Keeper of the Castle: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (3 page)

“Who’s that?” I whispered.

“Larry McCall,” said Graham. “County building inspector.”

“Damned thorn in my side, is what he is,” grumbled Pete.

“
Mr
. Nolan,” shouted McCall. “A word with you, if I may.”

“You’re not supposed to drop in unannounced,
Mr
. McCall,” Pete replied.

“I’ll drop in anytime I see fit,” McCall retorted, scowling. “Just because Mr. Elrich considers himself above the law doesn’t mean I’m willing to go along with it. I’ll sign off on the preliminary inspection when I think it appropriate, and not one moment sooner. This project is
not
adequately reinforced, as you know very well.”

“As
you
know very well,” Pete said, “we’ve experienced some setbacks. We’re addressing them as fast as
we can. It just so happens we’ve brought in a new consultant, someone experienced in this sort of building.”

Three sets of male eyes turned to me. Only then did I realize Pete was talking about me.

“I . . . uh, yes. Yes, indeed. I’m here to make sure things are done right and proper. Wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s me.”

There’s an informal code among builders that says inspectors are the enemy. We know full well that a good building inspector can improve public health and safety, foresee problems down the line, and even save lives. I, for one, follow building codes with a religious devotion. Still, when it comes to dealing with inspectors while on the job, builders maintain a united front. If we agree something is wrong, we’ll fix it just as soon as Mr. Snoopy leaves the jobsite.

“Who might you be, may I ask?” Larry McCall demanded.

“This is Mel Turner, the general director of Turner Construction,” Graham said. “She has years of experience with historic renovations in the Bay Area. You’ve no doubt heard of her.”

“Can’t say that I have,” McCall said sourly.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand.

After a moment’s hesitation, McCall shook it. His hand was cold and clammy, and he appeared so agitated I feared his blood pressure might be spiking.

I couldn’t decide whether to talk about my ghost- hunting credentials or to spout some bullpuckey about my (virtually nonexistent) experience with ancient structures. Happily for me, McCall turned his attention back to Pete Nolan.

“I ordered this project shut down,” McCall said to Pete. “You might as well send those men home.”

“It was my understanding Mr. Elrich had that stop-work order lifted,” said Pete.

The tension between the two men flared like a spark held to dry timber, and within seconds they were chest to chest, like a baseball player arguing with the umpire.

“
I’m
the one with the authority here,” said McCall. “Not Ellis Elrich. If you continue building while the project is under review, I will have you arrested for interfering with—”

“You will do no such thing! You will get off this property or I’ll—,” Pete yelled in reply.

“Everybody simmer down,” Graham said, his tone quiet but firm. Stepping between them, he placed a hand on each man’s chest and pushed them apart. “We’re all professionals here. Surely we can work something out.”

“You listen to
me
, McCall,” said Pete, jabbing a finger at the inspector. “I need this job. You hear me? I got a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. You screw this up for me, and by God, you’ll be sorry.”

Dog started barking. I held his collar tight and hushed him.

McCall stared daggers at the foreman, but to his credit appeared to be trying to rein himself in. “I’m going to check out the mortar mix. If you’re still leaving out the latex admix, I’m shutting this site down. I’ve found some remarkable inconsistencies. . . .” He waved his clipboard full of papers. “Let’s just say I don’t care
how
rich and powerful Ellis Elrich is.”

McCall nodded to Graham and me and, after straightening his tie, stalked down the hill toward the arched mouth of the monastery. After a moment, Pete followed, flyaway hair streaming behind him.

Dog let out another yelp, and Graham quieted him by stroking his silky head.

“You sure those two should be left alone together?” I asked, watching as the men disappeared into the darkness beyond the monastery’s entrance. “Maybe you should go with them.”

Graham shook his head. “It’s not like I’m running things here; I’m just the green consultant. I’ve done a couple of presentations for the building department so they understand the new techniques we’re using, but it’s Pete’s show. He’s got to learn to work with the county inspectors or McCall’s right: The site will be shut down until he or Elrich can find a way to accommodate the code.”

