Her exhaustion hit on the way home, and she dreaded even walking up the steps of the porch to the front door before walking upstairs.
She could have sworn she left the porch light on, but maybe the lightbulb burned out. She sighed. That would figure, of course. She’d take care of it in the morning. Well, afternoon, the way she felt right now.
For now, she used her phone flashlight to make her way up the steps that also needed replacing—her grandpa was lucky he hadn’t gone through the wood—and unlocked the front door. Once inside, she checked the light switch because none of the lights she’d left burning were on, and they’d been shut off.
Strange. Had someone come into the house and turned off the lights? Why would they? Maybe not many people knew she lived here yet, and like Samson, thought they had free rein of the place. When she switched the lights on, the first thing she saw was that the picture of the swamp, the one she’d been ready to brain Samson with, was hanging up on the wall by the entrance.
Wait. Sheknewshe’d left it in the kitchen, intending to get rid of it at some point. But here it was, back on the wall.
Fine, whatever. She lifted the heavy frame off the nail and set it against the wainscoting, facing the wall. Tomorrow she’d see about getting the locks changed. She really needed to go over finances first, because she didn’t think her measly tips would help much, but if she had rent money coming in from the shops in town, that would get her through until she could figure out what her next step was.
But she was too tired to think now. She went upstairs, showered in the feeble stream in the ancient bathroom, and collapsed on her air mattress.
When she staggered downstairs the next morning, driven by hunger, she stopped short at the bottom of the stairs.
The picture was back in its place on the wall.
Four
She feltfoolish calling the sheriff’s department for something so trivial, but if someone was squatting in her house, she wanted to know, and she didn’t want to be the one to go looking. She could have called Samson, she supposed, but he’d already done enough for her last night. More than she could repay him for.
The young deputy, younger than her, probably, tall and lanky, pulled up in front of the house. She watched through the window as he stepped out onto the street and looked up at the house a long time before opening the gate and coming up the walk.
She stepped out on the porch to greet him, and he hesitated halfway to the house.
He lifted his hat just a bit in greeting, enough to give a glimpse of his sandy hair. “I’m Deputy Thibodeaux. You having some trouble, Ms. Benoit?”
“I just...” How to explain herself without seeming like a hysterical female, something she definitely was not? Too late to have second thoughts about his visit now. “Just some odd things going on, and I want to make sure I’m the only person living here. The house has been empty a long time, and, well. I don’t want any unwelcome guests.”
He resumed his stroll, in no hurry. “What kind of odd things?” His brow creased as he mounted the porch, his gaze on her dead serious.
She explained about the light switches, and the picture, as she led the way into the house.
“So you want me to look around and make sure no one is here,” he said, clarifying.
She nodded, and motioned for him to lead the way into the living room, to the left of the entryway. She followed, not too close, but not too far. He walked the perimeter, pushing aside rotted drapes to check the windows, ensuring they were locked. He gave a strangled yelp and jumped back at the last window. She retreated to the doorway, not wanting to look away in case she needed to run to his rescue.
“What is it?” she demanded, pressing her hand to the center of her chest, trying to regulate her breathing.
He pushed the decaying drape farther aside to show her a spider as big as her palm.
The house was yards away from the swamp. She had already done a thorough spider inspection upstairs because she didn’t want to meet any of these guys when she was waking up, but she hadn’t checked down here. She would open the window and relocate this guy later.
After her heart stopped threatening to jump out of her chest.
The deputy circled the room, inspecting the fireplace with his flashlight. “Need to get this cleaned before you use it,” he said.
“I don’t see that happening for a very long time.” If she was here that long.
He stopped at the boarded-up entry to the solarium, and pulled on the edge of the plywood to make sure it wasn’t loose.
“Why’s this boarded up?”
She took a couple of steps into the room. Even though the solarium wasn’t visible now, she could see what it had been like when she was young. “From what Daisy told me, the glass in the solarium had some issues and my grandfather couldn’t afford to fix them, so he just boarded it up.” So many summers she’d sat in that room, reading under the big dual-headed ceiling fan, hiding in there when she was even younger, when her parents came to take her home..
Deputy Thibodeaux gave the back windows a more cursory perusal after his encounter with the spider, and he was about to leave the room altogether, when she motioned to the furniture covered in sheets.
“What about here?”
