Do-It-Yourself - Spackled And Spooked Part 4

"A connector that's used to clamp an electrical wire to a junction box," Derek explained. "Why do you ask?" He tossed it up in the air and caught it again.

"No reason, I guess. I found it in Aunt Inga's yard this morning."

Derek grinned. "No kidding. Only the one? I appreciate your bringing it to me, Avery, but they're a dime a dozen, almost literally. I buy a hundred for less than twenty bucks, and there're probably fifteen more of them floating around your house and yard right now." He stuck it in his pocket anyway.

"So it's yours?"

Derek looked at me for a moment. "Well, it's not like it has my name on it or anything, but who else's would it be?"

"No idea. I thought I saw something in the yard last night, so I hoped I'd found a clue, but I guess not."

"Afraid not," Derek said. "I must have dropped it this summer, while we were working on the house. Sorry, Tink."

"No problem. It was probably just my imagination anyway. Or an animal."

"You sure?" He looked around, brows knitted. There was nothing to see, however. No footprints, no broken branches, no conveniently dropped handkerchief with the prowler's initials . . . not even a paw print or a hair ball. All I'd found during my early-morning search was the small Tom Two Way, and that had turned out to be a red herring.

"I'm sure," I said firmly. "It was just my imagination. Or the Weimaraner from three doors down."

"The ghost dog?"

I nodded. The Weimaraner is smoky gray with yellow eyes, and it does look ghostly. "Sometimes it gets out. And chases the cats. I'm sure that's what it was. You ready to go?"

"As soon as I get the cats out of the laundry room," Derek said and went to suit action to words.

That day, the footsteps came back twice.

In the morning, Derek and I were hard at work removing the kitchen cabinets. I had excused myself for a visit to the bathroom, and while I was there, I heard someone come down the hallway. Naturally I a.s.sumed it was Derek, and started talking to him through the door. When he didn't respond, I raised my voice and heard him answer, faintly, from the kitchen. Since he couldn't very well be in two places at once, obviously he wasn't making the footsteps, which kept moving past the door even as we were calling to each other. However, he'd also been too far away to hear them, and by the time he arrived in the hallway, at a run and skid, the footsteps had reached the end of the hall and stopped. One funny thing: They were still m.u.f.fled and soft, as if they were walking on carpet, while the hallway now had hardwood floors. But that's the way it is with ghosts, I've heard: There's a nun in England somewhere who supposedly walks a half a foot below the current floor of whatever it is she haunts. Ghosts walk where the floor was when they were walking on it.

In the middle of the afternoon, the footsteps came back, and this time we both heard them. By then, the kitchen cabinets were history, thrown in the Dumpster, and we were in the small bedroom across from the main bath. I was s.p.a.ckling holes in the walls and Derek was tearing out the makeshift shelves in the closet. When the footsteps started, we both froze, ears p.r.i.c.ked. I stayed where I was, balanced on the step stool, my arm with the putty knife raised above my head. Derek, on the other hand, leapt for the hallway and stood there, hands on his hips and sandy eyebrows drawn into a scowl, while the footsteps essentially walked right through him and continued down the hall. He turned around to watch, not that there was anything to see.

"What did it feel like?" I asked when the footsteps had stopped and he came back into the room, chewing his bottom lip in what was either agitation or deep thought. "I've heard that encountering a ghost is like plunging into ice water."

"You have, huh? Sorry, this didn't feel like anything at all. I heard the steps walk toward me then walk away. I didn't feel anything."

"So you don't think it's a ghost?" I rubbed my arm with my free hand, to get rid of the goose pimples. Derek might not be cold, but I was.

"What happened to 'there's no such thing as ghosts'?" Derek asked.

"That was before I heard footsteps walking around in an empty house," I answered.

"There are other explanations, you know."

"Like what?"

"Somebody's trying to scare us."

"I thought about that." I nodded. "Specifically, I thought about you trying to scare me."

Derek rolled his eyes. "What are you suggesting? That I rigged a sound system and set it off by remote while I was away?"

"Or on a timer."

"I wouldn't do that," Derek said. "What would I gain by scaring you, Avery? If you refuse to come back to work, I'll have to do everything by myself."

He had a point. He had also brought up another one. "What would anyone else have to gain by scaring us both?"

"I'm not scared," Derek said. I rolled my eyes.

"Of course not. Pardon me. I'm sure it would take a lot more than a few unexplainable footsteps in an empty house to scare you. You didn't answer my question."

"No idea," Derek said cheerfully. "Maybe there's a safe full of cash under the floorboards, and somebody's looking for it? Maybe Mr. Murphy was a jewel thief and the Hope Diamond is hidden in the chimney? Maybe somebody else wanted to buy the house, and they're upset that we got it instead, and now they're trying to force us out so they can take over and renovate the house and make all the money?"

"If so, wouldn't they have come to us with an offer already? What's the good of getting rid of us if they can't be a.s.sured of getting the house? For all they know, someone else is trying to buy it from us, and we'll sell it to them instead. You've been in the crawls.p.a.ce, so you should have been able to see if there was a safe under the floorboards anywhere. And if there is something valuable hidden in the house, why wait until now to start looking? They had seventeen years to find it while the house was just sitting here."

