The Misadventures of the Laundry Hag: All Washed Up: (Book 3 in the Misadventures of the Laundry Hag series) (18 page)

 “Can you tell us about Aileene?”

 Veronica Gray laughed. “Oh, she was wild. A party girl. She knew every bar in three counties inside and out. Chris and I went out with her a few times, but that really wasn’t our scene, you understand. Still, she restrained herself when she worked here and she had a terrific sense of humor.”

 I wondered if Aileene Grant had seen the friendship in the same light as Veronica Grey. Somehow, I didn’t think so. In my head I had a picture of a wild young girl, trapped by circumstances and desperate for a different life.

 “What did Aileene think when her parents sold the house to your family?”

 “Oh, she was furious. She was a redhead and had the temper to match. She and Chris actually got into it here a few times.”

 “Over what?” Leo leaned forward, a man ready to get with the gossip already. From beneath her unibrow, Hilda scowled.

 “The house. Aileene told him the place was cursed.” Veronica laughed and shook her head. “There were always rumors about the place of course, the ghost and all, but no one took it seriously until Aileene added fuel to the fire.”

 “Rumors?” I squeezed Neil’s hand and shot Leo a warning glance. If Mrs. Grey wanted to believe they were only rumors, we weren’t the ones to enlighten her to our experiences.

 “Oh you know, the usual sort of nonsense. Reports of music playing late at night, lights on, voices. Chris went to inspect after each reported incident and every time he found the place exactly how we’d left it.”

 “And you told all of this to my mother?” Neil said. I knew the wheels in his head were turning around and around.

 “Of course. Laura and I had a good laugh over it. Not here. In the city of course. I wouldn’t want to offend Mrs. Grant.”

“Did you know Gillian Grant’s father?” I asked. It was a little off the topic of the haunted house, but Veronica was a font of information.

She shook her head. “No. By that time, Aileene had changed and I think she liked to keep her home life separate from her work here. And then of course, she passed on.” She looked genuinely upset about it and I felt a pang for suspecting her.

I wanted to ask if Aileene had changed because she resented the Greys for buying her childhood home, but that seemed rude, so I continued to focus on the property. “But obviously, you finally decided to sell.”

She sighed. “Yes. It’s been more of a headache to us than anything else. Because of our history with the Grants, it didn’t seem right to flip it ourselves. We offered the Grants the house back for the same price we originally bought it, but they declined. So, we made a tidy profit and here we all are.”

“Is there anything else you can tell us about the ghosts?”

She smiled. “I wish I could. The only disturbances down there in recent years have been teenage kids looking for a spot to cause mischief. I think any tales of ghosts are just smoke screens to draw attention away from their own actions.”

I sensed an end to our chat and rose, extending my hand. She shook it and Hilda showed us out. She didn’t say anything rude, but I doubted she would in front of Mrs. Grey.

“Well, that was interesting,” I said as we loaded back into Leo’s car.

“As in the old Chinese proverb, ‘may you always live in interesting times?’” Leo quipped.

“Yeah, just like that.”

“Do you still think the Greys are involved?” Neil asked.

“I think the Grants, the senior Grants at least, wanted to be rid of the place. I don’t think they had any intention of buying it back. The Greys aren’t superstitious and have deep pockets. And I think their daughter, for whatever reason, was attached to it. Still is, if she’s the one haunting me. What I don’t know is why. I needed to talk to Gillian Grant. She was about two when her mother died and if she’s anything like me, she’d dig until she found something. Tenacity, I believe someone once said it’s called.”

“Or stubbornness. The point is that whatever you call it, it works.” Neil took my mangled hand and raised it to his lips. “We’ll make it happen.”

Chapter Eighteen

“What the hell are you doing?” Leo stood, hands on hips and stared at the mess I’d made of the upstairs room. Pieces of flowered wallpaper had been peeled away in a random and completely half-assed manner. The destruction left a big white space in the center, which I’d been filling to suit my purposes.

“I needed a murder board. Under the circumstances, this was the best I could do.” I stood back, capped my permanent marker and surveyed my handiwork. “Don’t worry, we were going to paint this room, right? We’ll just paint over it.

“Who is this we you speak of?” he asked with raised brows.

