A good man who’d had a rough run of things after returning home from a tour in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a topic he talked about often, but Rosie knew he’d done something along the lines of emergency medicine when with the army. Knowing that, she figured the man had seen things that no human should ever have to witness.
His girlfriend of several years had apparently gotten involved with someone else without telling him. It hadn’t been exactly easy for him to adapt to civilian life and finding a job had been even harder. Combined with everything he’d experienced overseas and the life that seemed to have moved on without him once he returned home, he’d had a tough go at things at first.
But Lance was proof of human resilience. He got knocked down several times, but he picked himself up and he here was.
Rosie shifted the strap of her purse as she slowly climbed the steps. “You remember Nikki, right? My friend from the University of Alabama? She’s dating one of the brothers—Gabriel. She was over at their house and I was visiting her,” she said, leaving out most of the details since it wasn’t widely known that Nikki had been involved in what happened with Parker. Not that she didn’t trust Lance. What happened wasn’t her story to tell. “And Devlin was there. He’s bit of a . . . dickhead, so I was arguing with him.”
Lance’s reddish-brown brows lifted. “Okay. First, I cannot believe you were at the de Vincent house, and second, you were arguing with Devlin de Vincent.”
Rosie shrugged like she didn’t care, but it felt forced. As stupid as it sounded because Devlin was a virtual stranger to her, but she did care, because she couldn’t fathom how or why someone would be such an ass for no good reason. Sure, she wasn’t particularly nice to him when he came to her apartment, but he’d acted like he hadn’t known who she was and he’d been rude to her the moment he stepped through her door. The man she’d met in the cemetery, while distant, had been polite. That wasn’t the Devlin she had now seen twice.
It was like the man wanted people to hate him.
“Believe it,” she said, pushing thoughts of Devlin aside as the strap of her purse started to inch down her arm again.
“What was the house like?” he asked, and Rosie knew why he was asking. Like her, Lance knew all about the legends and rumors that surrounded the de Vincent place.
“I didn’t get to see much of it, but there was something super weird.” She told him about the ivy growing everywhere. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
“All over?” Interest filled his brown eyes.
“All over the entire exterior,” she confirmed.
“Hell, that is insane.” Lance scratched his fingers through his messy, curly hair. “So, do you think you can get us access to the house? Or Nikki could?”
Rosie barked out a short laugh. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?” He frowned.
She caught the purse before it slipped right off her arm. Jesus, she hated this purse with its short straps, but damn it, the patchwork fabric was so cute. “Besides the fact that the de Vincents are notoriously private, I’m pretty confident Devlin loathes me.”
“Loathes you? How in the world can anyone hate you?” He rose as she reached the top step and draped his arm over her shoulders. “You’re fucking awesome.”
Rosie laughed softly. “I know.” She didn’t want to spend another moment thinking about Devlin. “So, what’s the update with the Mendez family?”
Sliding his arm off her shoulders, he opened the door for her. “I’ll let Jilly give you the details.”
Jilly was in the narrow living room, on the phone with her girlfriend by the sound of the one-sided hushed argument and her brisk pace in front of the leaning tower of books. Those two argued over everything, from what they were having for dinner to if a residual haunting counted as a real haunting or not, and the only thing they both agreed on was the fact there was no one else for them. They were complete opposites, from the way they looked and dressed, all the way down to Jilly being a vegetarian and Liz considering herself a meat connoisseur.
But Rosie doubted she knew two people who loved each other more than them.
She dropped into the old armchair as Jilly turned, throwing up her free hand. “You know I love you, babe, but I have to get off the phone. Rosie and Lance are here—yes.” Jilly rolled her eyes. “Liz says hi.”
“Hi,” Rosie replied, grinning at Lance. “Is she working?”
“Yes. She’ll be here soon. What?” Jilly whipped around and picked up her glass of wine. “Liz will be here in forty minutes. I’m hanging up.” There was a pause, and her face softened. “You know I miss you. I always miss you, now shut up and get back to work so you can actually get off work on time for once.
“Do you guys want anything to drink? No? Perfect.” Jilly tossed her phone onto the couch, where it bounced off a fluffy chenille throw. “Glad to see you’re still alive, Rosie.”
Rosie arched a brow. “I miss a few phone calls and you guys assume I’m dead?”
“It’s New Orleans.” She tucked short dark strands behind her ear. “Anything is possible.”
“That’s a wee bit of an exaggeration,” Rosie commented.
“Gonna have to agree with Rosie on that.” Lance sat on the arm of her chair.
“Of course you do. You love her.” Jilly smiled sweetly.
Rosie stiffened while Lance flipped her off.
Jilly ignored him. “Anyway, I did speak to Preston Mendez, and like he’d asked of us, I haven’t showed his wife what we caught on camera yet.”
Preston had wanted to vet anything we caught on film before it was showed to his wife, and their team had respected that even though Rosie felt Maureen should know. She got that he didn’t want to upset his wife, but she was eventually going to have to see the film.
“Needless to say, he was quite disturbed by what was caught on film Saturday night,” she continued, taking a drink of her wine. “He didn’t hear the bang, but he did wake up when the baby started crying.”
“Is he going to let us stay the night in there?” Lance asked.
Jilly shook her head. “He’s still talking it over with his wife, but I think they’re going to let us. I’ve only explained a hundred million times to him why we’d be able to gain more evidence if we were able to do an overnight.”
“In the meantime, he should at least let us set up a couple of EVP recorders in the house,” Rosie suggested.
“Agreed. But people are weird when it comes to knowing there’s something in their house recording their conversations. You know this.” Jilly sat on the couch. “But kiddos, it’s time for me to tell you something really weird. Something I discovered while talking to Preston earlier, and it’s either a really bizarre coincidence or it’s fate.”
Rosie glanced at Lance. “Do you have any idea of what she is talking about?”
“Not really.”
“He doesn’t know, but when he came over earlier, he said when he talked to you on the phone, you were with a de Vincent. Is that true?” Jilly was practically trembling with excitement or she’d drunk one of those five-hour energy drinks again.
Her brows knit together as she exhaled heavily. The last person she wanted to think or talk about was a de Vincent. “Yeah, I was, but what does that have to do with anything?”
Jilly laughed. “Here is where things get either super coincidental or get really weird. As you know, the Mendezes didn’t have any activity in their home until they brought the baby home. We of course assumed that was the cause of the activity.”
Rosie nodded slowly. “Yeah. . . .”
“But come to find out, at the same time they introduced the baby to their home, the house next door to them, which had been empty, was sold to a lovely young couple.”
Rosie really had no idea where Jilly was going with this, and she wondered if she’d smoked some pot before they had come over.
“The house next door to them eventually went under an extensive renovation that has lasted months and is still currently undergoing renovation,” Jilly explained, tipping her wineglass at them before placing it on the coffee table. “And what is the number one thing that stirs up ghosts?”