Every House Is Haunted (23 page)

“I can’t see the harm in taking a quick walk around. I won’t touch anything.”

Charles shot her a look. “If you knew what this place was capable of you’d know how stupid you sound right now.” He pursed his lips. “This house has been empty for over sixty years. Exactly one day—” he raised his index finger “—after the Westons moved in, they were killed.”

“I’m not talking about moving in. I’m just talking about a quick tour.”

Charles paced back and forth in the foyer. Through the leaded glass panes in the front door, he saw Ted Weston standing out on the porch.

“They’re back,” he said brusquely. “I’m going outside to have a quick smoke and get rid of them. Why don’t you come out with us?”

“No thanks,” Sally said. “Nicotine screws with my biorhythms.”

“Bullshit,” Charles said, and opened the door. “Make it quick. And don’t touch
anything
.”

Sally gave him a two-fingered salute and went up the stairs.

When Charles stepped outside, Ted was sitting on the porch steps and smoking a cigarette. He had taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie.

“I’m worn out,” he said, scrubbing one hand down the side of his face. “It’s official.”

“It’s allowed,” Charles said, sitting down next to him. He produced a gilt cigarette case from an inside pocket, took out a cigarette, tamped it. “You have my permission.”

“Thanks.” Ted produced a lighter and lit Charles’s cigarette. Then he leaned back on his elbows and let out a deep sigh. “What a day.”

Charles looked around for Dawn but didn’t see her.

“She wanted to be alone,” Ted said by way of explanation.

Charles stood up and went down the steps to the flagstone path. He found himself conscious of making direct contact with the house and avoided it whenever possible.

“Heading out tonight?” he asked.

“Eleven-fifteen back to Calgary,” Ted said, exhaling smoke. “Would’ve left this morning if Dawn wasn’t so set on hiring that so-called psychic.”

“That was her idea?” Charles asked.

Ted looked slightly offended. “Sure wasn’t mine. But it’s not her fault. Not entirely. The neighbours were on her the moment we got here. Whispering about haunted houses and spooks.”

Charles put his hand in his pocket. “Why do you think she was so quick to believe it?”

Ted held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and stared at the smouldering tip. “Your partner got it exactly right, Mr. Courtney. What happened to my parents was an accident—a strange, fluky accident—but an accident nonetheless. I can accept that, but Dawn can’t. Or won’t.”

“But why blame the house?” Charles wondered. “Of all the possible explanations she could have gone with, why pick one with a rather unbelievable angle?”

Ted shrugged. “Because they had just moved into it, I guess. We both thought it was kind of strange, how fast they sold the old place and bought this one.”

“A house in this neighbourhood is usually considered a steal,” Charles offered. “They don’t come up that often.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured, too. But the thing is, they didn’t even tell us they were looking. They never said a word to us, and Dawn and my mother talked on the phone every Sunday. Last week Dawn calls me and says our parents got a sweet deal on a house in Rosedale. They closed escrow in a week. Before I became a criminal lawyer, I used to deal in real estate law, and I never heard of anyone closing escrow in a week.”

Charles said, “It’s strange but not completely unheard of.”

“I know,” Ted said, “and that’s why I’m willing to accept what happened. I don’t like it, but I’m not about to blame their deaths on ghosts.” He gave Charles a long, steady look. “Of course, that doesn’t exactly explain why you’re here, though.”

“It doesn’t?”

“You said you came to protect the reputation of the neighbourhood. You don’t want some psychic-for-hire going to the newspapers saying a house in Rosedale is not only haunted but responsible for the deaths of two people who were living there at the time. But if that’s true, then why was it the neighbours who put Dawn onto the idea in the first place? Wouldn’t it have been in their own best interests to keep their mouths shut?”

Charles looked down at his shoes, pretending to give the matter serious thought. “I think some people can’t help but talk. Tongues like to wag.”

Ted continued to look at Charles with that steady look in his eyes. “You might be right,” he said finally. “The fact remains that only two people know what really happened in that house, and both of them are dead. I don’t like that either, but that’s the way it is.”

