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Chapter 4

The First Week

FRANK PADILLA’S DAUGHTERS hadn’t said anything during the discussion about the house. They probably didn’t want to cause their dad any more trouble than he had on his hands already. But they were pretty upset about the idea of moving into a house like that.

Finally, the evening after Frank signed the year’s lease on the house, his younger daughter, Beatriz, broke down and told him, “Dad, I’m scared. I’m scared by what people say about that house. I don’t want to move in there.” Beatriz was only 10 years old.

Frank hugged her. “Oh,” he said, “your auntie and your abuelita have got you all upset.” He turned to his older daughter. “What about you, Elena?” he asked.

Elena was 14 and she tried to appear in control. She shrugged. “I guess I’m a little nervous,” she said.

“Let me think about it,” their dad told them, and Frank thought about it all evening.

“Listen,” he told the girls when he woke them up the next morning, “I know your tía and your abuelita have got you all scared about the house we’re going to move into. There’s no reason for it, but I don’t want you to worry. Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll go live in the house by myself for a while, just to make sure there’s nothing wrong. You can stay here. After a week or so, when you see there’s nothing wrong, you can start living there too.”

Frank loaded a bed and a chair into the back of his pickup truck and moved them into the house. He slept in the house for one week. He’d go over to Chino’s house for breakfast each morning and tell his daughters how nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

But later, when Frank got on with the Highway Department, he did admit to other men on his crew that even that first week some strange things happened in the house. Charlie Cook’s dad told him and that’s how the rest of us learned about it.

He said that one time in the middle of the night when he was about half asleep, a cold wind came rushing through the room and blew the blanket right off his bed. He felt the cold air and was awake enough to feel the blanket flying away. When he woke up the rest of the way, he found his blanket in a pile on the floor about six or eight feet below the foot of his bed.

Another time when he woke up in the morning, one of his shoes was missing. He found the shoe in a different room, and he had put both of them right under the edge of the bed when he took them off to go to sleep.

Another time the light turned on in the room all by itself in the middle of the night.

But even when Frank told the other men, he kind of tried to explain all those things away. Maybe he had thrashed around in his sleep and thrown the blanket off the bed. Maybe some animal had gotten in there and dragged his shoe into the other room. Maybe there had been a short in the wiring in the light switch.

Probably the truth was that Frank was very low on money and really wanted to take advantage of the offer of six months without having to pay rent, ghost or no ghost. Or maybe he didn’t want to admit that his mother and his sister were right. Whatever the reason, by the end of the week, he was telling everyone, “There’s nothing wrong with that house.”

And after the whole week had gone by, he said he wanted Elena, his 14-year-old daughter, to start staying there too.