“If ghosts did exist,” Suzy said in a low voice, “I bet they’d exist here.”
It did look like the kind of place that should have been haunted. The wraparound stoop, rotting wooden columns, and fluttering lace curtains belonged on the cover of a horror novel.
The creepiest part was the old people sitting in rocking chairs with blankets across their laps. They watched us emerge from the SUV like they suspected we were hoarding all the denture cream. Something about their sunken eyes and spun-sugar perms gave me the willies.
“When I get that old, feel free to euthanize me,” I muttered as we headed up the long walkway among the tangled bushes.
Suzy elbowed me so hard that I thought she might crack a rib. “Shut up.”
“No, really. If it looks like I’m starting to lose it, go ahead and pull the plug.” I mimed jerking a cable out of the wall. “Pop! It’ll be a mercy killing. I’ll never have to smell like mothballs and foot ointment.”
“Shut
up
.”
Normally, Suzy tried to laugh at my bad jokes. Or at least she’d try to one-up them.
Which meant that she wanted me to stop for another reason.
I turned to see a guy who looked like he needed the plug pulled on his life support. He was a fragile old man baked to the color of leather by the desert sun. The weight of his wrinkles made his face sag, so the tufts of hair sticking out of his ear canals were hilariously perky. The fact that he wasn’t actually on life support seemed near miraculous.
Judging by his scowl, he didn’t think my bad jokes were very funny.
I thrust a hand toward him and put on my official voice. “Special Agent Hawke, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“Badge,” said the old guy.
It took me a second to realize he was prompting me for identification, not sharing a strange name.
I showed him my fake FBI badge. It looked as good as the real thing because it was produced by the same vendor. Nice thing about being a secret government organization is that we have access to all the same resources as the public offices.
He barely glanced at it before hissing, “Fake. You’re both damn dirty frauds!”
“Excuse me?” Suzy asked.
“I know what you are. You’re the men in black. You didn’t come from no FBI office. You came from Area 51.”
Man, that would have been a much cooler office to work at. “I’m afraid you’re confused. We’re investigating an anonymous tip that references this, uh…” I had to glance at the sign again to catch the name. “Paradise Mile Retirement Village.” Retirement
village
? What was that even supposed to mean?
“Aliens,” he muttered.
“We definitely have nothing to do with aliens,” Suzy said firmly. That much was true. Demons and angels came from other dimensions, not other planets. “Are you in charge, sir? Or is there an orderly I could speak with?”
“Orderly’s done gone and gotten himself all busy with real work. He don’t got time for spooks like you. Herbert Richardson. That’s my name. Don’t you spread that around.” Herbert rolled his tongue around in his mouth then spit out the corner of his lips, shooting a stream of saliva onto the grass. “Names got power, you know.”
“With the aliens?” I tried not to laugh when I said it.
Herbert shuffled up to me until we were toe-to-toe. He was almost a foot shorter than me. “You tell me,
spook
.” He bit out every word.
I managed to keep it together until Herbert hobbled back toward the house. I covered my mouth with a hand, muffling my snorts.
Aliens. Hauntings.
This case
had
to be Fritz’s idea of a prank.
Herbert was too deaf to hear my laugh, but Suzy gave me a hard look.
“Come on,” I whispered to her. “This old bastard is wasting our time.”
“Get a grip, Hawke. Let’s do the job and get to lunch. I’m starving.”
Suzy stalked away, following Herbert toward the house. I got my laughter under control and trailed behind both of them.
The old people on the front stoop turned to me when I climbed up the steps. Their sunken eyes were dull, unreadable. Hard to tell if they were annoyed by our presence or just working on catatonia.
“Agent Takeuchi,” Suzy said, shaking hands with the woman nearest the door.
Her curls were so thin that I could make out the shape of her wrinkled scalp. Fortunately, for her sake, the giant hairy mole on her chin was distracting enough that most people might not notice that she was balding. “Are you going to get rid of him?”
“Him? Who are you talking about?” Suzy asked.
“The bad man. The one who never lets us sleep.” Her voice trembled as she spoke. Ghosts or not, she was legitimately scared.
“We’re following up on a tip,” Suzy said. “If there’s anything we can do to make your stay here more comfortable, we’ll see about doing it.”