This was the way construction worked: You dealt with the personalities and laws of the city or county in which the jobsite was located. Some permit offices were notoriously difficult to work with, others more easygoing. It depended on individual temperaments as well as on whether the town or county wanted to promote a bigger tax base, or was concerned for the environment, or if the mayor had significant ties to real estate developers.

“So what now?” I said.

“I’ll let Elrich know McCall’s back. Maybe he can intervene before those two kill each other. Do me a favor? Do a quick walk-through of the building. Let me know if you see or hear anything that could help us get a handle on whatever’s going on, spirits-wise.”

I smiled. “You really do think I’m a ghost whisperer, don’t you? I hate to disillusion you, but I don’t actually know what I’m doing where ghosts are concerned. I mean, they find me sometimes, but I’m really just flying by the seat of my pants.”

“What about that ghost-busting class you took?”

“I learned a lot, but . . . it was more focused on proving the existence of ghosts than figuring out how to get
rid of them. Or how to keep them from killing you, which is what I wanted to know.”

“You always insist ghosts can’t hurt us.”

“That’s true. Probably.”

As we spoke, I watched burly men moving in and out of the building. At the moment, the day was bright and sunny, and the suspicious activity was mostly a problem after sunset. And there was no denying that I yearned to take a look around the monastery, run my hands along the stones, soak in the atmosphere of the ancient corridors and chambers through which so many souls had passed over the centuries. “All right. I’ll go see if I pick up any vibrations. Maybe see a ghost about a broadsword.”

My phone started ringing. Because I’m a contractor, my phone is a lifeline, allowing me to run simultaneous projects from afar. I answered a plumber’s question about the modifications we’d made to the century-old piping in a Castro neighborhood bed-and-breakfast and then returned an earlier query from my foreman on a small greenhouse we were finishing up in Piedmont.

The second I hung up, the phone beeped again, and I confirmed an order for lumber for a project in the Mission. While I was answering a text message about blown insulation, Dog started barking and wagging his tail in ecstatic ferocity.

This wasn’t a simple yelp. This was the semihysterical bark Dog let out whenever . . .

I looked up to see men running from the cloister, shouting, white-faced with fear. When one slowed to look behind him, two others plowed into him, and all three flailed their arms to keep from falling.

It would have been comical, had they not been clearly terrified.

“What happened?” I called out to the fleeing men. “What is it?”

I had grown up on my father’s construction sites and learned at an early age how many things could go dangerously wrong on a job. Slippery surfaces, wobbly ladders, power tools, heavy materials—they could maim or kill in seconds, without warning. “What happened?” I repeated. Now that they were safe in the open air, they shrugged, chagrined. The men glanced at one another, and a couple of them quite literally kicked at the dirt with their boots.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of red. It had crossed in front of the arched doorway that led into the cloister. By the time I realized what I had seen, it was gone.

Dog yanked free of my grasp and ran into the building.

I took off after him.

“Hey, lady! Don’t . . . Lady, don’t go in there!” I heard someone yell as I paused in the doorway.

I ignored the warning. I wanted my dog. Besides, I knew the biggest impediment to dealing with ghosts was getting freaked-out by the very thought of them. My ghost-busting mentor, Olivier Galopin, had taught me ghosts retained their essential human characteristics. They might be sad, or angry, or tormented. Dead, I’ll grant you; confused, most certainly. But fundamentally human. And as fallible as ever.

I reached up to rub the gold wedding ring that hung on a chain around my neck. My mother had given it to me; she had inherited it from her own mother. It was the closest thing I had to a talisman, and touching it helped keep me centered and focused, connecting me to two generations of strong women.

Finally, I breathed fresh early-morning air deep into my lungs, released it slowly, then walked through the antechamber and into the chapel.

