during the day?”
“Technically, I guess. It was about five in the afternoon. But it gets dark so early now.” He shuddered. “The nights are so long.”
“And the sightings have grown more threatening since?”
Both Pyles nodded. Arden stayed as she was, with her arms folded and a bored look on her face.
“We were attacked in our sleep two weeks ago,” Roger said. “Kymmi was injured. It’s gotten worse since. We don’t shower alone. We don’t go anywhere alone at night, anywhere in the house.”
Chess shuffled through the stack of photographs balanced in her lap until she found the one she wanted. She assumed it was Kym; the image was of a woman’s toned back, covered in long shallow scratches. She held it up. “This was your injury, Mrs. Pyle?”
“Yes. The marks are still there.”
“Show her, Mom.” Arden turned to Chess. “My mom likes to show people her body, don’t you, Mom?”
Kym looked as if she wanted to slap the girl, but she kept her composure. “Do you need to see them, Miss Putnam?”
“If you don’t mind, that would be helpful.”
Kym rose from her seat and turned around, crossing her arms in front of her to grip the hem of her dress. Chess opened her mouth to speak—she hadn’t meant for the woman to do this in front of her child—but it was too late. The dress slipped up, displaying Kym’s silky thong and the lean expanse of her back, interrupted by a bra strap in matching pink.
Trying to behave as if this weren’t creepily inappropriate, Chess stood up to look closer. The scratches had faded. No longer the angry, puffy wounds in the picture, they were thin and scabbed over. “This happened two weeks ago?”
“They didn’t want to heal,” Roger said. “We tried everything. They’ve only just started to get better.”
“Actibac?” Chess asked, unable to resist.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“We get injured a lot, so we keep up on stuff like that.” She resumed her seat, hoping Kym would get the hint and lower her dress, but it took a good thirty seconds before the woman finally let the thin fabric slide back down over her body.
“See, I wish I’d known that, we could have just called the Church and asked them, wouldn’t that have been good, Kymmi?”
Kym gave him a tight smile, but her gaze stayed focused on Chess.
If that bitch thought she could make Chess uncomfortable, she was wrong. Chess allowed herself a tiny eye roll as she looked away and grabbed her Spectrometer. “Okay, why don’t you give me a tour of the house? Show me where the sightings and attacks have taken place? We’ll see what we can find.”
The Church operated a few living museums for the benefit of its employees; Chess especially liked the synagogue one, with instructors wearing those little hats they used to call yarmulkes. The Pyle home reminded her of one of those museums, as intensely and carefully decorated as the living room she’d already been in, and as impersonal.
They trooped up the graceful, winding staircase into a long hall. Windows at each end were blank white holes covered with blinds. Any light they might have let in was rendered useless by the bright electric bulbs at short intervals down the hall’s length. It must have cost a fortune to keep all those bulbs burning.
Ten rooms, including the master suite, Arden’s room, a computer room, library, and separate spa. The rest were guest bedrooms, unique only in their nondescript colors.
Chess’s Spectrometer gave off the occasional blip as she followed the Pyles through each guest room and bathroom, but not frequent or strong enough to give her any information. She took careful note of the layout. If the Pyles weren’t sleeping at night, it would be next to impossible to sneak in after dark and use her Hand of Glory to deepen their sleep so she could investigate. Of course, with all that security, paying an afterdark visit would be difficult whether the Pyles slept or not. She had a feeling their security didn’t. Maybe Merritt…?
No. Even if it were the sort of thing she could ask, she couldn’t ask. Trusting him would be foolish. A year or so of shared history didn’t make them friends.
“Roger,” she asked, interrupting him in the middle of showing her where he’d seen the ghost of a young man coming out of one of the bathrooms, “do you know where the boundaries of the original house stood? The one where the murders took place?”
“As far as we can tell—the foundation had been filled in and the walls demolished before we bought the land—the north walls aligned where our bedroom is. But from the measurement estimates we got from the surveyor, that house ended just after this room.” He indicated the doorway. “We haven’t seen any ghosts in that part of the house, not yet, anyway.”
“Have you been sleeping there?”
The Pyles exchanged glances—even Arden, who hadn’t spoken a word throughout the tour.
“We just haven’t been sleeping at night,” Kym said. “In any of the rooms.”
“Arden stays with a friend some nights,” Roger added. “And Kym and I stay in the living room.”
Chess nodded. She could probably use a warding spell to keep them off the top floor while she investigated up there, but it would make things more difficult. If she could even figure out a way in.
They headed back up the hall toward the master suite, the last room on the right. Chess had expected grandeur. She hadn’t expected the bed to be quite so bargelike, a slab of mattress covered with silk sheets. She definitely hadn’t expected to see hanging over it an enormous painting of a naked Kym. Was this what Arden meant when she said her mother liked to show off her body?
She certainly seemed to be enjoying it. Lying on her side on what looked like a fur rug—how original—with one hand demurely not quite covering the pale curls between her legs and the other thrown back behind her head. A lovely piece of work, Chess had to admit, but still…No wonder Arden was so grumpy, having to compare her own developing figure to the best body money could buy.
That was one problem she herself hadn’t had to deal with. Of course, in her case it would have been an improvement to be worried about how she measured up to the naked women she saw, rather than worrying about what they planned to do to her or make her do to them that time, but…
“The night you were attacked in here,” she said, “what exactly happened?”
“It was dark.” Roger looked as though he might have been coming down a bit; his eyes weren’t quite so glassy. “I don’t remember falling asleep or even waking up. Just…just hearing it, movements in the room, and Kymmi screaming, and I couldn’t seem to feel my hands…and it laughed and screamed.” His eyelids fluttered, blinking back tears. Chess reminded herself the man was a professional actor. “It was terrible.”
Kym herself was silent. Chess made a mental note to search for her private financial records. The file contained statements from several accounts, but they were all joint accounts. If Kym was looking for a good way to end the marriage and get as much money as she could, faking a haunting could be an effective, if roundabout and chancy, way to do it.
It was also a very public way, one that could end Roger Pyle’s career.
She studied the rest of the room in a slow, careful sweep while the Spectrometer beeped quietly from its new holster around her waist. Two dressers, two bedside tables with ornate handles on the bottom doors. Everything in the room had a twin, a mirror image of itself. How imaginative of Kym. If she hadn’t married whom she married, Chess thought, she probably would have been one of those women who hung plaster ducks on the walls and collected painted plates.
The Spectrometer found a steady beat while Chess paced the floor, speeding up by the bed, slowing down by the window, finally beeping faster outside