Delia had asked Pru to look into Alba Sanchez as well, just because she knew that Pru’s private detective license made her a lot more efficient when it came to digging up information about people. However, she was still a little surprised to hear from her friend, just because Pru generally preferred to text rather than call.
“What’s up?” Delia asked after she lifted the phone to her ear.
“Found some stuff,” Pru replied, sounding cheerful.
Then again, she was usually in her happy place when she got a chance to do some investigating that didn’t involve cheating spouses or insurance fraud, so her upbeat tone wasn’t too surprising.
“Like what?” Delia didn’t think Prudence could have found anything too incriminating…Alba Sanchez didn’t seem like the sort of person who would have too many buried bodies in her past…but you never knew.
“The house you think is haunted?”
“Yes?” Delia replied cautiously. She hoped Pru hadn’t discovered that the place was reputed to be a site for satanic rituals or something similarly messy. That would make it a lot harder to sell.
“Well, it’s one of the older homes in town. Sounds like the Sanchez family came to Laughlin in the 1940s to get jobs while Davis Dam was being built, but unlike a lot of other people, they stuck around afterward instead of moving on to the next project.”
Okay, so they’d been there for going on eighty years. That might not have sounded like much to people from the East Coast, where local history went back a lot further, but it was practically an epoch in Nevada time.
“I don’t know if the ghost has been around that long, though,” Delia replied, realizing how dubious she sounded. “No one ever mentioned any supernatural activity in the house until recently, so I really think the ghost is the woman who died there last fall.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the ghost,” Pru said. “No, I just found it interesting that the Sanchezes have always owned the house. Since they’ve been in town so long, they’ve done pretty well for themselves — I guess Alba’s husband Carlo was Don Laughlin’s right-hand man in the 1980s and was involved in a lot of the casino development back then — but even though they bought a big house in Bullhead City across the river at around the same time, they always made sure someone in the family lived the original house that Carlo’s parents built. It sounds like it was Carlo’s older sister’s home for a while. She was there for around ten years and left it to her kids in her will, but they never actually lived in it. And after Carlo passed away, Alba moved in.”
On the surface, it didn’t sound so strange that she might want to live in the home her late husband’s family had built. If Alba and Carlo had shared a more spacious house on the other side of the river…Bullhead City, Arizona, was actually much bigger than Laughlin itself…maybe Alba had decided it would be better to downsize rather than rattle around in a McMansion all by herself. It wasn’t as if Delia hadn’t seen that same story repeat itself plenty of times over the years. Living in a large home by yourself could be challenging as you got older, especially if you had any serious health issues to deal with.
And as for keeping the house in the family, well, Delia had seen that scenario play out plenty of times as well. The older the generation, the more they wanted to cling to what might have been the house a father or grandfather had built. It wasn’t until those properties got passed down to the kids or grandkids that they went on the market, mostly because the people who inherited them wanted the cash and didn’t want to deal with the complications and expense of a lengthy reno on an old house.
The only really surprising thing here was that Carlo’s nieces and nephews hadn’t sold the property outright when their mother died, rather than hang on to it so their aunt could move back to her original home during her final years.
“Any record of Alba buying the house back from her nieces and nephews?” Delia asked.
“Not that I could see. The property records are kind of muddy, to be honest. Carlo was definitely on the deed, but it looks like giving it to Lorena — Carlo’s older sister — was more of a handshake thing than anything else.”
Again, probably because they knew they weren’t going to sell the place or even rent it, so the legalities wouldn’t have seemed like that big a deal.
“What about Carlo and Lorena’s house in Bullhead City?” Delia asked next, and Pru replied right away.
“Oh, that one was much more cut and dried. Carlo left it to Aaron Sanchez’s father, Joseph, and he sold it about six months later. Made a chunk on it, too, since it was right on the river and was paid off. It went for a little over a million.”
That was a lot of money. The amount involved made Delia wonder why Aaron hadn’t asked his parents for a short-term loan, since — well, unless they’d immediately gone out and gambled it all away — they must have been sitting on a decent chunk of cash.
But it was very possible that he hadn’t wanted to let on how dire his financial circumstances actually were. Taking a percentage of the sale of the old homestead was one thing, since he’d be providing the necessary expertise to make sure it went for top dollar. Coming right out and having to admit that he’d lost his job with Keller Williams and that his supposed business partners…or whatever Aegis Holdings had been to him…had gone out of business might have been too big a blow to his pride.
No way of knowing why Aaron’s parents had decided to sell the place after it seemed the Sanchezes had worked damn hard to keep the old house in the family. It didn’t sound as if they needed the money.
Delia supposed she could have reached out to him and asked, but that sort of question felt awfully intrusive…and would also let Aaron know that she’d been doing some serious digging into the situation.
After all, she didn’t need to know all the ins and outs of his family dynamics. It was enough to know that they wanted to get rid of the place, and that it seemed to be haunted now when it hadn’t been before.
Oh, and also that Aaron’s grandmother appeared by all accounts to have been something of a witch, although Delia had a feeling that the clearly devout Alba Sanchez would have given them holy hell — pardon the expression — if anyone had dared to say such a thing to her face.
“I can keep poking around if you want,” Pru ventured, and Delia realized she’d waited just a little too long to respond to her friend’s comment.
“No, no, that’s fine,” she said hastily. “I kind of doubt you’re going to find anything else of much use, and I know you have better things to do.”
Something that sounded like a snort came through the iPhone’s speaker. “Oh, you mean like rooting around in some deadbeat’s financials to prove he was off playing around in a climbing gym when he was supposed to be home flat on his back with a work-related spinal injury?”
Delia couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Then sure, I suppose I have better things to do. But I’ll message you if I find anything else that looks interesting.”
