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And, once again, I didn’t pick up even the slightest flicker of anything that might have been a ghostly presence. No cold spots, no strange shadows, no whispery voices at the edge of my hearing.
The storm rolled in, though, bringing with it a burst of lightning, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder.
“That was close!” my mother exclaimed.
“Probably about two miles,” Tom said after a brief pause. I guessed that he’d stopped to do the mental math to figure out how many feet the sound had traveled.
“You’ll get used to it,” I said. “But it’s been a pretty active monsoon this year. According to the locals, some summers are a lot quieter than this.”
We were standing at the end of the hallway, in front of a tall window with stained-glass accents around its borders. Through it, I could see the rain pounding down, almost obscuring the trees in the garden.
Good thing I hadn’t left the top down on my VW Beetle.
“That’s good to hear,” my mother responded. “I’d hate to think it’s like this all the time.”
“It’s definitely not.” I paused there and looked at the stairwell off to one side. “If all the bedrooms are on this floor, what’s in the third story?”
Tom went over to the stairs and put his hand on the banister. It was mahogany, like all the others, but plain rather than carved. “Mostly attic space. I think there were servants’ quarters up there once, but the listing said it’s all just storage now.”
“Let’s take a look,” my mother said, and headed over toward him so she could start moving up the steps.
I hung back for a moment. Something in me really didn’t want to go up there. But was that actually my psychic sense kicking in, or had I just watched one too many horror movies in my formative years? The bad stuff in those films always seemed to happen in either the attic or the basement.
Since both Tom and my mother were already going full steam up the stairs, I didn’t have much choice except to follow, unless I wanted to look like an idiot. Anyway, I’d already faced down Lucien Dumond’s ghost when he wasn’t much more than an angry wind desperately trying to tell me who’d killed him, so I told myself there probably couldn’t be anything much worse in this house. After all, the previous owners had lived here for decades and hadn’t reported anything worse than a cold spot here and there and a pair of eyeglasses moved to a different location from time to time.
Gritting my teeth, I fell in behind Tom and my mother. I could believe this staircase had once led to the servants’ quarters, because it was so narrow that we could only go up single file.
Then my mother said, “Oh, no!” and cold washed its way down my back.
“What is it?” I asked, voice tight.
“A total mess,” Tom said. “I guess we’ll have to have a word with the building inspector about this.”
By that point, I’d reached the top of the stairs and could see what they were talking about. Water dripped from what looked like a fairly sizable leak in the roof, pattering down on the bare floorboards.
The lump in my throat subsided. “Oh, that is pretty bad,” I agreed. “Maybe there’s something up here we can put under it.”
Because the attic was far from empty, filled with discarded furniture and trunks and what might have been boxes of holiday ornaments. From the look of it, the previous owners hadn’t taken a darn thing with them when they moved out. Clearly, they’d wanted to make a clean break.
“Good idea,” my mother said. “Let’s look around.”
We all scattered to various corners and began poking through the clutter. The trunks I inspected all seemed to be full of clothes that would have fetched thousands of dollars in L.A.’s vintage clothing stores, and the boxes were in fact full of Christmas decorations. Nothing there that would catch water from a leaky roof.
“What about this?” Tom asked, holding up a large flower-painted bowl.
My mother sniggered. “Do you know what that is?”
“A flower bowl?”
“A chamber pot,” she said, grinning.
Tom looked like he wanted to drop the thing then and there, although a glance at the hard floor underfoot probably told him that wasn’t a very good idea.
“It’s okay,” my mother added. “I’m sure they washed it before they stuck it up here.”
“And it’ll definitely catch the rain,” I said.
Mouth grim, he walked over to the leak and set the chamber pot directly underneath it. At once, the drips started plinking away into the porcelain receptacle.
