Page 23 of The Devil Went Down to Laughlin
If Caleb had known where he was going, he could have simply teleported himself onto the property and searched for Delia himself. However, he’d never been there, and while there might have still been some photos of it online — even though Aaron had intimated that the house was currently off the market — it seemed simpler to wait and hear what he’d found.
If nothing else, Delia might get seriously annoyed with him if he appeared out of nowhere to check up on her. Caleb knew she didn’t appreciate that kind of babysitting.
“All right,” he said, not bothering to sound gracious. “I’ll wait to hear back from you.”
They ended the call there. For just a moment, he thought about opening up another beer but immediately shot down that notion. Although alcohol didn’t affect him the same way it did people without a drop of demon blood in their veins, he still wanted to be as sharp as possible.
Just in case.
Instead, he poured himself a glass of water and took it and his phone with him into the living room, where he sat down on the couch to wait. Although he was generally very happy with the setup in his house, right then he thought it was sort of stupid that he’d put his big TV downstairs in the bonus room rather than here, where it would be more easily accessible.
But since he wasn’t about to start rearranging the decor, he looked up a few stocks on his phone, read a couple of articles on Apple News, and checked his email.
To his surprise, he’d won the auction for the house in Wyeth Ranch. Since he’d already put down a deposit before he could bid, he now had forty-five days to come up with the rest of the money.
Well, that was something. Thank God for the time buffer, because right now, he had more important things on his mind than running over to the auction house’s offices and handing over a cashier’s check, the only form of payment they accepted.
About twelve minutes after he and Aaron had hung up, his phone rang.
“What did you find?” he asked.
Okay, sure, it could have been someone else, but Caleb didn’t get a lot of phone calls, so he couldn’t think who else would be contacting him. The auction house had already stated that all its communications would be via email, so he knew it wasn’t them.
“Well, it looks like she left,” Aaron replied, still in that just slightly too upbeat tone. “I gave her the keys, and everything was locked back up, and the keys were under the doormat, just like I asked her to do when she was done at the house. As far as I can tell, she did what she needed to do and got back on the road, because her car isn’t here.”
Delia was always careful with other people’s property — how could she not be, when showing houses was part of her job? — so all this sounded pretty much exactly like the way she would have handled such a situation.
Except….
“If she managed to banish the ghost, why didn’t she call you to let you know the house was cleared?”
“Well, she knew I was in a meeting. She probably didn’t want to bug me.”
Again, that didn’t sound too off base for Delia, but the other man’s blithe tone still grated. “Did you go inside? Was there a note?”
“I didn’t see anything. But I don’t know if she even would have had something to write with. There’s not a whole lot left in the house.”
Most people probably wouldn’t have a pen and paper available. Delia, on the other hand, usually carried a small notebook and a pen with her for those times when she wanted to write something down but didn’t want to use her phone’s notepad function.
But maybe she didn’t have her note-taking tools with her this time, for whatever reason. If that were the case, then she might have just gotten on the road and figured she’d call Aaron later to let him know what had happened with the ghost.
However, that didn’t explain why she hadn’t reached out to Caleb. She’d promised him she would check in, and it seemed as if she had…at first. The crappy cell reception could have been the real culprit here, but even so, there shouldn’t have been anything stopping her from calling him once she was away from the house and out someplace where she got a decent signal.
The more he thought about it, the more suspicious the whole situation sounded.
Aaron spoke again. “Tell you what. I told her she should drive up to Heritage Park and make her calls from there, since that’s my go-to place when I’ve been at my grandmother’s house and needed to call or text someone and couldn’t get a message out. The park is only a couple of minutes away. Let me go up there and see if I can spot her car. Delia might have already headed back to Vegas, but if she left the house only a few minutes ago, she could still be there.”
That sounded like a long shot to Caleb, but he wasn’t going to abandon any possibility, no matter how slim. “That could work. Thanks.”
“Just give me a couple of minutes.”
The call ended, and Caleb set his phone down on the coffee table to wait again. This time, though, it was a much shorter span before Aaron called back.
“I’m at the park. Her car is here.”
Thank God. “What did she say about the house?”
A pause. Then Aaron replied, “Sorry, I think you misunderstood. Her car is here…but there’s no sign of Delia.”
