Demon Walk Page 6

  She pulled the Google map out of her notebook and spread it next to the plat map. She lined up the road on both maps. The scale was wrong; the Google map had smaller dimensions, but she thought she could make a decent comparison.

  The house was roughly in the same spot.

  “This is current?” Dorothy asked, tapping the Google map.

  “Yes.” Lacey frowned down at the two documents.

  “Then it’s the same place,” Dorothy said. She smiled at Lacey.

  “But there’s a discrepancy,” Lacey said. She pulled out the property records. “The first modern record of sale of the property is 1918, and later records show the house built in that same year. If the house was already there, wouldn’t the records show an earlier year?” She passed the document to Dorothy.

  “Hmm, yes, you’re right. It should. That’s odd.” Dorothy tapped her chin as she pondered that. “All right. Let me go check something else.” She pulled the book back, ready to close it up.

  “Uh, can I possibly get a scan of this?” Lacey asked.

  Dorothy nodded. “Sure. You’ll need to fill out this request form. It takes five business days, but put your email address down and we’ll send it to you.”

  Before passing the form to Lacey, Dorothy jotted the book number and page number in the appropriate place.

  “Great,” Lacey said, taking the paper. “I’ll fill the rest in while you’re looking for the next thing.”

  Dorothy was only gone ten minutes that time. She returned with another book, canvas-covered, and legal-sized. She flipped through this sturdier book with more speed.

  “This is from 1915,” she said. She found the page with the correct coordinates and showed Lacey. “Here’s the house.” Again, the double outline of the structure showed up.

  “Well, something’s wrong,” Lacey said. “Was there any kind of change in how records were recorded around 1918? Some transfer or conversion of records that would have marked the house newly built in 1918 when that wasn’t so?”

  Dorothy frowned. “Not that I’m aware of, and I’ve been here for almost twenty years.” She scanned the drawing more closely, checking all the fine print around the legend and the edges. Finally she flipped the page over and looked at the back.

  “Oh,” she said with dawning understanding. “Look at this. Here’s a note that was added later.” Again she turned the book so Lacey could see.

  House and shed both burned completely down to the ground. –March 5, 1917.

  “Okay,” Lacey said. “This makes sense, then. The house was destroyed, then they built a new one the next year.”

  “Yes,” Dorothy said. “I knew there had to be an answer.” She smiled, pleased they had solved the riddle.

  “Can I get a copy of this drawing, as well?” Lacey asked. “Front and back?”

  “Sure.” Dorothy handed her another request form.

  By the time Lacey left the office, she felt like she had a good handle on the history of the house. The first home was built somewhere between 1888 and 1901. That definitely qualified as old. She realized this didn’t really offer much insight into who Reyes was or when he began haunting the property, but at least she knew there was something there to haunt.

  That evening she called Sam and told him what she’d found.

  “Okay, I think that kinda makes sense,” he said. “When we were there and I was feeling the space around that closet, it felt… mismatched, like it didn’t line up somehow. I’m still not sure what that means, but remember I said it was like the house—and the closet—were built over something that was already there?”

  “Yes,” Lacey said. “So Reyes comes from before. Whatever happened to set him in motion happened before.” She had a thought. “Do you think Pilar’s father might have built the new house to… contain him? Try to keep him buried?” She had an image in her head of the Wicked Witch of the West’s feet sticking out from under the fallen house in The Wizard of Oz.

  “Hmm, possible,” Sam said. “I’m not sure why you’d want to rebuild a house on already haunted ground, but if you did, you probably would try to cover the area over. It didn’t work, obviously.” He paused for a moment, and Lacey knew he was thinking hard. “I need to walk the property again,” he said. “Can you set it up with Carmen?”

  “Sure,” she said. “When?”

  “How about Wednesday? I’ll take the day off from work.”

