Reach | The House of Voices #1.5

FIVE

FIVE

Must. Clean. Apartment.

As uncomfortable as it made me, I was actually pretty thankful to have Laura behind me. That way, she couldn't see the horrified look on my face when I saw the disaster zone that was her apartment.

Her couch was buried under a pile of clothes and empty take out bags. There were socks on the floor and magazines scattered all over the place. I wasn't a neat freak (no matter what Gomez and Jacques said), but I did firmly believe that if your living space was going to be in chaos, it should at least be organized chaos. This was definitely not organized chaos. More like, chaotic chaos.

"What's wrong?" Laura asked.

Disorderly chaos, even.

"Well," Spade said, giving me an uncomfortable look over his shoulder.  "I think searching through your apartment is going to take a little while longer than we originally assumed."

Frenzied chaos, more like. The apartment looked like the Tasmanian Devil had gone through here. "A little while longer" my ass.

I gave Spade a look. He gave me a dry smile but ignored me otherwise. Rude.

Laura frowned, her bottom lip jutting out slightly. "What're you talking about?" She stalked forward and pushed me aside with a bony shoulder in my side. I resisted the urge to hiss at her.

Spade stepped aside before she could poke him in the hip, and allowed her to walk into the room.

"... It wasn't like this when I left it last evening," she told us. She turned around in a slow circle and let us see the horror in her eyes. "The place was pristine when I left for work. This must have been the ghost."

She whispered that last bit, eyes wide.

When she turned her back to us and started kicking at the mess on her floor, Spade looked at me. Lifting his eyebrows under his bangs meaningfully, he glanced at Laura and then back to me. I understood the question.

Do you buy it?

Good question. For the most part it seemed like she was telling us the truth. The apartment had been neat when she left for work. But there was something about the way she let us see the shock on her face that bugged me. She wasn't lying, but something was off.

I wrinkled my nose and shrugged slowly, not really knowing how to tell Spade my opinion without speaking. He tilted his head to the side, looking very much like a confused attack dog. But then he frowned and nodded once, and then turned to look back at Laura. He'd understood me.

Sweet.

"Ghosts can't move stuff about," I told Laura, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning against the doorjamb. Spade took a hesitant step into the room.

"They can't?"

"Nope. They can be seen and heard, but can't touch a damned thing."

"Is she kidding?"

Spade shook his head. "No, she's right. Ghosts can't touch or manipulate anything on our plane of existence. Poltergeists, perhaps, but not ghosts. This kind of mayhem is beyond their capabilities."

"So you're saying that I'm being stalked by a poltergeist?"

"It is possible."

But, more often than not, poltergeists capable of this much chaos tended to be very malicious. Which meant that, if it really was a poltergeist haunting her, Laura should have been dead by now. Spade didn't say that, though. Even though I could tell he'd been thinking it. It fell under the whole "Don't Scare The Client" rule.