker player, Miss… Carson, is it?’ He dropped the tea towel on the counter. ‘There never was any Lucy, was there? It’s the murder house you came to see.’ He chuckled. ‘I can spot ’em a mile away. Though we don’t get many these days. The last one was three, maybe four years ago. Some nosy parker claiming he was writing a magazine article. Don’t know if anything ever came of it, and I don’t care. But I could see it in your face, plain as day. Fascination, fear, horror, whatever you want to call it. My wife wouldn’t let them inside. But I figured, what’s the harm, just this once.’
She dropped her bag and sank into a chair, embarrassed at having been caught in a lie.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Cup of coffee’ll fix you right up.’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Erin cleared her throat. ‘Thank you.’ She stood. ‘I’ll be on my way then.’
‘I was already planning to make some for myself, so it’s no trouble. You’ve come this far, and I have yet to see any pamphlets.’ He rubbed his jaw. ‘Weekends are awfully quiet since I sold the store.’ At the sink, he scrubbed his hands with a block of white soap and filled an enamel kettle with water from the tap.
Clearly, the poor man was lonely. The least she could do was stay for a coffee.
She perched on the edge of the chair. ‘You owned