  “Okay by me, but remember, Carmen works days, too,” Lacey said. “I doubt she’ll be thrilled about having to take time off to translate for us.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, disappointed. “But you know what? She doesn’t need to be there. We got a lot of information from Pilar last time, so I don’t think we’ll need an interpreter this time. But can you have her notify Pilar, so she knows we’re coming?”

  “You got it,” Lacey said. “If need be, I might be able to tease out a little bit from Pilar, but we’ll just see how it goes.”

  “With any luck, I’ll get everything I need from my walk. If I don’t, we’ll get with Carmen another time.”

  “Okay, boss.” Lacey grinned. “I’ll set it up.” She could feel the excitement building.

  They were on the hunt now.

  ~~~

  TEN

  Wednesday morning, Lacey pulled up the dirt driveway in front of Pilar’s house and parked the car. She still wasn’t totally comfortable with leaving her car in Reyes’ sphere of influence, but Carmen had parked there without incident, so…

  Pilar came out the front door to greet them.

  “Hola. Buenos dias,” she called cheerfully.

  “Buenos dias,” Lacey said. “Como esta usted?”

  “Bien, bien,” Pilar said. She linked one arm with Sam for the walk into the house, but then pulled Lacey closer and linked arms with her as well.

  Hey, Lacey thought, maybe I’m not chopped liver anymore.

  Pilar chattered happily as they went inside.

  The house looked much the same. Lacey noticed the smell of herbs seemed stronger, more pungent. She noted some fresh bundles replacing some of the dryer ones she’d seen last time. She fingered one that rested on the table.

  “New herbs,” she said quietly to Sam.

  He nodded. “Keeping him at bay.”

  Pilar immediately began assembling items for tea: cups, spoons, sugar.

  “Can you tell her to wait?” Sam asked Lacey. “I want to walk first.”

  Lacey tapped Pilar on the shoulder. When the old woman turned, Lacey laid her hands over the tea cups. “Later,” she said, racking her brain for the right words. “Otro hora, por favor.”

  Pilar got it. She nodded and smiled.

  “Sam,” Lacey said, pointing to him, “walk.” She made a walking pantomime with her fingers.

  “Si,” Pilar said. She responded in a spate of Spanish, motioning toward the bedroom.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “I walk there.” He pointed to himself, made the walking fingers and pointed toward the door.

  Pilar nodded and led the way. The three of them trooped into the bedroom, then Pilar stood aside to give Sam room. He approached the closet carefully. The padlock was still in the hasp, but unlocked. He pulled it out and handed it to Pilar.

  Lacey held up her phone and started filming.

  She noticed that he wasn’t quite as hesitant as he had been before. He approached the closed door and actually got closer than last time. He held his hands out flat, inches from the door, and tuned in to the sensations.

  Lacey began worrying her bottom lip in her teeth. She glanced over at Pilar. The woman held herself tensely, but didn’t seem overly worried.

  Suddenly Sam reached for the doorknob.

  Lacey gasped.

  He curled his hand around the knob, gingerly at first, then more confidently. He turned the knob slowly.

  The door swung open.

  Lacey angled her phone toward the opening and stared at the screen. Clothes hanging in the dim recess, shoes on the floor. N
o movement.

  Sam stepped into the open doorway.

  Lacey could hardly keep still. Sounds seem to crawl up her throat and demand to be uttered, sounds of caution, of dread, but she clamped her jaws tight to keep them contained. Her eyes darted to Pilar; again, the woman looked watchful, concerned, but not panicky.

  Then Sam was closing the door again. The click of the lock mechanism was a welcome sound. Lacey let out a long, slow breath.

  “We need to go outside,” he said. He caught Pilar’s gaze and pointed toward the front. “Outside,” he said again.

  Pilar nodded, but motioned for Sam to go first. He moved past Lacey, giving her a quick smile. “Come on.”

  They trooped out the front door. Sam turned left and walked around the side of the house. The small window on the outside wall showed where the living room was, and beyond that, a solid wall backing the closet and bedroom.

  Sam walked close to the wall, his soft knee-high moccasins making no mark on the hard earth. He held one hand out to the wall, not touching it, but letting it glide along just inches from the rough adobe surface. As he neared the midsection of the wall, he slowed.

  Lacey watched through her screen as she filmed. He eased to a stop, then stepped out away from the wall. He walked a small semi-circle, around and back, his eyes intent on the ground. Was he looking for something? Lacey couldn’t be sure. With Sam, she never knew if he was looking with his eyes or with his inner senses.

  Suddenly he stopped and crouched on the ground. With one hand, he scratched at the dirt. The dry ground resisted most of his attempt to dig into it, so he stood and pulled a quarter from his pocket. He tried again, and was able to gouge out a hole a couple inches deep and a few inches wide.

  Lacey glanced at Pilar. The woman seemed as lost for an explanation as Lacey was. What was he looking for?

  He scratched at the hole, enlarging it slightly, digging deeper. Most of his hand disappeared into it. Then he stopped, examined the hole and began to dig in earnest.

  “Pilar,” he called, “do you have a shovel?” He made a digging motion.

  Pilar mimicked his pantomime. “Si,” she said. She turned and disappeared back into the house, then returned with a garden trowel.

  Sam frowned at the lightweight tool, but took it. He stabbed the ground with it, knocking loose chunks of hard dirt, then scraped them away. The hole widened, deepened.

  Then the trowel was stopped suddenly with a dull thunk.

  Sam cleared more dirt away. Lacey edged closer, video recording, until she could film over his shoulder. She saw the striations of wood grain, the rough wood the same color as the earth around it.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  Sam looked up at her. “I think,” he said slowly, “it’s stairs.”