Charles smoked his cigarette and said nothing.

They heard the clicking of Dawn’s shoes as she came down the sidewalk. She stepped up to the front gate, but didn’t pass through it. “Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Ted turned to Charles and offered his hand. “Thank you for stopping by. Good luck with your investigation.”

“Have a good flight,” Charles said.

He watched them drive off. When they were out of sight, he took the object out of his pocket.

It was an old, scuffed baseball. Part of the red waxed stitching had come loose and a flap of the nicotine-coloured rawhide hung loose. To Charles it looked like the dried scalp of a shrunken head. The letters T.R.T., faint but still legible, were printed on the side in childish block letters.

The baseball had come from the Mereville Group’s private collection of paranormal artefacts. It had been found in the house after the Group took ownership in 1944. Jimmy Dumfreys, one of the whiz kids in R&D, the same Jimmy who called 17 Ashley Avenue the great white shark of haunted houses, thought it might be an “apport”—a solid object which seemingly appears out of nowhere. Its significance, if it had one, was unknown. Charles had signed it out that morning, and it was due back by midnight. If it wasn’t returned, the snoops would be paying him a visit.

Right after they caught up with Dustin Haney.

Haney was the real estate agent who had sold the house to the Westons. Except Haney was no more a real estate agent than Charles and Sally were insurance investigators. They all worked for the Mereville Group—on the surface an ordinary multinational insurance company, below the surface a clandestine organization with interests in paranormal research. In addition to their various projects and investigations, the Group was also the caretaker of a handful of properties that were known collectively as “the Eight.” Over the years, with the assistance of individuals on the city council, they had managed to keep the properties secure, maintained, and off the real estate markets. The house on Ashley Avenue was not the most dangerous of the Eight (that honour belonged to an old fish-processing plant on Lake Shore Boulevard), but it was certainly the most attractive. As the operative in charge of visiting the house on a weekly basis and making sure it hadn’t “gone Amityville” on anyone (to use Sally’s phraseology), Haney would have been familiar with the neighbourhood and known how valuable the property would be to a couple who didn’t know its dark and bloody history.

The real question was why did Haney do it?

The Group was still trying to figure that part out, but Charles knew they weren’t really interested in the answer. What was done was done. They had learned a few facts. That a listing for 17 Ashley Avenue had appeared on three real estate websites over the past two weeks. That the name attached to the listing was one Dustin Haney. And that Haney stopped coming to work five days ago, which also happened to be the day the Westons closed escrow on their new home.

Charles wished he could have told Ted and Dawn the truth. He took no pride or pleasure in lying to people, though he acknowledged it as a necessary part of his duties. But the truth wouldn’t give them closure; it would probably have the opposite effect. It would have acted like a battering ram to the fragile doors of perception, and once those doors were open, it was impossible to close them again. Charles knew this from personal experience.

On the other hand, he felt not even an inkling of sympathy for Haney. It was hard to feel for a man who had taken advantage of a retired couple who had wanted nothing more than a home in which to spend their twilight years—twilight years which had turned out to be twilight days. The Group’s think-tank were still scratching their heads over Haney’s motive, but Charles figured it was because they were looking too deeply. He was willing to bet Haney had been motivated by nothing more than simple greed. Why he thought he could outrun and outwit the snoops was the real question.

As these thoughts raced through Charles’s mind, he discovered his feet had carried him around to the back of the house. From here he could see down into the Don Valley and the dark sprawling expanse of the old Brick Works. With its sooty brick and spire-like smokestacks, it would have made a better haunted house than the house on Ashley Avenue.

But looks are deceiving, aren’t they, Charles, m’boy?

Oh yes. In fact, that was the first thing they taught you at the Mereville Group. It could have been their slogan.

He bounced the T.R.T. baseball in his hand and stared down into the valley of dark twining shapes and rustling leaves. He had meant to give the ball to Sally before he left the house, but Ted Weston had picked that moment to show up on the porch and then Sally was already up the stairs.