A man three rocking chairs down spoke. “I could use fresh linens.”
Give me some credit. I didn’t laugh at that.
“Don’t talk to the spooks,” Herbert snapped at the other residents as he hobbled inside.
The foyer was spacious. The big windows had a good view of the sheer canyon walls. Empty birdcages hung from the ceiling, and a fountain half-hidden behind potted trees echoed through the whole room. I was pretty sure we'd find a nice tile mosaic underfoot if someone would scrub it clean.
“Damn,” I breathed, pulling off my sunglasses so I could get a better look. I could almost see why someone would have wanted to retire there.
Suzy didn’t seem nearly as impressed. “Have you had any incidents in this room, Herbert?”
“You tell me,” Herbert repeated, just as bitingly as the last time. “You’re the experts, ain’t you?”
“We work for the government. We aren’t psychics, sir.”
We probably would have employed psychics if they existed, though.
Herbert grumbled, scuffing his feet on the dusty floor. “No. The goddamn foyer ain’t had no incidents. It’s mostly been in the drawing room.”
“Lead the way, please,” Suzy said. As we headed up the hallway, narrow-walled and low-roofed, she hung back to whisper at me. “What’s a drawing room?”
“Kind of like a living room,” I said. “Somewhere to entertain guests.”
“How’d you know that?”
Because I’d been reading way too much steampunk lately. “I’m educated,” I said loftily.
Suzy snorted.
The drawing room was in the back of the house and we had to get a short tour of the entire first floor on our way to reach it. The whole manor was a lot bigger than it had looked from the outside, and much nicer, in that “older than dirt” kind of way.
The narrow hallway led past a library, a dining room with a grand staircase (which was only slightly ruined by the presence of a chairlift), and a couple of sitting rooms with wallpaper that my grandmother would have loved.
Herbert finally took us into an airy kitchen behind the dining room. The cast-iron cookware hanging over the island was greased to a shine. The oven was a beast that could have roasted a whole cow at once. The windows were small, but it didn’t seem to matter; there was nothing on the other side but vine-draped cliff anyway. Not much of a view worth fighting for.
“Do the residents eat pretty well here?” The knives were kept on a magnetic strip over the sink. I brushed one blade with my fingertip, and it was sharp enough to slice a narrow fissure into the pad.
“Why you asking?” Herbert sounded like I’d just insulted his mother.
“Just wondering. Looks like a well-stocked kitchen.”
“Is it a problem if we like to eat good? Can’t break into our brains with your radio signals if we don’t eat processed food with the neural implants the government adds?” Herbert smacked his knuckles against his temple. It sounded like it hurt.
So much for making casual conversation.
“There weren’t any incidents in this room, so let’s move on,” Suzy said tactfully.
“Ha! Notice you don’t deny the implants.”
“We can neither confirm nor deny the manipulation of packaged food goods.” She kept a straight face as she said it, but I could tell Suzy was approaching her breaking point.
Herbert grinned toothlessly. “I like this one,” he said to me. “Not as much of a liar as you other spooks!” He flapped his hands at the door. “Come on, come on, you gotta see the ghosts.”
“Have you encountered visible apparitions?” Suzy asked.
“What do you think, I’d call in a tip about ghosts I can’t see? Of course I seen them ‘visible apparitions’! What’s wrong with you?”
“Need that list alphabetized?” I muttered too quietly for Herbert to hear through his hair-stuffed ears. Suzy only pretended to be deaf, but I caught her smiling.
The drawing room was almost as big as the foyer, but unused. Most of the furniture was covered in white sheets. There was a fainting couch by the window, a piano, a couple antique sofas, a table. The wallpaper was discolored where paintings used to hang.
The floor was coated in dust. The only footprints were Herbert’s, I assumed, judging by the uneven gait and duck-footed twist to the prints.
When we walked in, floorboards creaked and clouds of dust filled the air.
I sneezed into my sleeve.
“What brought you back here in the first place, sir?” Suzy asked.
“All the cleaning I got to do,” Herbert said. “That dang orderly, he don’t do much cleaning. Told me not to bother with the rooms back here neither. They hired me to help around the house three weeks ago, and goddammit, I'm gonna done help around the house.”