  ~~~

  ELEVEN

  “Stairs?” Lacey couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

  “Yeah,” Sam said grimly. “I think there’s a cellar or basement or something here.” He dug a little more with the trowel, then picked up a piece of something gray.

  “What’s that?” Lacey asked.

  Sam held it up in his hand and turned it in the sun. It glittered with a dull gleam. “Obsidian,” he said.

  Pilar’s voice, soft with respect, drifted to them. “Brujo,” she said.

  Sam nodded. “Yes. Witch.”

  Lacey felt light fingers brush her spine. The chill that went through her shook the camera. She stepped back and planted her feet squarely on the ground to give her more stability.

  Sam rose to his feet and whacked dirt from his knees. “We have to dig here,” he told Lacey. “We’ll have to come back with shovels and dig. Remember I said there was a deep well here? That the evil was coming from there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is it. This is where it comes from.”

  Lacey didn’t like this, not one little bit. They were going to dig down to the evil?

  “But you don’t really mean we have to do this?” she asked. “You and me? I mean, can’t we get someone to do that? Call in a contractor, someone with a backhoe?” The idea of the two of them digging, without any more protection than the clothes they wore, gave Lacey the willies.

  Sam was shaking his head. “No. We can’t dig like that. It has to be by hand.” He locked eyes with her. “This is the key, Lacey. We have to do it. We have to get down there.”

  She turned off her phone and shoved it in her pocket. “Okay,” she said reluctantly, “if you say so. Do you want to go get some shovels and start today?”

  He stared down at the ground, then took Lacey’s wrist and checked her watch. “No. I’d rather start early in the morning. Saturday. I’ll see if Ed can help us.” He paused, thinking. “Once we start, we have to keep going and get down there. We can’t stop.” He looked up at Lacey. “Reyes is not going to like this.”

  Lacey swallowed. “Yeah, I’ll bet he won’t,” she said unhappily.

  Using his feet, Sam scraped the loose dirt back into the hole. He handed the trowel back to Pilar.

  “Can you make her understand?” he asked Lacey.

  “Uh, I’m not sure,” she said. She racked her brain for the word dig. It wasn’t there. “Sabado,” she said to Pilar. She pointed to herself and Sam. “Sabado, we come back, dig aqui.” She pantomimed as she spoke.

  “Sabado?” Saturday?

  “Si,” Lacey said. “Okay? We dig.” She pointed to the hole.

