Scent Of Roses Part 21

"Talk to you soon, love."

The endearment rolled over her, making her smile again. Plumping her pillow, she snuggled down under the sheet and went back to sleep.

The alarm went off again at 6:00 a.m. Elizabeth showered and dressed for the day, the ridiculous smile still on her face. It remained there even when she walked through the back door of the office humming some silly tune, and apparently her boss noticed.

"My, you're certainly cheerful today," Michael said. "You must have had an exceptionally good weekend."

She blushed. She couldn't help it.

Michael took in the high color in her cheeks and smiled. "Never mind. I don't think I want to know." He poured her a cup of coffee from the pot in the tiny kitchen that served as lunch room and lounge and handed it over.

"What about you?" Elizabeth doctored the brew with cream, then sat down next to him at the tiny kitchen table. "You and Barbara set a date yet?"

Michael's thick, sandy brows drew slightly together. "Not yet. I don't see any reason to rush."

"Neither do I. Especially if you still have any doubts."

"I don't have any doubts. It's just that marriage is a really big step."

She thought of Brian and what a disaster that had been, then thought of Zach and tried to imagine him in the role of husband but couldn't make the image appear. "A very big step," she agreed, not feeling nearly as chipper as she had when she'd walked through the door. She wasn't quite sure why, since she certainly didn't want to get married again and especially not to Zach.

She spent the morning with clients. There was a gap in her schedule after her first two appointments, which gave her some time before lunch. Grabbing her purse on the way out the door, she headed off to So Cal Edison, the first stop on her list.

"May I help you?" A blond woman wearing an array of heavy imitation gold jewelry and too much makeup sat at the information desk.

"Yes, thank you, I'd appreciate that. My name is Elizabeth Conners. I'm a counselor at the Family Psychology Clinic. I'm helping someone with a research project that involves the history of San Pico, in particular the agricultural history of certain farms in the community. I was hoping you might be able to help me doc.u.ment the chain of residents who may have lived in one of the workers' houses in the compound at Harcourt Farms."

Clearly impressed with the words research and history, the woman's blond eyebrows drew together. The pencil in her hand tapped briskly on the top of the desk.

"Have you tried city hall? They have all the records of homeowners in the area."

"Unfortunately, the house is occupied by tenants. The only records would be phone or utility company records."

"I see." Turning to the computer screen in front of her, the womanJanet was the name on the plastic tag on her right shoulderbegan to type in letters. "Do you have an address for the property?"

"It's 20543 Route 51, San Pico."

The letters on the keyboard clattered. "I don't know how much this will help. Our service records only go back ten years."

Elizabeth felt a stab of disappointment.

"Currently, the gas and electric service is listed in the name of a Miguel Santiago."

"That's right. Can you give me the names of the people who lived in the house before the Santiagos moved in?" Zach had given her the names Mariano Nunez had mentioned. She might as well verify as much as she could.

"I'm not really supposed to do this," Janet said, but continued to page down on the screen. "Looks like the Santiagos just moved in a couple of months ago. Before that, it was someone named Rodriquez. There's a gap here a few years back of about ten months. Looks like the house was empty."

"The house that was there before was torn down and this one built in its place."

The blond woman nodded. "That would explain it. I'll print the list back as far as it goes."

Elizabeth waited as the sheet printed out. Mariano had remembered the tenants in the house back almost thirty years but he didn't remember anyone dying there. She wished the So Cal list went back further.

Elizabeth accepted the printout the woman handed her. "Thank you very much."

Scanning the page, she recognized one of the names on Zach's list, Bob Rodgers, apparently not Hispanic like most of the men who worked on the farm. But then neither was the current foreman, Lester Stiles, and a number of other employees. Aside from Rodgers, the only other occupant of the old wood-framed house in the last ten years was named De La Cruz, also mentioned on Zach's list.

Elizabeth folded the paper, thanked the woman again, and headed out the door.

Next stop, Ma Bell.

Unfortunately, she had even less success there than she had at So Cal Ed. Even though they had been cooperative and their list went back a total of fifteen years, no new names showed up. If there was a ghost, it must be someone who had died before Mariano Nunez arrived at the farm thirty years ago.

Elizabeth thought of Maria and how frightened she was, and by the time she got back to the office, her mood was grim.

Having promised to phone Zach with whatever news she had gleaned, she dialed his office number. As before, his secretary put her call straight through.

Zach picked up the phone and started to smile the moment he heard Elizabeth's voice. "Hi, baby."

"I hate to bother you, Zach. I know you're busy, but I promised I would call."

"You're not bothering me. What'd you find out?"

"Nothing. That's why I hated to call."

"I'm glad you did. I'm up to my a.s.s in alligators here. It's nice to hear a friendly voice."

"What are we going to do, Zach? I feel so sorry for Maria. I wish I knew how to help her, but this ghost thing is way out of my league."

"I know what you mean. But as I was driving back this morningtrying not to think how s.e.xy you looked lying there in bedI got an idea."

"What is it?"

"It occurred to me we haven't tried the obvious. Mariano was fairly certain no one died in the house during the years he's worked on the farmwhich covers about thirty yearsso if there was a death, it probably happened further back in time. San Pico is a pretty small town, even smaller thirty or forty years ago. According to most of the info, ghosts usually result from a violent, or sudden, unexpected death, right?"

"Right."

"Maybe there's something about it in the newspaper."

"Zach, you're a genius! Why didn't we think of this sooner?"

"Like you said, ghost-hunting is kind of uncharted territory."

"I'll go down to the Newspress as soon as I get a chance. I think they keep the old papers on microfiche or something. I'll see what I can dig up."