"Fine," Derek said sulkily. "What's your suggestion?"

"I'm not sure. But it seems to me that either there's a ghost walking down the hallway at five past two every afternoon, or someone is playing a joke on us."

"Why would someone do that?"

"Because it's fun to see us sweat?"

"Who's sweating?" Derek asked. "And n.o.body's here to see our reactions anyway. But if someone is doing it, there'll be evidence somewhere. Wires, speakers, something like that. At the very least a tape recorder or something in the attic."

"There's an attic?" I glanced up at the ceiling. Considering how low the roof was, I hadn't considered the possibility of more s.p.a.ce up above.

Derek nodded. "I stuck my head up there when I first looked at the place. The entrance is in the master bedroom closet."

He headed down the hallway, following the path the footsteps had taken. I trailed behind, looking around. The carpets were gone, so there was nowhere to hide a trip wire, and there were no suspicious holes in the walls or unexplained electrical thingamajigs, either. Just the stuff you'd expect to be there: switch plates and outlets for the electrical system, an old-fashioned phone jack or two, and the vents for the heat and air. "Funny place for an attic access."

"Not really," Derek said, turning into the master bedroom. "It's just a hatch in the ceiling with a makeshift ladder nailed to the wall. I guess they wanted it somewhere out of the way."

He pulled open the door to the closet and stepped in. I stopped in the doorway and watched as he started up the short ladder on the far wall of the closet. After just two rungs he was able to push the piece of plywood covering the access off into the attic. Grabbing the edges of the hole with both hands, he boosted himself up through the hole. I smiled appreciatively at the display of muscles bunching under the sleeves of his blue T-shirt.

"You coming?" he asked from upstairs as he swung his jeans-clad legs up through the hole and into the attic. The next moment his face appeared in the opening. "I'll pull."

"Is there anything worth seeing up there?"

Derek looked around for a second. "Not much, no. A few old boxes over in the corner. Maybe some stuff whoever cleaned the place out seventeen years ago didn't realize was here."

"No super-duper sound system with spooky, ghostly sound effects?"

"Afraid not. Just the boxes. And some more dust and old insulation and stuff like that. C'mere, I'll pull you up." He extended a tanned arm down through the hatch.

"If there's nothing there, I think I'll pa.s.s. Go get the boxes and hand them to me, would you? We may as well look through them."

Derek crawled away and reappeared a minute later with an old corrugated cardboard box. "It's heavy," he warned, lowering it through the opening, the muscles in his arms tensing.

"I'm stronger than I look," I answered. And added an involuntary, "Ooof!" when the box dropped into my arms. My knees buckled, and I staggered out into the bedroom, groaning, while Derek disappeared from view to gather up another box, chuckling.

There were four boxes in all, and we opened them sitting cross-legged on the floor in the master bedroom. Derek slit the tape on the first with his trusty X-Acto knife, and a cloud of dust flew skyward as he pulled the flaps apart. I sneezed.

"Old books," he said after a moment's examination. "Paperbacks. Romance novels from the late '80s and early '90s, looks like." He wielded the X-Acto knife again. "Same thing in this one. I think Melissa used to read these. Wonder if she still does. And how that makes Ray Stenham feel." He smirked.

"Why would it make Ray feel anything at all?" I wanted to know. I mean, we all know that just because a woman enjoys a good romance novel now and again, it doesn't mean that she's unfulfilled in her own relationship, right?

"Hey, anyone who drives a Hummer that big must have something to prove, don't you think?"

"I prefer not to think about Raymond Stenham in that way," I said.

"Because he's not as good-looking as me?"

"Because he's my cousin. And because I'm involved with you and shouldn't have a need to speculate about anyone else's . . . um . . . tools."

Derek chuckled but didn't pursue the subject. "This one's full of elementary school stuff," he said, opening the third box. "Composition notebooks, projects, drawings. Peggy must have kept her kid's school work."

"Open the last one." I pulled the fourth box toward me. "If there's anything valuable anywhere, it must be there. Nothing in these others would fetch a fortune. A first edition pre-Plum Janet Evanovich romance might be worth a few bucks on eBay, but even if every book in the box is a first edition, and autographed, we're only talking a few thousand dollars. And I doubt anyone would want Patrick's drawing of A-is-for-Apple or the handprint turned-into-a-turkey he made for Thanksgiving the year he was four. Although Patrick himself might like them."

"Sorry," Derek answered, having ripped open the last box while I was expounding. "Nothing exciting here, either. More papers. Notes. Something that looks like a ma.n.u.script. Maybe Peggy had aspirations of becoming the next big thing in romance. It's called Tied Up in Tartan."

"Ooooh!" I reached out.

Derek grinned. "Scottish bondage, you think? You're not going to read it, are you?" He held on to the handful of pages as I tugged.

"Why not? It's ours. Came with the house, right? And if it has the potential to be a bestseller, why not get it published?"

"I doubt it's that easy," Derek said, but he relinquished the first few pages of the ma.n.u.script anyway. It was handwritten, the cursive childishly rounded.

