7 Never Haunt a Historian Read Free Page A

phone to make sure the battery was charged. She paused with one shaky finger hovering over the nine.
    “Leigh?”
    She jumped. Cara stood in the doorway. “Do you know if he used the upstairs?”
    “I have no clue,” Leigh answered. “Did you see—”
    Cara disappeared inside the house again.
    Leigh groaned in frustration. She waited another minute, then moved slowly toward the open door. Cara had said Archie wasn’t in the front room, hadn’t she? Leigh crept forward and poked her head inside.
    Her nose was met by the mingling aromas of must, dust, and burned coffee. The room was shabby and cluttered; about what she would expect for a middle-aged bachelor who was generally either puttering outside or away in his pickup. But the floor was a disaster, strewn liberally with the recognizable shreds of cardboard, paper, and plastic that had once sheathed snack crackers, boxed macaroni and cheese, dehydrated potatoes, and instant soup. Someone—and she had a pretty good idea who—had led a full-out assault on Archie’s food pantry.
    Leigh jumped as she heard a banging noise from the back of the house. As if on cue, the culprit in question bounded in from the kitchen and danced around her ankles, his flailing paws scattering the litter in all directions. “Down, Wiley!” Leigh ordered, sensing the animal’s clearly telegraphed intentions of leaping onto her person. The lanky black mutt seemed to be some combination of Labrador and hound, but his attitude was all puppy. “Been a little hungry lately, have you?”
    The dog continued to prance in circles around her as Leigh made her way through the front room to the kitchen. The farmhouse’s tired-looking vinyl floor was scratched, pitted, and buried even deeper in waste than was the front room. A small, box-shaped television sat on the countertop, hooked up to a digital converter box and tuned to a free local channel. The one small table was empty except for a single, quarter-full coffee mug; on the floor beneath lay an overturned glass, one fork, and the shards of a broken breakfast plate. The pantry door hung open, its former contents spilling out into the room like a cornucopia.
    “He’s not in the house,” Cara announced, returning down a narrow staircase and joining Leigh in the kitchen. “I looked in every room.” Her eyes remained fixed on her cousin, even as she raised a practiced knee to forestall Wiley’s attempt at a crotch sniff. “And my guess would be that he either left in a hurry in response to some emergency, or else he didn’t intend to leave at all.”
    Leigh drew in a shuddering breath. “He couldn’t be… you know…”
    “Stuffed somewhere?” Cara finished without a blink. “No. I’ve looked in all the closets, under the beds, everywhere that would be feasible. It’s a small house; the attic door looks like it hasn’t been opened in years. Have you looked around outside? In the cellar?”
    Leigh raised an eyebrow.
    Cara let out a breath. “We’ll have to do it now, then. Did you see this?” She pointed to the kitchen countertop along the far wall. A well-used coffee maker sat with its glass carafe still on the warmer, stained brown and bone dry. The red brew light was on.
    “Whatever was left has all evaporated,” Cara said soberly, wading through the trash to switch the machine off. “We’re lucky it didn’t start a fire.”
    The women stood in silence a moment, looking at each other.
    “I’d guess we’d better look around outside,” Leigh agreed.
    The women proceeded out the back door and into the yard. With Leigh sticking close to—but always behind—her cousin, they systematically checked the farmhouse cellar, the detached garage (which was filled with so much junk it couldn’t possibly house any vehicle larger than a scooter), the skeletal shell of the old barn (which was empty except for several decades’ worth of bat guano), and the tool shed (whose notable lack of tools shed some light on Archie’s