Another sneeze. Two sneezes. Three. My face was exploding. “Pardon,” I managed to rasp before ducking into the hallway separating the kitchen and drawing room. It was narrow, windowless, dark. My hair brushed the rafters. Some kind of servant’s access, maybe?
It was dusty there, too, but I stopped sneezing immediately. Being able to breathe the stale air wasn’t much of an improvement.
Herbert’s voice drifted from the other room. “When I was cleaning the kitchen, I heard voices coming out of here. Then I heard something breaking. Came in to shut down the party. Found a broken oil lamp and them ‘visible apparitions.’”
I wasn’t eager to return to dust central, so I explored the servant’s hall. There was a door at the end that didn’t lead to a room I’d seen on Herbert’s reluctant tour. I tried to open it, but it had no doorknob—just a keyhole on a plate. Must have only opened on the other side.
Kneeling down, I put my eye to the keyhole. The room on the other side was red. Just plain red, walls and floor and ceiling, a color so uniform that I couldn’t make out any difference between the carpet and the wallpaper.
Huh
. Must have been a trick of the light.
“Can you describe the apparitions?” Suzy asked.
Scrubbing my nose, I reentered the drawing room. My partner was holding the pieces of a glass bulb that looked like they had once belonged to an oil lamp. That was what Herbert had heard breaking.
“Don’t got to describe nothing,” Herbert said. “Make your own goddamn observations.”
I opened my Steno pad to the first blank page, drew a line, and wrote “crazy old people haunting” at the top. New case, new page, time for some new notes. “How are we supposed to do that?”
Herbert gestured impatiently at a bookshelf. “Well, look at them.”
The bookshelf was populated by lots of old hardbacks and a few small photographs.
No apparitions.
My eyes started watering again. I held my breath, tried not to sneeze.
“That’s little Gertie,” Herbert said, pointing to the corner. “Let me done tell you, if she’d growed up in my house, she never would have had these kinds of manners. God knows where her parents went. She’s a beast.”
“You can see Gertie right now?” Suzy asked.
“I’m not blind, woman! And this one’s—this one’s named Lynne,” Herbert said to a shelf. “She can be a real female dog, if you know what I mean, but at least she done got some manners.”
I clicked my pen twice, tucked it into my shirt pocket. Seemed like I was definitely not going to need notes for this case. Herbert really was just crazy.
Then I sneezed again.
This time, I recognized the burn flaring up my sinuses, and it had nothing to do with dust.
Herbert looked irritated. “You got a problem, son?”
“Sorry. I must be allergic to something around here.” I gave Suzy a significant look. She frowned at me so I added, “Something must have bloomed
powerfully
this year.”
Her eyes brightened. I could actually see the light bulb going off in her head. “Pretty powerful,” Suzy agreed. “Or in close proximity to where we’re standing.”
See, I’m allergic to magic. If anyone casts a spell nearby, I struggle to breathe. The more sneezing, wheezing, and mucus, the more powerful the magic. Pretty awkward quirk for a witch, but it had its utility.
Like now, when it told me someone was casting spells in a supposedly haunted house.
“What rooms surround this one?” Suzy asked.
Herbert scowled. “No bathrooms or nothing. We ain’t got no mold problems, if that’s what you’re suggesting. We’re up to code here. One of the first things I checked when they hired me. I'm taking care of everything.”
“I don’t mean to imply anything, sir. I’m just trying to get a grip on the house’s layout.”
He scratched the whiskers on his chin. “Storage closet’s over there. Got a hallway alongside the other wall.” That was where I’d stepped out for a breather. “It connects with an old servant’s bedroom.” Probably the red room. “That’s about it, aside from the gardens out there.”
Suzy rubbed a spot on the window clear and peered outside as I kept sneezing. “Nobody in the garden,” she said.
“And I didn’t see anyone in the hall or servant’s bedroom.” I was so congested that I sounded like Comic Book Guy criticizing the latest episode of
The Simpsons
.
“You stay out of the bad man’s bedroom, now,” Herbert said. “He don’t like no visitors. Even less friendly than Ander.”
“Ander is another apparition?”
“You’re not very bright, are you, spook?” Herbert asked.
I chose to treat that like a rhetorical question.
“That’s all that borders the room,” Suzy said, changing the subject back. “A closet, a hallway, and the gardens.”