Keeper of the Castle: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (20 page)

Suddenly, he sat up straight and put a finger to his lips to shush me.

“Have you seen her?” he whispered.

“Her who?” But I knew whom he meant as soon as a frigid cold engulfed me.

“Ssshhh.”
He hushed me again and got up to creep over to the doorway. I joined him.

I couldn’t see anything at first, just a flash of red in my peripheral vision. But then I heard the whispering and weeping as she walked by.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Donnchadh whispered, rapt.

“I . . .” Were Donnchadh and I seeing the same thing? How did ghosts appear to one another? This was a whole new ball game for me. “Sure, yes, she really is lovely.”

This time I was prepared for the sadness and hunger, but they still made me feel weak. Donnchadh, for his part, had an enthralled, amazed expression on his face, and there was a hint of a smile.

“Have you spoken to her?”

If it was possible for a ghost to blush, I do believe
Donnchadh MacPhaidein would have done so. He started sputtering. “I dinnae . . . I . . .”

“Surely she would be happy to meet—” I was about to say “one of her kind,” but stopped myself. What was I, ghost matchmaker? And
were
they the same kind? “Someone like you.”

“She’s a lady. Can’t you see? Gold brocade on her dress . . . She’s like a dream. Wouldn’t be seemly. I’m nae of her class.”

“Oh.” If I thought I was at a loss with the whole ghost thing, now I was dealing with ancient forms of what was proper and not. I wasn’t all that good with twenty-first-century social conventions, forget those from centuries ago. Still, given the circumstances, it seemed like a little New World informality might help things along.

“Have you at least spoken to her?”

He shrugged, looking depressed again. “I’ve tried, but I cannae understand her.”

“You can’t?”

“I believe she’s from the far-off lands.”

“She speaks another language?”

“Aye, I believe so.”

She passed by us, and I shivered from the cold. This was not the chill from the stones; it was a bone-deep freeze, causing my breath to come out in little white puffs. Donnchadh, of course, was impervious. I wondered why he didn’t have the same effect on me.

“She is verra frail, verra hungry.”

“Are you the one who’s been stealing food? And you put it out for her?”

Again, if only a ghost could blush. He shrugged and ducked his head. “There is nourishment. She is verra hungry.”

“Do you know her name, anything else about her?” I
asked. I was going to have to figure out who this woman was and what she had to do with Donnchadh or this monastery.

He shook his head. “But I shall keep her safe. I stake my life upon it.”

I wasn’t convinced the poor guy had a life to put to the stake for anyone anymore, but I got the gist.

*   *   *

Alicia was waiting for me when I walked into the foyer of the main house.

“Did you find the address of the warehouse?” I asked.

“No. I’m sorry. It seems Mr. Libole removed the address on each invoice. I didn’t notice at the time, which was incredibly sloppy of me. I just had no reason to suspect he’d be keeping such secrets. Now I’m making phone calls—I’ll track it down, one way or another,” she said with determination. “I feel terrible that it’s taken me this long.”

“I appreciate your looking,” I said, disappointed but trying not to show it. Alicia was so hard on herself there was no need to heap on more punishment.

“But I was thinking about that other thing you asked me about. The security tapes from that night.”

“Do they show anything?”

“Nothing visual. But like I said, it has that strange voice on it. . . . Anyway, I thought you might want to listen.” She gave me a significant look. “Maybe you’d be able to understand something.”

Our eyes held for a long moment, and she continued. “Brendan told me about your . . . abilities. With spirits. I’m . . . It’s amazing. What an incredible thing to be able to contact people from the other side.”

“I don’t . . .” I was about to deny it, to decry my rotten luck. But then I decided that Alicia was right. I had just
spent much of the afternoon chatting with a man from the fifteenth century, or thereabouts. It hadn’t been the most scintillating conversation I’d ever taken part in, but when I thought about it, it was nothing short of miraculous.

I nodded. “Thanks, Alicia. I’d love to listen to that tape.”

She led me to a small, windowless cubicle in the basement not far from the Discovery Room. It was full of electronic equipment, from computers to surveillance monitors displaying several sections of the monastery, the surrounding woods, and portions of the perimeter fence.

Alicia cued something up on one of the computers and hit play.

The voice was ghostly; no doubt about it. Covered in static and fading in and out, it was a strange, ethereal whispering that rose to weeping and wailing. The same wailing I’d heard when I first found Larry McCall. I didn’t have to understand the words to feel the chills going up and down my spine.

“Is that . . . ? She’s speaking Spanish, isn’t she?”

Alicia’s eyes were huge. “I think so. Or Portuguese, or maybe Italian. It’s really hard to make out.”

“I keep intending to learn Spanish,” I said. “But so far I’m restricted to construction-site vocabulary. Which is quite limited. And somehow I doubt a centuries-old ghost would be speaking about circular saws, which for your information is
sierra circular
.”

Alicia smiled. “She . . . The poor woman sounds like she needs help. Do you . . . do you think we have to help her, somehow?”

I couldn’t help but note that Alicia was now using the pronoun “we.” It felt nice to think that now we were in
this together, that I had an ally here at Elrich’s eccentric estate.

“I think you may be right,” I said. “She needs something. The first step would be to get someone to listen to this and interpret it for us.”

“I’ll copy it to a thumb drive for you.”

There were plenty of guys in my employ whose first language was Spanish. But I didn’t want to ask any of them for help. They were already freaked-out enough, what with the goings-on at the project. Besides, I knew another native Spanish speaker who might be able to help.

Luz
. She was the perfect person. Unfortunately, she hated ghosts. The woman wasn’t scared of anything in this life except ghosts. And clowns. But I was desperate.