And here you are still outside while she’s inside.

Charles clutched the ball in a death grip. The voice in his head had managed to do what half an hour in the house had been unable to accomplish.

It had scared him.

Here he was promenading around the yard while Sally was inside—
inside
—the house.

He started back at a quick trot.

By the time he reached the front yard, he was running.

Sally was twenty years old when she was recruited by the Mereville Group. On that particular day she had been standing outside the Red and White General Store in Antigonish, drinking an Orange Crush. She looked up when the car with the Hertz sticker in the corner of windshield pulled into the gravel parking lot and the man in the expensive suit stepped out. Not Charles. She didn’t meet him until a month later, when she began the Group’s year-long training program in Toronto. This man, who moved not toward the store but directly over to where Sally was standing, introduced himself as Edward Reed and then proceeded to ask if she had given any thought to her career.

Sally had stared at Edward Reed for a long moment.
Next he’s going to ask if I ever thought of being a model.
She had heard stories about strange men who approached girls and offered them work as models. Unfortunately, most of those men turned out to be El Pervos who were interested only in girls willing to take off their clothes. Of course, they didn’t tell you that up front. Oh no. First they had to butter you up, tell you how beautiful you are, and how much money you could make—and so easily!

That thought was going through Sally’s mind as she reached out to shake Edward Reed’s hand. The moment they touched it was jerked out of her mind (she jerked her hand back, too), and was replaced with a sudden and inexplicable amount of knowledge about the man standing before her.

His name isn’t Edward Reed; it’s Winter. Dan Winter. Daniel Clarence Winter. He’s thirty-eight years old, he lives in Barrie, Ontario, and he’s left-handed. Once, in his senior year of high school, he cheated on a trig final.

Sally dropped her Orange Crush and stared agog at Dan Winter, a.k.a. Edward Reed.

“It was a calculus final, actually,” Dan Winter said. “But you were close.”

Sally continued to stare. She’d had episodes like this before, but never one so strong, so
intense
.

Mr. Winter told Sally what was by then clearly evident: she was a telepath. Then he asked her again if she had given any thought to her career. Sally had replied in her mind:
My career as a telepath?

Dan Winter grinned at her:
Yes
.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

A year later, Sally had finished the psychic’s equivalent of preparatory school and was given her first assignment—bloodhound work at Pearson International Airport. Using her “wild talent,” she picked out potential recruits from the crowds of people departing and arriving. She had been there only a week before the Group pulled her out. They were concerned that in the wake of 9/11, airport security would be on high alert, and that it was only a matter of time before someone noticed that Sally was never meeting anyone or taking any flights herself.

So they sent her to the mall. Five of them, to be precise, on a rotating monthly schedule. Same assignment, sniff out potential psychics for the Mereville Group. Sally did that for six months, spending her days pretending to window-shop, eating her meals in greasy food courts (she put on fifteen pounds), and staying under the radar of mall security (who were not nearly as astute as their brethren at the airport). The Group called this sort of work “trawling.” Sally called it boring.

When Charles had come to her with the Ashley Avenue assignment, Sally had done more than jump at it—she had pole-vaulted over it. Anything to get her away from the mind-numbing Muzak and the El Pervos in the food court who seemed to come not so much to eat as to ogle the teenage girls.

Looking up at the house on Ashley Avenue for the first time, Sally had wondered if she hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew. But now, as she walked aimlessly through the rooms on the second floor, she found herself feeling strangely relaxed, almost at peace. It was not the sort of feeling she would have expected to feel in a place with the reputation that 17 Ashley Avenue had. Instead she was experiencing the same kaleidoscopic mix of emotions she had felt on her first few days in the Group’s training facility: a heady cocktail of curiosity, excitement, and nervousness.

She wanted to do a good job here—because she took pride in her work, but more because she didn’t want to go back to the mall. It was trite, but it was true. She’d had her fill of malls and was ready for something new, something marginally more exciting than “trawling.” And she hoped after today, the Group would feel the same way, too.