Ghosts, I knew from firsthand experience, made for excellent witnesses. Unfortunately, the timing didn't line up here. "No reason," I said.
Charlie studied me, shrugged for the millionth time, and led me over to the furnace, which was located about halfway down the hallway. Once there, he removed the metal cover, set it down, and grabbed a flashlight from the nearby bathroom.
"I kept the safe in here," he said, and shined the light at an empty space above the furnace. "I just set it in there."
"It wasn't bolted in?"
"No. It's heavy, but so's the furnace. The safe just sat right where the old blower used to be. The thing broke ages ago. That's it right over there."
He pointed the flashlight over to a dome-shaped, metal-encased fan. Surrounding the fan were a lot of old baggies full of random screws and washers. One of the baggies even had baggies in it. Hoarding at its purest.
"Can you give me a minute alone?" I asked.
"Sure...you gonna dust for prints or something?"
"Or something," I said.
He nodded and smiled eagerly, anything to please me. No doubt anything to please anyone. He stepped back through his labyrinthine hallway, contorting his body this way and that, and when he was gone, I went to work.
Chapter Six
First, I scanned the hallway.
I noted a window directly opposite the furnace. The window was covered by both blinds and a curtain. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the blind wasn't really made for this window. It was a half inch too narrow...perhaps just narrow enough for someone to see through.
I next ran my fingers along the dusty curtain, and what struck me immediately was how thin the material was. Thin and see-through. Individually, the blinds were too narrow and the curtains too thin. But together, they should have done the job of keeping away prying eyes.
I thought about that as I scanned his hallway...and spotted the oscillating fan at the end. The fan was turned off, but I had another thought.
I went over to it and turned it on. It faced into what appeared to be Charlie's bedroom. Then it started oscillating, turning briefly toward the hallway. The blast of air from the fan wasn't much. But it was enough. A moment later, the hem of the curtain fluttered up.
I watched three or four revolutions of the fan, and each time, the hem of the curtain fluttered higher and higher. I went back to the window and studied it, and as I studied it, an image began to form in my thoughts.
The image coalesced into that of a young man standing just outside the window. I closed my eyes and the image came into sharper focus. A young man who was watching Charlie. Standing just outside the trailer. Late at night.
Who the person was, I hadn't a clue. Why he happened to be standing just outside the trailer, I didn't know that either. My psychic hits are just that. Hits. Not all-knowing information. Glimpses of information. Snapshots of information. It was up to me to dig deeper, to decipher, to probe, and ultimately to figure out what the hell it all meant.
I went back into the living room, walked around the upper half of a recliner - just the upper half, mind you - and found Charlie scratching his fat little pooch. The dog saw me, promptly piddled on the carpet, and dashed off into the kitchen. Or what should have been a kitchen. In Charlie's world, it was just another storage room.
"Rocko!" he shouted, but Charlie didn't really sound angry. He sounded shocked, if anything. He immediately produced a rag from somewhere on his person and went to work on the pee stain in the carpet. "I don't know what's gotten into him."
"Maybe he smells my sister's cat on me," I said, since it seemed safer to say than: It's probably because I'm a blood-sucking fiend, and dogs, for some reason, can sense us.
"Maybe," said Charlie. "But dogs are going to be dogs, ya know? You can't get mad at them for being dogs."
I smiled at his simple philosophy. I asked, "Do you ever leave Rocko alone?"
"Sometimes, but he likes to ride in the car with me."
"So there are times when your house is completely empty?"
"I suppose so, yeah."
As he cleaned, I asked him how often he checked on the safe. He looked up at me from the floor, a little sweat already appearing on his brow as he worked at the dog pee. "Well, I don't really check it."
"What do you do?"
He looked away, suddenly embarrassed. He stopped scrubbing the floor. His balding head gleamed. "I guess I sometimes look at it."