Roan shook her head so vigorously one of the braids laying against her back flipped onto her chest. Santiago rolled his eyes. Mrs. Willoby’s room was at the end of the hall to the right, and apparently searching Mrs. Willoby’s room was a line the best special ops tracker he’d ever worked with refused to cross.
Santiago started with the bathroom directly across from the stairwell; Roan walked up the last two steps and veered left down the hall.
Was the house haunted? Yes, as was the lake. He was the only person who ritualistically chose to enter this side of the lake. Who chose to see, feel, and hear the spirits who’d died there. Inside the house, the only spirit he’d encountered was that of a child. He’d only encountered her once before. When Ned Tate, the owner before Mrs. Willoby, had hung himself in the attic. The spirit had been there near the window overlooking the front of the house. In the direction Roan was walking. In all the years he’d lived and visited Shrouded Lake, he’d only seen her the once.
The upstairs bathroom was large, the size of a bedroom. It had been that way from the time the family transitioned from the outhouse still existing on the property to indoor plumbing in the rooms.
Unlike Santiago’s and Julian’s homes, Mrs. Willoby hadn’t done much renovation outside of the hideous paint.
Like the first time he’d checked, there was nothing out of place in the bathroom.
Santiago looked out the rectangular window above the toilet, and nothing looked out of place on the leaves scattered on the ground below. Scanning the tree line, he didn’t see anything that made him pause.
“All clear back here, Sheriff,” Roan called out.
Santiago stepped out into the hall and shut the bathroom door behind him.
“Make sure the family’s cleared the property and do a walk around,” Santi directed, walking toward the open bedroom door. Quickly scanning the room, he re-holstered his weapon.
“You sure you want to go in there alone?”
“You want to come with me?” he asked with raised brow.
“I’ll be right outside,” she said, holstering her gun and trotting down the stairs. “Holler if you need me. And if the dead rise up and rip out your tongue making it so you can’t holler, you’ll die alone because I won’t be stepping foot back into this house.”
Santiago laughed.
His smile disappeared the moment he stepped into the room.
Just like his initial walk through, there were no obvious disturbances other than the smell.
Mrs. Willoby’s queen-sized bed was against the far-left wall centered between two long vertical windows. The window on the far side of the bed was open. On the nightstand beneath it, the cream porcelain lamp with painted pink Begonias was intact. As was the lamp on the other side of her bed. Nothing appeared to be shattered or broken in the bedroom.
Striding across the room, he pulled back the lace cream curtains and opened the intact double glass doors that led to the balcony. If there was ever a place he thought Mrs. Willoby would die, it was out here on her rickety wooden balcony overlooking Shrouded Lake. When she was well, hell, even when she was ill, she sat out here drinking her morning coffee, afternoon tea, and evening whiskey.
She hadn’t owned the home for long, but the older woman enjoyed her days looking out over the water.
Stepping back inside, Santiago shut the French doors. When one sense didn’t detect anything out of the ordinary, he knew to lean more heavily onto one of his others.
Now familiar with the furniture in the room and the room’s dimensions, he walked the perimeter of the space and returned to the bed where the smell was the strongest.
It wasn’t the smell of death or sickness. More like rot and mold.
Opening his eyes, he squatted down and pulled back the bed covers. He ducked to look beneath the bedframe and pulled back sharply as the acrid scent singed his nostrils.
On the hardwood floor, in the centermost area beneath the bed was what appeared to be a small, shattered vessel. Something dark and oily seeped from the broken shards of what may have been a palm-sized jar.
“What the hell is this?” he said, rising, and pushed the foot of the bed over until he could clearly see the dark-blue glass jar, like something you’d see at an antique sale.
The broken object had been placed dead center of the bed. The oily substance contained flower petals, slimy looking leaves, and other herblike bits, but that wasn’t what made the fine hairs on his forearms stand on end. It was what looked to be two little chicken hearts that had apparently rolled from the oily container and left a trail about a foot away.
Santiago rubbed the tension building at the back of his neck.
The warmth of his hand against his cooling skin made him realize the room had become extremely cold. Unnaturally so.
“Well shit,” he muttered, rising. Maybe he’d delay telling Roan about this turn. He’d been through too much, seen too much, not to know when he was in the presence of something from the other side. Life in Appalachia had always been woven within the material of the unknown and unseen. Life on Shrouded Lake more so…enough so that he couldn’t rule out the implications on Mrs. Willoby’s death.
Roan’s blood curling scream echoed through the house, and Santiago ran out of the house, ready to take out whatever and whoever hurt?—
