The sun was shining. The birds were chirping. And Anjali smelled like Clorox.
She was scrubbing the kitchen sink, and the bleach fumes were making her giddy. So it took her a moment or two to realize someone was knocking on the door.
She wasn’t expecting anyone, but old Mrs. Griego, who lived on the fifth floor, tended to buzz anyone and everyone into the building. Last week she’d buzzed in a member from the Church of Hemp and Hallelujah.
But her visitor wasn’t a churchgoer with a goofy grin. It was Scott Wilder.
Anjali knew this without opening the door.
No, it wasn’t the psychic thing. She looked through the spy hole.
Hands on her hips, she pondered her next move.
“Anjali,” he called out, his voice muffled by the door. “I know you’re in there. Can we talk?”
I’d rather sniff Clorox, she thought.
“I’ll just keep coming back,” he said finally.
She opened the door. “Do I need to turn you down in Hindi? You obviously don’t understand English.”
Scott was wearing the same smile from the day before. “You can say it to me in any language. I don’t take no for an answer. They taught us that in business school.”
Anjali didn’t want to carry on a conversation in the hall. Mrs. Griego probably had her big ear pressed flat against the floorboards. So she stepped aside and waved him in.
She did this with a big show of reluctance.
Still smiling, Scott walked in, a slim leather folder tucked under his arm. She hadn’t noticed his clothes yesterday, but today he was dressed in a light blue Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up and gray wool slacks so fine the material looked like silk.
Anjali was wearing tan Capri pants that made her look shorter than she was and a V-neck tee that had seen better days.
She leaned back against the door and folded her arms. “Welcome to Casa Kumar. I’d ask you to sit but I know you won’t have time for that.”
“What do you want to do with the rest of your life?” Scott asked.
She was caught off guard by the question. “What? I don’t know.” But what really unnerved her was how she’d been asking herself the same thing for days now.
Scott sighed. “Do you know how many people I’ve interviewed in my search to find someone with even an iota of second sight? And here you are, the real thing, and you’re just hiding away, hiding all that talent. You’re like a sundial in the shade.”
The quip on the tip of her tongue melted away. She was at a loss for words.
Which hardly ever happened.
He extracted a disc from the leather folder. “I have something I want you to look at. Where’s your DVD player?”
Sufficiently curious, she gestured toward the entertainment center. If there was one area she splurged on it was movies—Hollywood, Bollywood, and basically everything coming out of Asia. She did a lot of entertaining at home. The guest list was pretty exclusive too.
Just Anjali and her cat.
Scott crouched before the TV set and slipped the DVD in. “I taped this four days ago.” Grabbing the remote, he sat back on the sofa.
Her black cat, Kali, wandered into the room and jumped up next to Scott. He reached out to pet her, stopping when she bared her teeth and hissed.
Anjali shot Kali an approving look and curled up in the recliner, tucking her legs under her. “Let me guess. Footage of a bunch of guys crawling through a haunted house wearing night vision goggles?”
Instead of replying, Scott raised the volume.
The camera panned in on a shabby family room. A woman and two children, a boy and a girl, were seated on a worn and sagging couch. “That’s Lynne Michaels,” Scott said. “And two of her three kids.”
Face drawn, dishwater blond hair pulled back in a tight bun, Lynne cleared her throat. “We’ve had all the downstairs windows looked at. Everything is fixed tight, but the carpet keeps getting wet. It hasn’t rained in over a month. I’ve had the pipes checked and there isn’t a single leak.”
Anjali knew where this was going. “Scott—”
“Wait, just watch a little more, please.”
It was the please that did it. It wasn’t like he was begging. But it was close.
“Fine.” She leaned forward and propped her chin on her hands.
Now the little girl was speaking. “And there’s noises in the walls…like scratching. The lights in my room won’t stay on. It’s always cold inside. I sleep with Mommy.” She nudged her brother. “Tell them.” The little boy looked down at his hands and stayed silent. “He sleeps with us too,” she added.
“We’ve had electricians come in,” Lynne said in a tired voice. “They can’t find anything. The baby is at my mother’s. She can’t take in all of us though.”
Anjali looked at Scott in dismay. “There’s a baby involved? Don’t tell me there’s a baby involved.”
Scott hit the pause button. “The strange occurrences began with the baby monitor. Strange clicks and then whispers began coming through. At first Lynne thought the monitor was picking up noises from the TV or the radio, but the kids would be in bed, nobody was downstairs. She’s had items go missing, dish towels, scissors, pliers, toys.”
“Why don’t they move?”
“She’s a single mom. It took her almost a year to find a house they could afford in a decent area. But she finally put the house up for sale weeks ago. Not a single bid. I’m telling you, anyone who walks into that house feels something’s off.”
Anjali didn’t consider herself a dumb person, but she’d honestly never expected normal people to be affected negatively by ghosts and such. Just her. Not a single mom with three kids.
Still, Anjali didn’t understand how she could possibly help. “What do you want me to do? You already suspect the house is haunted. It’s not like you need me to sense anything.”
Scott leaned forward, his dark gaze serious. “I want you to help me find out what’s in that house and why it’s there. And then I want you to tell it to leave.”