The chapel’s walls were still being built, the space covered by a temporary roof of corrugated metal held up by tall steel beams. Daylight shone through the gap at the top of the walls. Stone pillars supported nothing, arched niches sat empty, and several carved portions of what I imagined were ceiling vaults remained on the ground, in groupings scattered throughout the cavernous space.

Following the sound of Dog’s bark, I crossed the chapel to the rear of the sacristy and ducked into a passageway that led to a series of tiny, cramped chambers. The doorways were low, the walls the beefy thickness of the stones. While the main chapel featured the graceful arches of Gothic style, the farther I went into the heart of the reconstruction, the cruder the structure became.

I stepped into a large antechamber.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man.

Larry McCall sat in a stone niche, looking as unpleasant as he had a few minutes ago. But this time he was still. Silent.

“Mr. McCall?”

When I looked straight at him, he was gone.

Uh-oh.

I
searched my peripheral vision.

McCall sat hunched over. Unmoving, silent—just staring.

Standing perfectly still, I listened for sounds of breathing but heard only the harsh rasp of my own accelerated panting.

My breath hung in the air in foggy puffs. The temperature had plummeted.

And then I heard a woman crying. Weeping. Sobbing as though her heart were breaking. An overwhelming sadness washed over me.

I took another deep breath, clasped the ring at my neck, and walked in the direction of the sobs. Passing through a carved vestibule, I emerged into a round room, reminiscent of a turret but only a single story tall. It was made of golden stones that retained bits and pieces of colored plaster and stood out from the dark gray of the rest of the building. To one side was a huge stack of bags
of mortar, and on the floor were several mixing troughs, trowels, and knives.

Dog cowered against the far wall.

A body lay on the ground. Three-piece suit, white shirt, shiny black shoes.

I could see from where I stood that Larry McCall’s head had been crushed by a sixty-pound bag of mortar, and blood was pooling on the stone floor.

I recoiled in horror, hardly believing that a man I had been speaking to just moments before was now dead. Murdered.

I reached for my phone, dialed 911, but there was no reception.

Something moved. Spooked, I jumped, plastering my back to the wall.

When I looked straight at it, it disappeared. But in my peripheral vision I could see a woman in a long red dress. An old-fashioned gown, festooned with lace and trim. I’m no fashion expert, but I was thinking seventeenth or eighteenth century. She held a long string of beads in her hands.

She was crying. With each sob, I could feel myself sharing in her despair and emptiness. I felt famished, nauseated with a deep, gut-wrenching hunger.

I tried to fight off the sensations, but it was no use. They were overwhelming. I felt wetness on my cheeks, only realizing then that I was crying.

I doubled over, then sank to the floor and sobbed.

It seemed an eternity before Graham found me and led me out of the cloister.

*   *   *

The only positive thing I could say about finding Larry McCall’s body was that we were in Marin County.

That’s not saying much, I know, but at least I didn’t have
to contend with the one-raised-eyebrow, I-think-you-must-somehow-be-involved-in-this stare of Homicide Inspector Annette Crawford, of the San Francisco Police Department. Sooner or later, she would no doubt find out I was involved, and I would have some ’splaining to do, but for the moment, I could pretend to be the kind of person who didn’t stumble over dead bodies with alarming frequency.

It wasn’t hard acting rattled, though, because I wasn’t acting. Besides the visual of the body on the floor, I kept remembering the powerful feelings stirred up by the Lady in Red’s weeping. Even as Graham led me past Larry McCall’s glowering ghost and through the stone chambers, our work boots ringing loudly on the stone and cement floors, I felt a near-debilitating sense of grief and a deep, gnawing hunger. I was famished, sick with hunger and hopelessness.

The sensation finally ebbed when I emerged from the cloister, stepping into the bright sunshine.

I shook my head, as though to dislodge the memory from my brain.

“Just one more time,” Detective Bernardino said, misinterpreting my gesture. “Then we can wrap this up and you can go. Heck of a day, huh?”

“You can say that again.”

Detective Bernardino was about my age and height; pear-shaped, with an olive complexion, he had dark curly hair, and full, sensuous lips that would have been attractive on a different sort of man. “You say the victim and”—he checked his notebook—“this Pete Nolan person were fighting?”

