Demon House: The Haunting of Demler Mansion (Penny Wright Book 3) Read online

  Just a few weeks ago, Nicki had cut her red hair into a bob like the supermodel Linda Evangelista. Nicki had the willowy limbs and angular face to pull off the look. She’d urged Tina to get the same style, but Tina knew her own cheeks were too round. After her haircut, Nicki had posed in front of the mirror in the cabin, puffing out her lips. Hey Teeny, I could be a Bond girl, couldn’t I? she’d asked. A deadly spy. Except too often in those movies, the women were the ones who ended up dying.

  Tina’s eyes stung. She blinked, and forgot for a split second how she’d gotten here—a wet potato in one hand, rusty peeler in the other.

  “They’ll probably want to interview all of us.” Vera hefted another pot onto the stove.

  “What?” Tina looked up. “Interviews? Why?”

  “It’s what they did after the last one. Rosalee. They set up in Diane’s office and made us come in, one by one, talking about how we knew Rose and when we’d last seen her. Whether she’d been upset and stuff like that.”

  The potato had left a coating of slime on Tina’s hand. She gagged. The peeler clattered onto the floor.

  “Hey, careful. Don’t hurt yourself.” Vera walked over and picked up the peeler, setting it on the counter. “If you need to lie down, you can skip lunch duty. I’ll ask Jasmine to fill in. Okay?”

  “I—” Tina was about to protest that she was fine, thinking, Why can’t you just leave me alone? But then she realized how close she was to screaming. If she had to stand in this room cooking like nothing had happened, like Nicki’s body wasn’t lying inside that white tent, she’d lose her mind.

  “Yeah. I don’t feel all that well.”

  Vera pulled Tina into a hug. “We’ll be all right. Long as we stick together. Remember what Diane says? Sometimes new beginnings come in disguise.”

  Tina had never hated Shady Valley more than right at that moment.

  Tina first heard about the camp from her seatmate on the Greyhound Bus. She’d boarded in Denver, thinking vaguely that it would be cool to see the ocean, though she had no specific plans to go as far as California. She’d just wanted to make a point to her mother—If you think I’m going to blend into a new family like some modern reboot of the Brady Bunch, you’ve got another thing coming.

  She couldn’t stand her stepfather or his big house in Highlands Ranch, which was over an hour’s drive from their old apartment in Boulder. Tina’s mom had the guy’s baby—first step in their start-over family. So Tina had cleared out her savings account—built up over the years from gifts from Grandpa and tips earned hostessing at a fancy Italian place on Pearl Street—bought the bus ticket, and set off on a personal summer vacation. She’d just finished her junior year. Next year she’d have to start over at a new school. Such a crock, being the new kid as a senior. Her mom couldn’t have waited a little longer for the wedding?

  Tina had brought along a few rolls of quarters, too, so she could check in with Mom periodically via payphones. Because she wasn’t a monster.

  But then, as she sat on the bus riding down I-70, Tina had looked into her pack and realized that her wallet was gone. Someone must’ve lifted it in the bus terminal. She’d made it less than a single day on her own.

  Her seat mate, a tiny girl who was a sophomore at Metro State, had seen her distress. “I heard about this free camp for girls up north, by a lake. One of my friends stayed there for a couple weeks last summer. Supposed to be free.”

  A camp for girls sounded awful, in theory. Was it a religious situation, where they’d try to pray the sinful independence out of her? Or a boot camp, where she’d have to do pull-ups and sit-ups all day and get screamed at by wannabe drill sergeants?

  “But how would I even get there?” Tina had asked. Unless she hitchhiked.

  “Or you could come to my house in Glenwood Springs.”

  A hot springs vacation sounded nicer than the mystery camp, so Tina got off the bus with her new friend. But after a couple of days, the girl’s parents were eying Tina skeptically, and she knew she needed a longer-term plan. Either that, or slink back to Highlands Ranch to a summer of babysitting her step-siblings, and maybe waitressing at Chili’s.

