The Haunted (37 page)

She smiled back. “Nor do we want to. But let’s just take it easy for a few days. Think about things. We shouldn’t make any rash decisions. You just get your Web site done. I’ll work my way through this district settlement; then we’ll figure out where to go.”

“I love you,” he said. He realized he hadn’t said it to her when he first came over.

“I love you, too,” she replied, and kissed him on the nose. “But let’s get out there now and rescue the kids from my dad.”

Julian took a shower, then had breakfast. Claire went to work shortly after eight, and as soon as she was gone, he gave Rick a call. The print shop didn’t open until ten, which gave them plenty of time, and Rick promised to meet him there in fifteen minutes.

“Can I go?” James asked as soon as he hung up the phone.

Julian put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “No,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.” He heard Roger’s snort of derision from the couch and chose to ignore it. “But don’t worry. I’ll be back pretty quickly.”

It
was
quick. Rick must have been able to tell that he wasn’t really needed, as there was no heavy lifting and
everything they took out of the house could have been just as easily carried by one person, but he had seen the ghost that night of the party and had no doubt read between the lines and figured out that something else had gone down. He didn’t ask any questions, though, and for that Julian was grateful.

“I’ll explain it all later,” Julian promised when they were finished.

Rick nodded, looked down the street, then over at the house. “Whatever it is, I think you made the right decision,” he said.

Julian spent the rest of the morning setting up his equipment in the room he’d be sharing with Claire, using her mother’s sewing machine table as a desk. He spent the afternoon working, trying to ignore all the distracting intrusions, taking occasional breaks to hang out with the kids. To thank her parents for their hospitality, he took everyone out to Fazio’s for dinner, and afterward all six of them sat in the living room watching television until, one by one, they drifted away.

The last thing he wanted was to be left alone with his father-in-law, but it was nine o’clock and the kids were in bed, Claire was in the bathroom taking a shower, and Claire’s mother went into the kitchen. Julian pretended to be concentrating on the procedural crime show that was on TV, but Roger leaned forward, blocking his view. “You pathetic fruit fly,” he said disgustedly. “I always knew you weren’t a man, but now you’re afraid of your own
house
? Because you think it’s
haunted
? What are you, three?”

Julian said nothing. He didn’t want to get into it right now. They were going to be living at Claire’s parents’ for a little while, and it would not be a good idea to antagonize her father on his first day here.

Still, the old man kept pushing. “Is this how you take care of your family? Huh? I’ll put up with this sort of
talk from my daughter and my grandkids. But I want you to know that I have no respect for you at all—”

“You think you’re brave enough to stay in that house alone?” Julian confronted him. “One night in there, you old buzzard, and you’ll be weeping like the scared little girl you really are.”

“Get out!” Roger bellowed. “I will not be treated this way in my own house!”

Julian stood. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll leave.”

“Not them, you!”

“
We’ll
leave,” Julian repeated. “And we’re going to move back to California, where you most definitely will
not
be welcome in our home.”

Claire’s mother had come in from the kitchen and heard the last of this. “Julian! Roger! I won’t have that kind of talk in my house. You two apologize and make up right this minute!” She glared at her husband. “And you be a gracious host, or so help me God I’ll …” She left the thought unfinished.

The two men looked away from each other, focused their attention on the television and sat silently. But moments after Marian returned to the kitchen, Roger’s grumbling started again, snide asides to himself that Julian was obviously meant to hear. Julian tuned him out, ignoring him completely, and finally, unable to put up with it anymore, Roger stood, taking out his keys. “Come on,” he said disdainfully. “Let’s see your house. Prove to me that it’s haunted.”

Claire had just returned, wearing pajamas and a robe, and she stepped between them. “No one’s going there. Especially at night!” She turned to her father. “You can check it out tomorrow, Dad. It’s safer in the daytime.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Roger!” Claire’s mom called out. She stood in the kitchen doorway, frowning at him. “The Lord’s name.”