  Pilar wrung her hands nervously. “Si.” She smiled briefly, but it was not convincing.

  Sam stepped up to the woman and put his hands on her frail shoulders. “We’re going to fix this,” he said earnestly. “We’re going to get rid of Reyes.”

  Lacey doubted Pilar understood the words—except for Reyes—but she seemed to understand the intent. She nodded. “Si,” she said quietly.

  “Come on.” Sam put his arm around her and led her back to the house.

  ~~~

  TWELVE

  Friday morning, Lacey had some welcome emails waiting for her. She was grateful for something to take her mind off the plans for tomorrow, even if it was all related.

  Sam had called Ed LaRosa, his ex-wife’s husband, and convinced him to help with the digging project. As a bonus, Ed spoke Spanish, so he was able to call Pilar and explain the plan more eloquently than Lacey could. Both Lacey and Sam preferred this to going through Carmen. They weren’t sure how supportive the girl would be, or if she might even try to stop them. Dealing directly with Pilar—as directly as possible—gave them all some needed confidence.

  So when Lacey sat down to her laptop and saw the two emails from the San Juan Capistrano Planning and Zoning Department, she was glad for the slight diversion. She printed out the scans of the old plat drawings and tried again to line them up with the current Google map. It was a struggle to get the scale right; she printed out several attempts before she got the Google map to line up exactly with the old maps using the street as a registration mark. When she finally got the streets to match up perfectly, she then checked the two versions of the houses on the property.

  Pilar’s house was not built in the same footprint as the older house. To Lacey’s eyes, judging by the scale of the maps, the houses overlapped, but Guillermo’s had been situated several feet further south.

  Directly over the stairs that Sam found.

  She sat back in her chair and stared out the slider. So it could have been a cellar. The fact that Sam was correct did not instill comfort.

  What was down there?

  She decided to switch away from the disturbing thoughts to something else. She had two emails from the city’s office of the medical examiner: Humberto’s and Manuel’s death records.

  She opened Humberto’s first. She would expect, his death being so much earlier, that there would be less detail.

  She was right.

  April 18, 1949, Humberto Maria Casales died of an aortic aneurysm. No prior damage to the heart muscle, no thickening of the arteri
es. Hmm, Lacey thought. That’s not a heart attack. An aneurysm was a weak spot in an artery wall that bursts suddenly. Normally drops a victim in an instant and they’re dead before they hit the ground. Attached to the file was a brief sketch of the rupture in the aorta above the heart.

  No mention by the attending physician of any prior treatment for heart-related issues. And back in 1949, she wasn’t sure if anyone had even heard the word cholesterol.

  She opened the file for Manuel. He died October 5, 1958.

  Severely ruptured thoracic aortal aneurysm.

  That word severely gave her pause. She was no doctor, but she would consider any ruptured aneurysm to be pretty damn severe. Funny, though, that both men died of the same cause.

  She scanned the ME’s description. Some prior scarring of the heart muscle. Manuel was being treated for high blood pressure. Must have had a small incident earlier, Lacey guessed. What were those mini-strokes called? TIAs, she thought. So at least here was some physical evidence to support the idea of a heart attack.

  She read further. More physical details about his other organs, all normal. He’d been overweight, but not obese. There was some slight bruising on the skin of his upper chest. Then one sentence leaped out at her.

  Rupture was so forceful that aorta was completely severed.

  Severed? She read the sentence again. Severed, as in torn in half, completely pulled apart. Could an aneurysm do that?

  She looked at the diagram included at the back of the file. The rupture was in the aortal arch. Lacey knew the aorta—the main artery that carried blood from the heart—left the top of the heart and then arched over it 180 degrees before heading down behind the heart to supply the lower half of the body. The diagram showed the break—the rupture—as a dashed line clear across the top of the arch.

  She clicked back to the file on Humberto and brought up that older, cruder diagram. She sized the windows on her computer so she could look at both diagrams side by side.