Zach laughed. "Now there's a pun. I'll go online, try to see if I can find something useful. It's a long shot, but you never know."

"Good idea."

"If we don't find anything in the paper, I'm going to try talking to my father. He doesn't remember anything that happened after his fall, but sometimes his mind can be fairly sharp when he talks about the past."

"You think that's a good idea?"

"To tell you the truth, I think he likes to reminisce about the good ol' days. He would have been a kid in the forties, when the gray house was first built. Maybe he'll remember something about the people who lived there as he grew up."

"It's definitely worth a try. I gotta run. My next client just walked in."

"Let me know if you come up with anything."

"I will."

"I'll see you Friday."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "See you Friday."

Zach hung up and realized his stomach was clenching. He'd been gripping the phone, inwardly praying Liz hadn't changed her mind again and would refuse to see him this weekend. He took a deep breath and forced himself to relax. He had never known a woman who affected him the way Liz did.

He thought about the girl she had been in high school, determinedly independent, refusing to give in to peer pressure like other girls her age. Her mother had died from cancer when she was fifteen, and talk was, it had been a slow, agonizing death. Afterward, her dad's small grocery store had gone straight down-hill and he had finally been forced to file bankruptcy. Liz had gone to work at Marge's Cafe, the place he'd first noticed her.

She was smart. He figured she might have gotten some kind of scholars.h.i.+p, but likely still had to work to put herself through college. He admired her for the grit it must have taken. She had always been the kind of person who cared about others, undoubtedly the reason she had gone into family counseling.

Zach sighed and leaned back in his chair. He was getting in way too deep and he knew it. The little voice in his head was telling him to run before it was too late.

But his heart was saying something else. Something he had never heard before. Take a chance. Just this once.

Just thinking about it made his stomach clench harder.

With her busy schedule, Elizabeth didn't make it down to the San Pico Newspress until Wednesday afternoon. Zach had told her he thought the house had been built some time in the nineteen forties, so she asked the clerk at the counter if she could look at newspapers dating back to that time.

She planned to scan the headlines. In a town the size of San Pico, any sort of violent crime would have been front-page news.

A gray-haired woman, slightly pudgy, wearing a pair of silver reading gla.s.ses on a chain around her neck, stood behind the counter.

"May I help you?"

Elizabeth told her she wanted to look at old newspaper records and the woman motioned for her to come through the low wooden gate into the working area of the office, then led her into a room at the rear of the redbrick building, fairly new since the town had been growing and newspaper readers.h.i.+p along with it.

"Going back the last five years, everything's on computer," the woman said proudly. "We're getting very modern here. Unfortunately, before that, you'll still be dealing with microfiche. The machines are on the table against the wall."

Elizabeth turned in that direction, saw two clunky old microfiche readers with big screens and b.u.t.tons on the side to run the film from reel to reel.

"You know how to run one?"

"I think so, yes. I used machines like these to do research when I was in college."

"The film's in boxes in those metal file drawers." The woman pointed to a tall cabinet that held four, legal-size drawers. "The label tells which years each roll of film covers. Every copy of the paper ever printed is in those files. Let me know if you need any help."

The woman walked away and Elizabeth set to work, starting in the early nineteen forties, looking for any sort of violent crime that might have happened in the house or anywhere on Harcourt Farms. It was a long, tedious job that took the entire afternoon. She was just finis.h.i.+ng up when the clerk returned at closing.

She sighed as she got up from her chair. If she had time, she could come back and check the police blotter, which showed anything reported by the police, but for that many years, the undertaking would be huge.

She was exhausted and discouraged when she left the building. Most of the violence in San Pico seemed to center around family disputes or arguments in local bars, and as far as she could tell, none of them had resulted in a death at Harcourt Farms. She'd looked for suicides and found a number, but none that had happened on the farm.

Later that evening, she phoned Zach at his apartment, figuring he would be home from work by now, but got his answering machine instead. She couldn't help wondering if he was out on a date, then shoved the unwanted thought away. She watched TV for a while and resisted the urge to phone him again before she went to bed.

She didn't want to be disappointed.

It was six o'clock the next morning when the phone on Elizabeth's nightstand began to ring, rousing her from a restless sleep. An instant later, her alarm clock went off. Groggy, she shut off the alarm and fumbled for the phone, immediately recognizing the woman's voice on the other end of the line.

"Maria? Is that you?"

She was crying. Elizabeth couldn't make out her words.

"It's all right, Maria. Just take a deep breath and try to calm down. I want you to start at the beginning and tell me what's wrong."

Maria made a strangled sound into the phone as she gulped back tears. "I saw her. Last night in my bedroom. The little girl. She was there, standing at the foot of my bed." A sob escaped. She dragged in a choking breath of air.

"All right, let's just take this slowly. You're all right now, aren't you? You're feeling all okay?"

"Si, si. I am feeling all right."

"That's good. Was Miguel there with you last night?"

"Si, he was there."

"Did he see the little girl, too?"

"I do not know. I think he saw something. He woke up right after I did. I tried to talk to him after it was over, but he only got angry and walked out of the bedroom. He slept on the sofa, then before the sun came up, he went to work."

"Listen, Maria. I'm coming out there. We'll talk about this and you can tell me what you saw."

"Miguel will not like it if you come."

Elizabeth chewed her lip. She didn't want to cause Maria more trouble. "Did he take the car?"

"No, he is working in the fields."

"Do you feel well enough to drive?"

"Si, I can drive."

"Come down to my office. I'll meet you there in an hour."