  But then Tina spotted a pamphlet for the Shady Valley Camp for Girls in the lobby at the public hot springs pool. She picked it up and paged through, studying the pictures and the text.

  A friendly and accepting environment where all are welcome, no questions asked.

  Campers gain work experience and earn spending money while making lifelong friendships.

  The photos showed a stunning valley filled with wildflowers and grasslands. Blue mountains skimmed across the horizon. A wooden dock stretched into a lake with the sun setting behind. The girls looked happy, some with piercings in their eyebrows and ear cartilage, hair and skin of all colors.

  There was some stuff about rules for minors during the school year, waivers signed by guardians, and other things Tina skimmed over. She had just turned eighteen, and it was summer break. No issues there.

  She couldn’t explain it, but something about the place called to her. You just can’t sit still, her mom had said, in the years before she’d gotten remarried and didn’t want Tina around anymore. Her mom didn’t come out and say it, exactly, but Tina could tell. Everybody eventually got tired of her, and whenever she realized it had happened, she left before they could make her go.

  The parents of her college friend—the one from the Greyhound bus—were happy enough to front the fifteen dollars for a bus headed north to Crimson Falls.

  It was the worst mistake Tina had ever made in her life.

  When sounds of lunchtime burst from the windows of the lodge, Tina grabbed her backpack and walked across the meadow toward the main road. As usual, she had no destination yet. No plan. She hadn’t decided yet if she would return. Technically, the new school year had started a few days ago. Her mom hadn’t yet tried to make her come home for senior year. What if Tina didn’t bother to graduate? Would anyone care?

  Nicki had all kinds of plans, like moving to New York to join a modeling agency. Studying French literature in college. So plans didn’t necessarily mean a thing, did they?

  Tina just needed to get away to some new place—where Nicki’s bunk wasn’t right above hers, sitting empty. Someplace that she and Nicki hadn’t shared laughs and poured out their souls.

  Though both of them kept secrets, too. Some things were too shameful to say out loud, not even to your closest friend.

  “My best friend is dead,” she whispered again, because she deserved to feel the anguish of those words. “I let her leave. I yelled at her and she left, and now she’ll never come back.”

  Sweat rolled down her spine, and her skin felt tight after a few minutes of sun. Sometimes, she borrowed Nicki’s Rockies cap when they hiked outside. It had smelled of Coconut Suave shampoo. Where was it now? In the lake, or had the deputies found it with her body?

  There was an ambulance waiting with its engine off. That was kind of sick, wasn’t it? Bringing an ambulance to carry a dead body, as if there was any hope left?

  Police cars were parked all over the road. Tina gave them a wide berth, keeping her head down. They didn’t notice her.

  The bus wasn’t due for another half hour. But she couldn’t stand around here waiting. Tina was sure she could walk to the next stop down the road before it arrived.

  She was about a mile from the ambulance when a silver Buick approached, traveling the opposite way. She had seen the car before. It belonged to Grant Demler, Diane’s younger brother. He was in his twenties, a sheriff’s deputy, but everybody still thought of him as the star basketball forward at Crimson Falls High. The other camp residents stood straighter and stuck their chests out whenever he dropped by the cabins—which was more often than Tina thought necessary. Not that Grant paid any attention to her.

  The Buick slowed, and the window rolled down. Tina kept walking, eyes forward on the straight line of the road.

  “Hey. You need a ride?”

  She stopped and looked over. But it wasn’t Grant driving the car.

  This guy was younger. He had Grant’s sloping nose and dark features, but he’d buzzed his hair close to his scalp. She’d seen him before, just from a distance.

  Edmund. That was his name. Another one of the Demlers. Unlike Grant, he didn’t come around the cabins.

  Except once, Tina recalled. Maybe a week or two after she’d arrived. The day that Grant and a few other guys came to build the wooden storage shed by the lake. That day, Tina definitely remembered, because it ended with Grant’s nose bloodied. Which he’d probably deserved.