“They were arguing. Not fighting, exactly.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“They were discussing the proper admix for the mortar, but I certainly wouldn’t characterize it as a ‘fight.’”

“And what about this Graham Donovan person?”

“He’s the green consultant on the project.”

“He a hippie type?”

“Um, not really, no. He’s a green consultant type who—”

“Was he fighting with the victim as well?”

“Nobody was actually fighting. I mean, I don’t think McCall was Graham’s favorite person. After all, nobody likes building inspectors. But—”

Bernardino’s beady eyes bored into me. “Nobody likes buildings inspectors?”

“I didn’t mean that, exactly. It’s just . . . In fact, Graham used to be an OSHA inspector, himself. So he understands the need for regulations. Besides, he was with me the whole time, so unless you think we worked together to drop a bag of mortar on that poor man’s head, I—”

Apparently I had opened up a whole new avenue of investigation because Detective Bernardino fixed me with an interested look.
Shut up, Mel,
I told myself.
Shut up, shut up, shut up. The detective doesn’t know you from Adam and has no reason not to think you’re an upstanding citizen who just happens of see a lot of ghosts.

I was starting to miss Annette Crawford.

I began again. “Sorry. I’m not being clear. What I’m trying to say is that Graham—who is an honest, upstanding businessman—was with me the whole time. He had no reason to harm Mr. McCall, no motive, and no opportunity. Neither of us did. That’s what I meant to say.” I sat back and tried to relax.

Detective Bernardino’s gaze rested briefly on my chest. Now I
really
missed Inspector Crawford.

“Okay, so what you’re saying is the DB—’scuze me, that’s cop talk for dead body—was threatening to shut down this job,” Bernardino said. “That about right?”

“It didn’t get that far—”

“So the owner of the project would have plenty of motive. Am I right?”

“I . . . um . . .” I wasn’t sure what to say. Annette Crawford never asked my opinion about whodunit. “I can’t imagine Ellis Elrich would risk everything—and he has a lot—just to rid himself of a pesky building inspector. There are much easier—not to mention less homicidal—ways to take care of something like that.”

Now Detective Bernardino gave me the stink-eye. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to have
that
much of an opinion.

The once-peaceful scene was a whirl of activity, with squad cars, unmarked police cars, the medical examiner’s wagon, and the CSI van littering the meadow, and dozens of police officers and other officials milling about. Could Pete Nolan really have killed Larry McCall? Last I’d seen him, he was following the inspector into the building, but then I’d spent several minutes chatting with Graham and on my phone. For all I knew, Pete had stormed out of the building even as someone else entered, found McCall, and crushed his head with a sixty-pound bag of mortar. But who? That took strength, and a lot of it. I was reasonably strong, and while I could probably drag a bag that size from point A to point B, maybe even carry it if someone handed it to me, there was no way on earth I’d be able to hoist it up, much less throw it at someone. It took a lot of force to move sixty pounds of dead weight.

“What I meant to say is that if Mr. Elrich had a problem with a building inspector, he has more than enough money to bribe someone. Or at the very least, to pay one of his employees to take care of it.”

Sheesh
. I couldn’t believe what was coming out of my mouth. I was implicating people left and right. I was the
opposite of the kind of person you wanted in your foxhole when hell started raining down.

“So you think Ellis Elrich had motive and opportunity.”

“I actually don’t think anything, really. That must be obvious by now.”

“You seem awful nervous.”

“I’m not used to finding . . . to, uh, being around . . . I mean . . .” Could I be any more suspicious? I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
As far as this paunchy fellow is concerned,
I told myself,
you are an innocent bystander. Start acting like one.
“I’m sorry. It was a very unsettling experience.”

“I can imagine,” the detective said, seeming more sympathetic.

“Let me start again. I’m a contractor. I’m not at my best around murder.”

“You think it’s murder?”