“Me and Neil and Sylvia. You can sit back and supervise.”

“So long as we’re clear. Now, tell me what all this is for.”

I didn’t have pictures, so I’d written names. “This is Aileene Grant, our murder victim and possible ghost.”

“But not the bean nighe.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t think about the bean nighe right now. Still, I wished Neil would hurry up with his phone calls. Having him out of my sight had my guts roiling like I’d eaten something rotten. “One specter at a time, please.”

Leo nodded. “Hit me with your best theory.”

“Okay, so here’s Aileene Grant, who grew up here. At first blush she looks like your garden variety wild child, out bar hopping and biding her time to move on. Yet she goes nuclear on Chris Grey.” I drew a line between Christopher Grey’s name and Aileen Grant’s along with a little
ka-boom
in between them to illustrate. “She lost it when Grey took her father up on the offer to buy this place. The question is, why?”

I wrote WHY in big block letters under the
ka-boom
and circled it.

“You know, if you used different colors the important parts would pop more. Do you want to go to Walmart and…?”

I cast him a black look.

He held up his hands defensively. “Just FYI. So, why then?”

“Can’t say for sure. Do you have any ideas?”

“I….don’t know.” Leo tapped his chin. “What else have you got?”

I drew a line between Chris Grey and the senior Grants and connected them with a dollar sign. “For some unknown reason, the Grants sold their property to the Greys. They might have made more money if they listed it conventionally, but they chose to sell it privately. Maybe it was for the convenience, or they didn’t want to deal with a realtor. Or for something else.” I add a question mark next to the dollar sign.

“I’m with you.” Leo nodded.

“Good, because I have no idea where I’m going with this.” Under Aileen’s name, I wrote the years she’d lived, 1969 - 1991.
Death due to arsenic. Pos. rat poison.

“Creepy,” Leo said.

I glanced at him over my shoulder. “What?”

“She was the same age as her daughter is now when she died.”

He was right, that was super creepy.

Beneath Aileene’s death I wrote in small letters to fit it all,
property
and then next to that I add
haunted since 60’s, when Grants buy old lock house. Reports increased after sale 2 Greys.
”

“Really?” Leo asked. From his snide tone, I knew he was trying to make us both forget that unnerving coincidence. “Because the letters t and o take up so much more room than the number two.”

“Hush, you. It’s my murder board. Go make your own if you don’t like my methods.”

Outside a little Prius hummed to a stop and I saw Neil unfolding himself from the passenger’s seat. The knot in my chest loosened a bit. “They’re back.”

“I hope they brought some inspiration for dinner, because I’m fresh out of ideas.”

“Focus, Leo. You’re my sounding board.”

“Are you going to write on me next?”

I ignored him. Leo grew extra quippy when he was unsettled. And talk of murder was unsettling, at least to most people. Leo’s last lover had been killed by the same murdering jackass who’d tried to blow me up.

“Okay, I’ll just finish up here.” I sighed. Not like I’d made any real progress anyway.

I listened to his light tread on the stairs and then heavier footsteps as Neil ascended. The fact that he made any noise at all testified to just how exhausted he must be. Neil typically moved like a big cat, stealthy and graceful. I moved more like a herd of charging water buffalo.

He stood in the doorway and I stared at him as he took in my makeshift murder board. “
NCIS
?”

 “
Castle
,” I corrected with a smile. He knew I was a sucker for detective shows.

His gaze returned to the wall. I shifted my weight and asked, “Any progress contacting Gillian Grant?”

“Not yet. I have a few calls in. I’ll go up in a few hours and check.” His tone sounded off, distracted by more than just my half-assed attempt at hieroglyphics.

“What’s wrong?”

He didn’t try to deflect me or claim that everything would be fine. “The insurance lapsed on the truck. They won’t cover the damage from the wreck.”

I blinked, completely stunned into silence. “Lapsed?”

He wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I forgot to pay it while you were in the hospital.”

Shit. I could see it happening, too. All our other bills were on an automatic payment, but the cheap car insurance I’d located was a mom-and-pop operation that had been in business since the fifties and the old lady who ran the office wasn’t set up for auto draft. I’d faithfully mailed them a check every month, but with everything that had happened, it was one thing in the sea of chaos and I hadn’t given it a second thought. So much for my fifty dollars a month savings.

