MONDAY, 9:28 A.M.
Kathy Bates, Xander thought. Not the homicidal loony from Misery but the little-too-happy, bubbly Bates from Rat Race. That’s who the real estate woman reminded him of. Like Bates, there was plenty of her. She seemed to find everything funny regardless of who said it or how unfunny it was.
“Ooh . . . you just rolled in from Pasadena!” She laughed -her whimsy at the use of the word rolled or at Pasadena, Xander couldn’t tell. “And you’re looking for a house?”
Mr. King smiled, the way people do when they’re waiting for a punchline. “Well, actually, I think we found one.”
“Just go ahead and make my job easy, will ya?” she said and lowered herself into the chair behind the office space’s single desk. She positioned a keyboard in front of her and said, “Which one?”
“At the end of Gabriel Road.”
She looked up and somehow kept her smile while forming a perplexed expression. “Off of Highway 3 . . . and Rem Way?”
A bulge the size of Xander’s thumb appeared between her eyes. “I don’t think . . .” She started typing, squinting at the monitor. Xander turned to look out the big front window.
Across the street was some kind of lumber mill. Whole trees, stripped of branches and bark, were piled into stacks the size of office buildings. Someone was using a fire hose to spray water over the logs. Perhaps it was to keep them from burning up at the slightest spark. It didn’t look safe to Xander.
A paper cup tumbled by in the parking lot, and Xander remembered. He pushed his hand into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled property listing his father had tossed away. It was exactly what Kathy Bates needed. He unfolded it and smoothed out the wrinkles. But this wasn’t the house on Gabriel Road. The picture was of a smallish cabin they had not seen. Dad had tossed it out the window, frustrated that it had led him to nowhere. That was before Xander had seen the house in the shadows. Could Dad have been looking at the wrong property listing? he wondered. If so, how had they found the house?
Another thought occurred to him, and it chilled his skin. What if the house’s power was so strong it made Dad see something on the page that wasn’t there? Or maybe it had even changed the page after getting them there.
That’s called paranoia, Xander thought. Stop it!
He crunched the paper back into a ball. He tossed it into a wastebasket by the desk.
“There’s nothing here. I’m sorry,” Kathy Bates said. Then something dawned on her. “You’re talking about the old Konig place!”
“Konig?” his father said. He glanced at Xander.
“That ol’ rundown place?” she laughed. “I didn’t know it was for sale. Was there a sign?”
“No, but . . .”
Xander said, “There was a property listing.”
“Really?” She squinted at him as though he had just said his name was Johnny Depp.
“Off the Internet,” his father said. “I think it was your Web site.”
She shook her head. “Not mine. Not if that property was listed. But then we all share the same listing service, so I don’t know . . .”
“Is it for sale?” Dad asked.
She laughed. “Well, my daddy used to say everything is for sale. Let me look into it.” She looked at Xander, then back to Dad. “It’s pretty rundown, you know. Nobody’s lived there for . . . I don’t know, thirty or forty years. Way before my time.” She leaned over her desk—as much as she possibly could—and whispered, “The man who lived there . . .” She looked again at Xander. “Well, I shouldn’t say.”
Dad turned to leave.
Xander knew he had no patience for rumors. Xander had no such qualms. He said, “What about him, the man who used to live there?”
Happy to have Xander’s ear, she said, “They say he killed his wife.”
Xander took a step back. He threw a shocked expression at Dad, who had turned back, interested.
“Schoolteacher. Just disappeared. After the authorities started asking questions, the man and the rest of his family vanished.”
“Family?” Xander said.
“Little boy and girl. I don’t know how old. Sweetest family in the world, if you listen to the old folks around here.”
Xander was stunned. “And nobody knows what happened to them?”
“Some say they high-tailed it to Europe.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Most believe he took them somewhere and killed them. Then took his own life.”
Dad forced a smile. “Just old rumors,” he said. “Thank you for looking into this for us. I’ll be back.” He strode for the door.
Xander’s feet felt like cement. He didn’t like that a house he already thought had problems also had a gruesome history. He knew it shouldn’t have surprised him. Every haunted house in every movie he had ever seen got that way by some tragic event in the past. He wanted to ask the woman what else she knew, but his dad had already pushed through the door. He nodded at her inquisitive look and hustled to catch up.