“Hell’s bells, Marian. I’m supposed to put up with this … childishness
and
be polite?”

“Yes!”

He threw up his hands. “Fine.” But as soon as the two women left the room, Claire following her mother into the kitchen, the old man turned on Julian. “This is idiocy. You two are going to lose a fortune; then you’ll come crawling to me, and …” He must have seen from the look in Julian’s eyes that continuing along this line of reasoning would cause big trouble, because he let the sentence trail off.

“Go,” Julian said. “Check the house out. Try to prove me wrong.”

“I will.”

Julian looked straight into his father-in-law’s eyes. “It’s your funeral,” he said flatly.

As always, Roger was the first one awake, and the house was silent as he got out of bed to do his business. By the time he came out of the bathroom, Marian was in the kitchen, starting the coffee, though Claire, Julian and the kids were still asleep.

“You’re not really planning to go over to their house, are you?” Marian asked worriedly as he sat down at the kitchen table.

“Of course. Why not?”

“I just think—”

“Their house isn’t haunted, Marian. Jeez Louise.”

She didn’t respond, but the stiffness of her back told him that she disagreed, and she remained silent as she started making the waffle batter.

Claire entered the kitchen a few moments later, wide-awake and wearing a bathrobe, and Marian said, “I don’t want him going over to your house.”

“It’s not a good idea, Dad,” Claire agreed. She sat down next to him at the table.

“There’s no such thing as a haunted house.”

“Whether you believe it or not, we saw what we saw. And we’re selling the place no matter what you say.”

“That’s just stupid. You’re going to take a bath because—”

“Because we have to get rid of that house.”

At the counter, Marian turned around. “Don’t do it, Roger.”

“I’m going,” he said stubbornly.

“Then take Julian with you,” Claire said. “He can show you where everything happened, explain it to you.”

Roger grunted. He knew what her plan was. If he went with Julian, that fairy probably wouldn’t even let him into the house. They’d walk around the yard, look into windows and leave.

“That’s a good idea,” Marian seconded.

He nodded, pretending to agree. But after they’d all finished eating and Claire had gone off to work, the first thing he did was sneak into the bedroom and call Rob. If he was going to go with a son-in-law, it might as well be the one he liked. The line was busy, though, and he hung up, sat down on the edge of his bed and watched the
Today
show for a while. He liked that Ann Curry.

He got distracted, lost track of time, and by the time Marian came in looking for him, nearly a half hour had passed. “Why are you hiding in here?” she demanded.

“I’m busy,” he told her.

Huffing with disapproval, she made the bed around him, then took her clothes out of the closet and went into the bathroom to change. He picked up the phone, tried to call again, but Rob wasn’t home, and he got Diane instead. He told his daughter to have her husband call him back, because he wanted Rob to go with him to Claire’s house, then changed his mind and said he’d go over there alone.

“Dad—” she began.

“Good-bye,” he said, and hung up on her before she could give him a lecture.

He turned off the TV, then picked up his keys and wallet from the dresser.

“Roger?” Marian called from the bathroom.

Hurrying out before she could quiz him about where he was going, he passed through the living room, where Julian was playing some kind of card game with his kids. Roger smiled and waved at Megan and James, but he and Julian ignored each other as he walked out the door.

Driving side streets instead of main roads, he was there in five minutes. He parked the car in the driveway and got out to check the lay of the land. All of the houses except theirs were for sale, and all of the yards, including theirs, were dead. Weird, he had to admit, but except for the lawn problem, nothing about Claire’s house looked unusual at all. He walked up to the front door and took out his key, thinking about Julian. How could that pansy be afraid of his own house? Roger was embarrassed that his daughter had married such a pantywaist. No wonder their boy was turning out the way he was.