Well, yes, Detective,
I thought.
I assume the man did not drop a bagful of mortar on his own head in a rather inventive suicide.

But I was finally getting smart. I kept my mouth shut and shrugged.

“So. A lady contractor.” Bernardino looked me up and down again. I was beginning to think he wasn’t attracted to me as much as he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of a “lady” contractor.

“Actually, we just refer to ourselves as contractors. The ‘lady’ part seems kind of unnecessary. Superfluous, even.”

He nodded, as though he’d finally figured me out. “Gotcha. You’re a libber, then.”

“Sure, that’s me, a lady libber.”

“Huh.” There was a hint of a smile on the detective’s
ruddy face, but it wasn’t particularly friendly. His eyes ran over me one more time, and I lost my patience.

“Do you have any other questions that might help you figure out what happened to poor Larry McCall? Because if not, I’d like to go.”

“Well.
Somebody’s
got her knickers in a twist, doesn’t she?”

“My knickers are none of your—”

Bernardino’s eyes flickered over my shoulder, and he seemed to nod to someone behind me. “Okay, I guess that’ll do for now. Just one more question: Why didn’t you call nine-one-one right away when you found the body?”

“I tried, but my phone didn’t work. The guys say it’s the thickness of the stones, or something, but cell phones don’t work inside the monastery.”

“Huh. This your current address and phone number?”

I nodded.

“All right. You can go,
Ms.
Turner,” he said grandly.

I headed over to where Graham had been speaking with some of the construction crew. He looked grim.

“You okay?”

I nodded.

“Did you tell him about the fight between Nolan and McCall?”

“I may have mentioned it.”

I could see a muscle work in Graham’s jaw as he scanned the hectic scene. It was a tableau I had encountered too often in the last couple of years. It always amazed me how many people were involved in the processing of a crime scene. Especially since I suspected Marin County didn’t see a lot of such crimes. Ellis Elrich’s celebrity status no doubt also guaranteed the full-court press.

“I think I managed to implicate just about everyone in McCall’s death, up to and including myself,” I continued. “Given how often I’ve been through this lately, you’d think I’d be better at dealing with the police. The detective was kind of an ass. As much as Annette Crawford scares me, I’m starting to pine for her.”

Graham gave a humorless chuckle.

“Are you worried about Nolan?”

He nodded. “They were asking a lot of questions about him, and given how many witnesses overheard his argument with McCall . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t look good.”

“Nolan does seem to have a temper.”

“Yes, he does.” Graham inclined his head.

“Still . . . do you really think he could have done it? Practically right in front of everyone? I mean, that would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it?”

“Anger can make people do some pretty stupid things. But I don’t know. . . . I’ve known Pete for years—your dad knows him, too. I’ve never seen him become violent. Not unless . . .”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he’s been drinking.”

“Surely he wasn’t drunk this early in the morning?” Pete Nolan had seemed sober enough to me, but I hardly knew the man and hadn’t been close enough to him to detect the odor of alcohol.

“No, not that I could tell. He got sober a couple of years ago, and as far as I know, he’s been on the wagon since. But he’s got a couple of priors, bar fights from back when he was still drinking. I hope they don’t dig those up and draw some conclusions.”

“I hate to say it, but Detective Bernardino wouldn’t be much of a cop if he didn’t.”

Graham’s eyes were shadowed with worry. I understood what he was feeling—the first time I’d seen a ghost was when my friend Matt stood accused of murder. Matt and I hadn’t been particularly close then, but I remembered the urge to prove his innocence and the frustration of not knowing how. The justice system can be relentless, and there’s nothing quite like having someone look at you as if you’re a killer to throw you off your game.

“It could have been a freak accident,” I suggested. “Maybe Pete was threatening him with the bag of mortar—you know, just to scare him—and it slipped out of his hands. . . .”

“And landed on McCall’s head?” Graham shook his head. “
Dammit
, I should never have let them go in there alone.”

“You couldn’t possibly have foreseen something like this. And you can’t police everybody on a jobsite.”