  Edmund’s arm draped out of the open window, fingers drumming against the car door. He wasn’t smiling. Perhaps that was what made Tina cross the road to speak to him—the impression that he wasn’t trying to flirt with her.

  “I’m heading into town,” she said, nodding in the direction from which he’d come.

  “Aren’t you from Shady Valley?”

  The rest went unsaid: campers only went into town on weekends. This was a Tuesday. “So? I wanted to leave. Free country.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why’d you want to leave?”

  “Because I do,” she shouted. “It’s none of your business.” She couldn’t help looking back at the line of police vehicles, which were blurry from the heat rising off the asphalt. September was supposed to be fall, wasn’t it? Almost, anyway. Yet the highs were still in the eighties this week. A bead of sweat ran from her hairline into her ear.

  If Edmund was shocked or annoyed that she’d yelled at him, he didn’t show it. “Okay, I’ll drive you. Get in.”

  “You’re heading the wrong way.”

  For the first time, a hint of a smile. “I know how to turn around.”

  Why not? she thought. Better than standing out here in the heat.

  She got in and shut the door, resting her backpack between her feet. But he didn’t pull away. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  “Can we go?” she asked.

  Suddenly Edmund moved toward her, arm caging her in. She gasped and shrank back.

  He grabbed hold of the seatbelt and stretched it across her stomach. The metal connector clicked into place.

  “Safety first, fun second,” he said. It was one of Diane’s dumb little sayings. His eyes met hers. He was still angled toward her, the sleeve of his t-shirt brushing her arm. Her body shook with each beat of her heart.

  Edmund put the Buick into gear, pulled into a U-turn, and sped off toward town.

  Chapter Four

  Penny had heard of Edmund Demler as a cautionary tale—the kind of story traded by her female classmates in high school about the dangers of hitchhiking, not that anyone was so trusting or foolish anymore.

  He wasn’t quite a household name. He was one of those second-tier serial killers, one that fans of true crime podcasts and daytime documentaries knew about. His killings hadn’t been especially gruesome, but there was something about his youth and his unusually striking face—masculine, yet almost more beautiful than handsome—that captured the public’s attention. Some compared him to Ted Bundy and claimed that Demler would’ve been even more prolific if he hadn't died so soon.

  When Anderson Green asked Penny to join his team on this case, Penny had done some research to refresh her memory, and realized she hadn’t known that much about the man at all.

  In the mid-nineties, when Demler was around nineteen, a girl disappeared from the Crimson Falls area. Rosalee. Then another girl the following summer. Nicki. Both had been staying at a camp for troubled teen girls. Later, their bodies were found in the lake not far from Demler Mansion.

  Now, Penny remembered—Tina was the third girl to disappear.

  Anderson strode over to the woman in the cable-knit sweater, offering his hand. “You must be Vera. I’m Anderson Green.”

  “I’m called Vera Miller now, but in my heart, I’ll always be Vera Demler. I wasn’t born into the family, though. I married in.”

  “Your husband passed last year, I heard?” Anderson said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Vera’s eyes brightened behind her red-framed glasses. “Thank you, I appreciate the condolences. Yes, Sylas died last year after battling stomach cancer.”

  “So you own the Demler property?” Zandra asked.

  “I do now. The big house and these cabins. Back in ’95, when Tina was still alive, I just worked here. After what happened with Edmund, the rest of the family wanted nothing more to do with this place.”

  “But not your husband?” Anderson prompted.

  She shook her head like she was shaking off the memories. “Most of the relatives think I should just tear it all down—like my nephew Trey Lofton. You met him earlier, I believe. Trey’s the sheriff now, and he’s making every effort to help me despite his difference of opinion.”

  Penny tapped a finger against her lower lip. Sheriff Lofton hadn’t mentioned that he was part of the Demler family. No wonder he’d been sensitive about privacy.

  “Even if you tore down the house, the ghosts would still remain on the property,” Zandra pointed out. “Quite possibly even angrier than before.”