Unlocking the door, he stepped inside. It looked like a tornado had hit the place. Lamps were broken, tables and chairs overturned. Broken glass littered the floor. That gave him pause. Julian had described this, but hearing about it and seeing it were two different things. He recalled that nightmare he’d had about their basement, and though he hated to admit it, he felt less secure than he should have because of the dream.

He was getting to be as bad as they were.

Dreams weren’t real. He had nothing to be afraid of. The only thing that had happened here was that there’d been a blackout, and Julian had stumbled around in the dark like an asshole, knocking things over.

Roger made his way through the debris. In the dining room, the table was covered with a fine white powder that looked like flour but, considering his hippie son-in-law, could just as easily have been cocaine. Although
there was no way Julian and Claire could afford
this
much cocaine.

Frowning, he walked around the side of the table to the opposite end. Someone had drawn in the powder with a finger, and it wasn’t until he was looking at it from the proper angle that he could read what it said:
Sniff some, you stupid old fuck
.

Roger felt his face grow hot with anger. Julian had written this and had left it here for
him
, knowing he would come by the house to investigate, knowing it would cross his mind that the powder resembled cocaine. He bent over, put his face near the tabletop and breathed in.

It smelled like rat poison.

Sniff some, you stupid old fuck.

Julian was trying to kill him.

Roger felt chilled. He and his son-in-law didn’t like each other, but he never would have thought Julian capable of such cold-bloodedness, and he straightened up, looking around, seeing the entire house as one gigantic booby trap. What waited for him in the kitchen? Upstairs? In the basement?

Roger shook his head to clear it. That made no sense. Julian had fled the house because he was afraid, because he thought the house was haunted. He hadn’t been pretending. And he certainly hadn’t poured rat poison all over the dining room table on the off chance that Roger would come over alone and inhale a big nostrilful to test whether it was cocaine.

Maybe the house
was
haunted.

That made no sense, either.

Roger had no explanation for anything that was going on, but he was warier now than he had been when he’d first arrived. He felt uncomfortable here, and while he still wasn’t willing to concede that Julian and Claire
might be right about the house being dangerous, he was starting to think that it might be a good idea to leave and come back later, maybe with Rob.

Suddenly there seemed to be a smoky smell in the air, one that was faint but growing stronger. At first he thought it was coming from somewhere outside, but when he turned around, sniffing, trying to determine its origin, he saw a small plume creeping out from the fireplace in the living room. The sight made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It was not just that there’d been no fire in the fireplace a moment ago and there was no way one could have been lit; it was the behavior of the plume of smoke itself. For rather than emerging from the flue and dissipating, or floating up toward the ceiling, the thin gray tendril moved out and into the room, solid and well-defined, turning left, then right, like a snake exploring a new environment. There was something
alive
about the smoke, and Roger was gripped by the certainty that it was searching for him.

All thoughts of showing Julian to be a pathetic coward with an overactive imagination had fled. Roger was filled with the single-minded desire to get out of the house as quickly as possible. There was no way he was going back through that living room. Which meant that in order to get out of the house, he had to exit through the back door.

The tendril of smoke was five feet long now and nosing its way toward the dining room.

Feeling the panic well within him, Roger turned and hurried into the kitchen.

Except it wasn’t the kitchen.

He was in a dark, low-ceilinged space that looked like the interior of a tent. Before him, in an indentation, was a fire, and though the smoke issuing from the blaze was wafting upward, it looked completely normal and not
tendril-like at all. It was the only thing that looked normal, however. The floor was bare ground, dirt, and the material of the tent walls seemed to be dried skin, skin that looked too smooth and light to be animal.

He whirled around, intending to run back through the doorway, but the doorway was no longer there.

A stifled sob escaped his throat. He thought of what Julian had told him—

You’ll be weeping like the scared little girl you really are.

—and wondered whether his son-in-law had planned this. Maybe that powder on the tabletop
had
been cocaine, and he had accidentally snorted some and now he was hallucinating. The timing was right, and it would explain everything that had happened afterward, including this.