Iain MacNiachail, his long reddish gold hair flowing in the breeze that blew in from the North Sea, carrying with it the smell of heather and gorse, clung to the ramparts of Dunaghdrumnich Castle. . . .

I giggled.

"I'm going back to work," Derek announced. "C'mon, Avery. You can read the rest tonight. Let's not waste the daylight." He reached down for me, and I took his hand and got to my feet.

"So there was no evidence of foul play up there? No sound system, no suspicious wires, n.o.body hiding in a corner with a foghorn ready to make ghostly noises?"

"Nothing," Derek said, heading for the smaller bedroom with me behind.

"So if someone's playing with us, they didn't hide their equipment in the attic."

"That's right."

"So maybe n.o.body's playing tricks on us."

"There's no such thing as ghosts," Derek said. I rolled my eyes at his back as we both trotted into the small bedroom and returned to work.

An hour or so later, there was a knock on the door. A peremptory rat-tat-tat, conveying brisk impatience. Derek arched his brows, took a better hold of the crowbar, and headed out of the bedroom. I jumped off my step stool and trailed after, s.p.a.ckling knife in hand.

We were halfway across the living room when the knock came again, followed by a yowl. I sped up and was next to Derek when he yanked open the door, a scowl on his face and crowbar at the ready.

Outside stood an older lady with gray hair cut in a mannish crop. Looking at the wrinkles crisscrossing her face, I put her close to the three-quarters-of-a-century mark, but the rest of her showed no sign of succ.u.mbing to old age anytime soon. She was dressed in a green shirt and tan pants with dirt on the knees, and under one beefy arm she held Jemmy, while in the other hand, by the scruff of her neck, she hoisted Inky. I was impressed. Hauling both cats at the same time is a ch.o.r.e, especially when they're unwilling to be hauled, which is most of the time. But she wasn't even breathing hard, in spite of Inky's irate yowls and efforts to free herself.

"These critters yours?" She looked from Derek to me with sharp, dark eyes.

"Mine," I said, making no move to take them from her. I've been scratched enough to know better. "You can put them down."

"And let 'em go right back to digging in my garden? Nosah!" She snapped her lips closed. Nosah-no, sir-is the Mainer's way of stating an emphatic negative.

"You'd better come in then," I said, moving back, "and then you can let them go."

She stepped across the threshold, still holding both cats, and Derek swung the door shut behind her. As soon as she put them down, Jemmy and Inky took off, tearing across the hardwood floors, skidding around the corner. Inky hissed once across her shoulder before she disappeared.

"My name is Avery Baker," I added, extending the hand that wasn't holding the knife, "and this is Derek Ellis."

The older woman shook my hand, her grip tight enough to grind my bones together. I hid my paw behind my back, surrept.i.tiously flexing, after she let go. Derek gave as good as he got, I was glad to see, after switching the crowbar to his other hand. "And you are . . . ?" he prompted as he squeezed.

"Venetia Rudolph. Next door." She took her hand back and tucked both into the pockets of her baggy khakis. I did my best not to giggle.

"Well, we're sorry about the cats. We brought them from home to take care of any mice, and they must have gotten out." I had in fact let them out myself sometime in the midmorning, after they'd sat at the door complaining for fifteen minutes, but Venetia seemed so upset about the fact that they'd been in her yard, that I thought it better to make it sound like an accident. "I hope they didn't ruin your lovely landscaping."

The landscaping of the red brick ranch to the left of us was lovely. There were bushes and plants of various sizes and shades of green in containers and beds all around the front of the house, and when I'd been out in our backyard earlier, I'd seen huge beds of flowering plants behind the house, as well. This late in the year, it wasn't as beautiful as I could imagine it might be in May or June, with every flower in riotous explosion of color and texture, but I could make out climbing roses on trellises around the back deck, a patch of what could only be monstrous sunflowers off to the side, and pots of colorful pansies marching up the stairs and all along the railing.

Venetia smiled tightly. "They found the herb garden. And the catnip."

"Oops," I said.

Derek hid a grin. "Sorry about that, Miss Rudolph. It won't happen again."

"You'd best make sure it doesn't," Venetia Rudolph said and turned to leave.

"May I ask you a question, Miss Rudolph?" I said quickly.

"In addition to the one you just asked?"

What an old battle-ax! I bit back a sharp retort. "Another of the neighbors told us that our house is haunted. He said he's heard screams at night and seen lights go on and off and shadows move past the windows."

"Hogwash!" Venetia barked.

"And Derek and I have both heard footsteps walking down the hallway when no one was here but us." I glanced over at Derek for confirmation. He nodded.

Venetia's eyes slid sideways to the opening to the hallway. She must have been in our house before, to know where it was. Either that, or the layout of her house was exactly the same. "The cat," she said.

I shook my head. "Jemmy walks like a man, I agree, but he was outside. Savaging your catnip. And yesterday he wasn't here at all. Sorry."

"Harrumph! In that case, young lady, I'm sure I can't help you. I've lived next door for twenty-five years, and no screams have ever disturbed my sleep."

She turned toward the door again.