Page 14 of The Devil Went Down to Laughlin
Off in the distance, the tall shapes of the casinos that clustered along the riverfront began to rise against the desert’s yellow expanse, and when she passed the turnoff for the Davis Dam, she knew she was getting close. Onto Casino Drive, and then another turn onto L Street, moving past what felt like acres of trailer and RV parks. So far, she hadn’t seen a single real house, and she wondered if her nav was pointing her in the wrong direction somehow.
But then she noted a cluster of cottonwoods and willows and a single driveway with a gate, and she realized that was where she was supposed to turn off. At first, she couldn’t see anything of the house at all, but once she was past the trees that surrounded the property, she spied a white-painted two-story home with light blue shutters, kind of your standard American farmhouse in appearance and definitely incongruous amidst all the RVs and casinos that otherwise dominated the Laughlin landscape.
A black BMW was parked in front of a detached structure that Delia guessed was the garage. The car had to be Aaron’s, so it didn’t look as if the finance company had repo’d it yet.
Or maybe he’d borrowed some money from family to get his payments up to date. Either way, it wasn’t her business…and she wouldn’t ask.
She came to a stop next to the BMW and turned off her Hyundai’s engine, then got out. Almost at once, a hot, dry wind tugged at her hair, even though she’d pulled it back into a ponytail. Before she’d left work, she’d gone into the bathroom and changed out of her skirt, heels, and blouse into jeans and a sleeveless top and some sandals, an outfit she’d brought with her after she realized the day before that it would be better to be dressed practically for this mission.
Just in case.
Almost as soon as she’d gotten out of her little SUV, Aaron emerged onto the front porch of the house. He looked much better than he had yesterday, since it seemed as if he’d gotten a haircut and a decent night’s sleep in the interim.
“Hey, there,” he called. “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”
“No,” she said, then made her way along the little gravel path that wound its way to the door. The grass surrounding the path was yellowed and in definite need of a watering, and again, she could tell that Aaron’s great-grandparents obviously hadn’t worried about fitting in with the desert landscape, not with that lawn and all the trees that surrounded the property. “Although I’m starting to wonder if this is the only real house in Laughlin.”
He grinned at her as she came up the porch steps. “No, there are real houses, but most of them are to the south of here, near the Colorado River bend. My family hung onto this place even though developers kept trying to buy them out.”
Delia could see why anyone who’d built the RV parks or the casinos would have wanted this plot of land, since it did sort of sit right in the middle of what was otherwise mostly commercial real estate. Pru hadn’t mentioned anything about that, although Delia guessed all those offers — if they’d even happened — had been informal, verbal affairs and nothing that would have been put in the public record.
“I’m glad they did,” she said. “It’s always fun to come across these holdouts in the middle of boring suburbia or retail areas.” She paused there and glanced around. The paint on the siding was fading, and she could see evidence of some wood rot on the porch columns, but those were easy fixes. “If developers are so interested in this place, why not sell it to one of them rather than a private party? Then you wouldn’t even have to worry about whether it was haunted or not, since the developers would just bulldoze the house anyway.”
Aaron didn’t quite wince, but she could tell he wasn’t too thrilled with her assessment of the situation. “Not possible,” he said shortly. “I finally convinced my parents to sell the house — a lot of the family isn’t even in the area anymore, and there wouldn’t have been a lot of takers in the first place — but my father flat-out told me that selling to a developer was off the table. It has to go to someone who’ll preserve the property.”
If that was the case, then even leaving aside the haunted-or-not aspect of the situation, they were going to have a much harder time unloading the place. People wanted to live in real neighborhoods, not in a carve-out of a couple of acres in the middle of unending RV parks.
But Aaron probably knew that as well as she did, so Delia didn’t see any reason to bring it up.
“Okay,” she said. “Then I suppose we might as well go inside and check it out.”
He nodded, then turned around and opened the door to let her in.
Like a lot of houses of a similar vintage, it had a small foyer that had a staircase immediately facing the front door, with a formal dining room on one side and a sitting room on the other. A blast of cool, damp air hit Delia’s face, telling her that the place only had a swamp cooler, not real A/C.
Another strike against the house.
But again, Aaron must have known that, too. Anyway, she wasn’t here to evaluate the home’s shortcomings and give an honest assessment of its current market value.
No, she was here to see if she could sense the ghost who apparently lingered in the house and figure out the best way to convince it that it needed to move on.
There was something off about this place, though, an intangible quality she couldn’t begin to describe. It didn’t feel exactly like the sometimes oppressive sensation she sensed when she was in the presence of a particularly troubled or stubborn entity, but it still seemed to press on her, making each breath a little more difficult to pull in than it should have.
Aaron must have noticed something was wrong, because he asked, “Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” she managed.
And oddly, as soon as the words left her mouth, she did feel fine. Or rather, while she didn’t like the sensation of the slightly damp air lying on her bare arms or the faint scent of mothballs that seemed to pervade the place, at least she could breathe properly.
As far as she could tell, no one seemed to have touched much of anything after Alba Sanchez died. A fussy-looking table and matching chairs still occupied the dining room, while the sitting room was crowded with a sofa and two matching chairs, all upholstered in the same powder-blue velvet. Matching velvet curtains hung at the windows.
“Are these all your grandmother’s things?” Delia asked.
Looking somber, Aaron replied, “Yes. Because we weren’t sure what to do with the house, we left all the furniture in place. Her personal items were given to people in the family according to her will, but everything else is still here.”
“So…she left the house to your parents?”
For a second, his gaze slipped away from hers, and she thought again of how the house seemed to have been passed among members of the family without much ceremony. “Basically,” he said. “My father was next in line to inherit. But then we decided to sell the place instead.”