Time for her to face one of her fears.

*   *   *

“You want me to do
what
?”

After promising Alicia I’d let her know what I found out, I hopped in my car and zoomed across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco State University, where I cornered Luz in her office.

“Just listen to the recording and see if you can make anything out.”

“Who’s on the recording, Mel?”

“It could be stray radio waves.”

“Uh-huh. What’s behind door number two?”

“It could be a woman saying something in Spanish. Or Portuguese. Or maybe Italian.”

“Is this a ghost?”

“It’s a recording.”

“Of a ghost?”

“Maybe. They’re the security tapes that are supposed to run all the time—there was no visual at all, but some
audio, at the time Larry McCall was killed. Probably the killer erased them on purpose, but it’s just possible it’s something else.”

“Like what?”

“Every time this one ghost comes by, the temperature plummets. Sometimes ghosts drain energy sources, like flashlight batteries and that sort of thing. It’s possible the ghost came by during the murder, or perhaps was even attracted by the violence, somehow, and her energy ruined the recording. Maybe.”

Luz gave me her one-eyebrow-raised stare.

“Just listen and tell me if you can make anything out. For Graham’s sake.”

She glared at me, but settled down to listen.

“She’s praying,” said Luz after a few moments. “I think she’s saying the rosary.”

“That makes sense—I saw her carrying beads.”

“And . . . she’s looking for her room.”

“What room?”

“The presidential suite, of course.” Luz gave me a look. “She doesn’t say.”

“Anything else?”

“She’s . . . hungry. Very hungry. She keeps repeating that:
“Tengo hambre, mucho hambre.”

“Is
that
what she’s saying? This makes a lot more sense. . . . I thought she was saying she had a man.”

“
Hambre
, not
hombre
,” lectured Luz. “This is why pronunciation matters.”

“Yes, Professor.” I actually
had
been confused, but mostly I said it to annoy Luz and keep her tethered to her usual snide sense of humor.

“Wait . . . ,” said Luz. “Play that part again.”

The recording was scratchy and faded in and out. A listener had to be pretty creative to figure out what was
being said; a lot of words could have gone a number of different ways.

“I think . . . she’s a prisoner. Was there a prisoner being kept here?”

“At a monastery? I don’t think a woman would have been kept there.”

“Is there a way to find out for sure? How much do you know about the building?”

“I’ve been reading up, but it was an old building, inhabited for a very long time. Plus there are huge gaps in the records. But I would be surprised to hear of a woman prisoner being kept at a monastery. Wouldn’t you?”

“Seems odd, but what do I know?” she said with a shrug.

“Does she say anything about a man being killed with a bag of mortar? No names or descriptions? Or anything about a treasure?”

She shook her head. “Not that I can make out, but I’ll take it home and listen to the recordings again, see if I can hear anything else.”

“You don’t have to, Luz. You’ve done a lot already, and I know how this freaks you out.”

She shrugged, but seemed agitated, almost angry. “She . . . she’s obviously in need of something. I’ll take them home and listen again, just in case.”

“Thank you.”

She just nodded. Yep, agitated for sure.

All this time, when Luz said she was afraid of ghosts, I thought it was in an abstract “ghosts are profoundly disturbing” kind of way.

Now I wondered: Had Luz experienced something she didn’t want to tell me about? If so, why wouldn’t she have confided in me? But looking at her now, the stubborn tilt of her chin, the determined look in her eyes, I
realized: Luz Cabrera did things on her own time, in her own way. It was that determination that had helped her claw her way out of her working-class neighborhood and through graduate school, that had given her the fortitude with which she approached the vicissitudes of life and all the difficulties that the world of social work threw at her.

I supposed we all had to come to the spirit world in our own fashion.

*   *   *

As I drove back over the Golden Gate Bridge toward Marin, appreciating the picture-perfect late-afternoon sun glinting off the ocean and the almost comically fluffy white clouds over the Marin Headlands, I realized that although Donnchadh’s revelations about his love for the Spanish-speaking Lady in Red were fascinating, they brought me not one step closer to figuring out what was going on. So I stopped by the house, filled Alicia in on the little the recordings had revealed, grabbed the paperwork on the job to go over one more time, and snagged
Keeper of the Castle
.

Then Dog and I headed back to the hospital.

Graham was in that strange, vacant sleep. His eyes were encircled by patches of solid black—not blue like a black eye, but true deep purple-black. It was disconcerting.

I sat by his side and thumbed through all the paperwork associated with the job, but found nothing pertinent. So I brought out the novel.
Keeper of the Castle
really was a darned good read. I was completely absorbed in the travails of the star-crossed couple when my phone rang.

Nurse Ratched glared at me. I apologized and jumped up to take the call out in the corridor.

My stomach fell when I saw the readout: Valerie. My
ex-husband’s wife and my stepson Caleb’s current stepmother. And one of my least favorite people.

Of course, I was also one of
her
less than favorite people, so if she was calling me, it was probably important. I swore under my breath and then answered the phone with all the sincerity I could muster.

“Valerie, what a surprise. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m
exhausted
.” If the woman on the other end of the line had been anyone else, I might have taken this more seriously. After all, Valerie was now pregnant. But since she had always claimed to be exhausted
pre
pregnancy as well, despite having no job and employing both a maid and a gardener, I wasn’t all that sympathetic. Like that of a lot of underemployed wealthy people I’d met in my line of work, Valerie’s exhaustion seemed to expand to fill her vast number of hours of having nothing to do but gaze at her well-massaged navel and complain.