“Your grandmother’s house?” she repeated.
Aaron swallowed some more water and then put his glass back down on the coffee table — this time using a coaster, as if he’d just realized he’d made sort of a faux pas by not utilizing it earlier.
“Yes,” he said. “She died last fall, around the middle of November. There was a lot of debate about whether we should even sell the place at all, since it’s been in the family for a long time, but it needs a bunch of work, and my parents didn’t want to tackle the project. So they asked me to handle the sale.”
“I’m assuming it’s more of a problem than you expected,” Caleb commented dryly.
A grimace, and Aaron said, “That’s putting it mildly. I mean, I didn’t hear or see anything when I was taking pictures of the house, but the first buyers backed out of the contract after they went in to measure everything for their furniture, and they heard strange noises coming from the basement.”
“Possums, or maybe rats?” Caleb asked, seizing on the most logical explanation for those sorts of sounds…even though he doubted a simple rodent invasion would have been enough to send the man over here, looking for help.
“No,” Aaron replied, his tone flat. “I had an exterminator come in and look everything over. He said there weren’t any signs of a rodent infestation, and I had a plumber check out the whole house, too, just in case there was something wrong with the pipes. So I put the house back on the market, but every time people would go to view the place, they’d hear more weird noises. One time, a door handle came loose and went flying across the room. It almost hit the agent who was showing the house right in the head.”
Delia couldn’t help wincing — not just because she guessed that an antique brass or crystal doorknob could have done some serious damage if it had actually connected, but also because it sure sounded as if Aaron’s grandmother’s house was haunted.
And that explained why he’d come to her for help…although Delia wasn’t sure how he’d managed to track her down at Caleb’s house.
“You want me to talk to the ghost,” she said, and at once, Aaron’s expression brightened, although the brightest smile in the world couldn’t erase the shadows under his eyes.
“Would you? I mean, everyone in town knows about your sideline, and it sounds as if you have a pretty good success rate.”
That she did. Once or twice, she’d come across a spirit so recalcitrant that no matter what she said or did, it wouldn’t budge, but those instances were few and far between.
Before she could respond, though, Caleb sat up a little straighter and fastened Aaron with a direct look, his eyes somehow appearing darker than their usual friendly brown. Most of the time, her quarter-demon friend appeared laid-back in the extreme, but when he stared at you like that, it was better if you didn’t try any shenanigans.
“How did you know to find Delia here?” he demanded.
Aaron gave a very weary shrug, as if he almost didn’t have the energy to even lift his shoulders a fraction of an inch. “I went to her house first,” he said. “But her neighbor said she’d gone over to her friend Caleb’s place.”
Mrs. Gallina, flapping her jaw again. The woman meant well, but because her children were all grown and had relocated to various towns up and down the West Coast, she had decided to transfer all her protective instincts to Delia, who, as a woman living on her own, apparently needed a mother figure looking out for her.
Never mind that Delia’s own mother lived only fifteen minutes away and certainly could have been there quickly enough to help out if an emergency arose.
Anyway, Mrs. Gallina had seen Delia hurrying out to her car with the potted orchid in her arms — she’d been running late and had backed out of the garage before she realized the plant was still sitting on the kitchen island, and had gone into the house through the front door rather than wasting time opening the garage door — and the woman had asked if the orchid was a gift. Even though she knew all this had been making her even later, Delia had told her neighbor that the plant was a present for her friend Caleb, who’d just sold his house. After that, she’d murmured breathlessly that she was running late and needed to get going, but the encounter would have provided enough information about where she was headed that Mrs. Gallina could have passed it along to Aaron Sanchez.
Except….
“Did this neighbor give you my address or something?” Caleb inquired, one brow lifting at an angle that told Delia he wasn’t too thrilled by any of this.
Aaron had the grace to look sheepish. “Well, I’d sort of heard through the grapevine that you two were spending a lot of time together, so I kind of looked you up online a while back when I was thinking of asking Delia out.”
This piece of explanation only made Caleb set his jaw, and Delia knew Aaron was just digging his hole that much deeper.
To be fair, property records weren’t a state secret. She didn’t know why Caleb hadn’t set up a trust to buy his current house, because doing so would have helped a little to obfuscate the identity of the owner, but she supposed everything had moved so fast that he really hadn’t had the time to put the necessary paperwork together.
But at least the house was listed on the county recorder’s website as belonging to Caleb Lowe. As far as Delia had been able to tell, she was the only person in town who knew he was really Caleb Lockwood…and she intended to keep it that way.
However, she couldn’t help thinking it had been just a little stalker-y for Aaron to investigate Caleb as a possible rival.
“Well, that explains it,” she said as brightly as she could, even while shooting Caleb another of those sideways looks that she hoped would tell him he needed to drop the whole thing about Aaron hunting down his address. “And of course I’ll come to your grandmother’s house to see if I can find anything that feels strange.”
Caleb’s fingers tightened on his knees, and she could tell he was practically stomping on his tongue not to interject.
Good. They were friends, of course, and she was always willing to listen to his advice and insights, but in the end, she was a grown woman who could make her own decisions.
And so far, she’d never turned down someone who was asking for help with their haunted house.
Even if Aaron had recently been possessed by a demon and still looked positively hag-ridden.