  “Well I wouldn’t do it, regardless,” Vera said. “My husband Sylas refused to let Edmund destroy everything that this family once stood for, and I feel the same. I’m still hoping to fix the house up one day, once I’ve saved enough money. That was Sylas’s dream, too, before he died.” She tugged her cardigan closed and hugged herself, eyes going distant. “So I’m certainly grateful for your help.”

  Anderson looked to Zandra. Penny studied the silent communication that passed between the two. She couldn’t tell what it meant. But Zandra seemed to get the message, because she nodded.

  “We’re going to head over to Demler Mansion for a preliminary assessment,” Zandra said. “Vera, would you walk with us?”

  “Me?”

  “You could tell us more about the Demler family. I get the sense it has many branches?”

  Vera laughed. “Oh, yes. If you want to understand Crimson Falls, you’ll have to get used to the Demler family history. It permeates everything around here.”

  “Then come with us. As long as you don’t mind walking back in the dark,” Zandra added. “We might be out for a little while.”

  “I don’t usually like going out in the dark, since my night vision isn’t the best. But I’ll bring a lantern. I’d like to do my part.” Vera had straightened, her frown disappearing, which surprised Penny. Given the reputation of Demler Mansion and the recent events, she’d have expected the woman to refuse going too near.

  “Let me just grab my coat and change my shoes on the way,” Vera said. “I live in the cottage on the far end of the property.”

  They walked along a well-worn path to the lake. Woods hemmed them in on the right side of the trail, while the water lay to the left. The sun was just beginning to set, casting the lake and the surrounding land in shadow. Vera and Anderson chatted at the front; Ben was bringing up the rear, carrying a black duffle that Penny guessed held more equipment. Each member of the Mercury team wore a tech vest. The thing felt heavy, and Penny couldn’t help looking down at the constantly shifting digital numbers on her chest.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Zandra said. “The vest is only distracting at first.”

  “But what does it do?”

  “Tracks your bio signs as well as the stats of the area around you—temperature, radiation. There’s an app for your phone when you have cell service or wifi. Your vest also connects at shorter ranges directly to your partner—well, the other members of the team, so they’re notified if you’re in distress. Uses radio frequencies, so you’re fairly free to roam.”

  Inside Demler Mansion? Penny thought. I have no intention of roaming.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Zandra said, as if Penny had voiced her concern out loud. “We’ll be staying together.”

  “Were you…reading my mind just now?” Penny could hear the thoughts of the dead. It had never occurred to her before now that some para-sensitives could sense the thoughts of the living. But why not? Penny’s brother had prophetic dreams. What other strange talents might be out there?

  “I was only paying attention to your body language,” Zandra replied, “but I can read energy. Though I’d prefer you keep that fact to yourself. My talent comes in handy with interviewing witnesses, but not as much if they know.”

  Penny thought of the first moments they’d met, how Zandra had been looking at her so intently.

  “You were reading me earlier though. Right?”

  Zandra gave a slight nod. “I try not to read my colleagues, as professional courtesy, but sometimes it’s out of my control. I hope you’ll understand.”

  “Do I have much choice?” Penny said. But she added a smile. We’re all doing our job, she thought. “What else can you do?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.” Zandra lifted her chin in Vera’s direction. “Come on. We’re still in the middle of an interview, and Anderson’s probably getting antsy. I’d better get on with it.”

  Zandra picked up her pace. “Ms. Miller?” she asked when they caught up. “Or do you prefer Demler?”

  The woman glanced back. “Just Vera, please.”

  “Vera, I’m curious about your cabins. How long has the resort been in operation?”

  “Well, that’s a complicated subject.” They crossed a low bridge, and their footsteps clattered against the wood. “We opened as lodgings about a decade ago, Sylas and I. It’s really a lovely vacation spot, with the lake and the mountain views.” She gestured around them, although the landscape was fast disappearing as the light faded. “But…most of our tourists are here because of the media focus on Edmund. Including those kids last month—Hannah and Kacey and Ross. Poor things. I tell everyone not to go near the house.”