“I’ll talk to them when we get back. Maybe they’ll understand.” Yeah, and maybe Atlas would start a conga line.

His focus remained on some spot on the floor halfway between us. “We’re in deep, aren’t we.”

It wasn’t really a question but I forced out an answer. “Yeah.” That was putting it mildly, between my medical bills, Penny’s delivery/surgery and now the truck. We weren’t set up to take hit after financial hit. “It’s not your fault, Neil.”

He did look at me then, a look full of challenge. “Whose fault is it?”

My chin went up. “Mine, so if you’re going to beat someone up over it, it’ll have to be me.”

I stared back at the murder board, took a deep breath then asked, “Do you want to go home? Maybe you can pick up some overtime or I can find some cleaning gigs.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “You’re not done here.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Not compared to real life or the people who depended on us.

He shot me a warning look. “Don’t say that. It matters to you, I know it does. You’ve been more alive since we’ve been here than I’ve seen you in months, so don’t give up on it just because I screwed up.”

“Neil,” I said, then didn’t know what to say.

“I should go back, but I don’t want to leave you here. No way in hell will I leave you here after last night.”

I breathed in a relieved sigh, glad I didn’t have to make the suggestion. “That’s not even an option worth considering. I go wherever you go, period.”

He was silent for a time and then came toward me and plucked the marker from my hand. On my wall he wrote
strange events,
underlined it and wrote
, 1. woman in the road.

My brows crinkled into a scowl. “You mean ghost.”

“It wasn’t a ghost that I saw in the road.”

“What?”

“It was a woman. A real honest-to-God flesh and blood woman. The thing we saw last night,” he shuddered, “that I could believe was a ghost, but the woman in the road was alive.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it again. Could he be right? I had a better look than he did, but he seemed so sure. I, on the other hand, wasn’t. I had ghosts on the brain after all, that’s why I’d been sent here, so there was a possibility I’d superimposed a ghost-like quality.

“What about the ghost in the library?”

“Are you sure it was a ghost?”

Stubbornness prodded me to insist that yes, she was definitely a ghost, but again, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. I’d taken pain meds after the accident and that basement had been dark other than the reading lamps on the tables. “It was a woman, and I’m even willing to wager it was the same woman who was standing in the road, but maybe she wasn’t really a ghost.”

Neil wrote
boom box in the wall
as his second list item and
library shelf
as number three. “So, operating under the assumption that it has been a woman and not a ghost messing with us, what can we conclude?”

“She’s nuts.”

“That’s not very helpful, Uncle Scrooge.”

“I’m serious. It seems even crazier that a real person would stand in front of our car. A ghost we would have driven right through, but a person would have been hit.”

“I didn’t hit her,” Neil said with confidence. “I flipped the damn truck but I didn’t hit her. There was no blood, no body, nothing.”

“Sheriff Ruiz said there was no sign of a vehicle nearby. So where did she come from?”

“She has to live nearby. Walking distance.”

“That narrows it down to like two thousand people.” I stared at the words boom box and frowned. “Here’s something we didn’t consider yet. Technologically speaking, a boom box is pretty old.”

“It’s archaic, really,” Neil agreed. “So why use that instead of an iPod or even a cell phone that would have been harder for us to spot?”

“Unless that’s all that you have,” I muttered. “One of the elderly women I clean for was upset because her son wanted to replace her CD collection with an iPod for Christmas. He thought he was doing something nice, but she was comfortable with the technology she had.”

“But the woman in the road, the same one you saw at the library, wasn’t elderly, right?”

“No older than I am,” I agreed. Never mind that I felt as old as Methuselah after sleeping in the car. Chronologically, I was in my thirties. “I’ve even mastered the smartphone. Well, mostly.”

“So let’s just say it’s disposable tech. That whoever put it in the wall used it simply because they didn’t mind not getting it back. Still, why was it that you were in that room half the night before you heard it?”

I frowned. He was right. I hadn’t thought of it that way but I’d been in bed for several hours before I heard anything. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Neil said, his gaze steady, “that someone had to turn it on. And they had to sneak past us to do it.”