Keeper of the Castle: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (4 page)

“Still, I wish I’d followed them.” Graham blew out a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “I hate to think Pete did this. But it happened so fast, and it’s true he’s always been a hothead. Anyway, I expect we’ll know more after the police review the security tapes.”

“What security tapes?”

“Elrich had the site wired for security.”

“He bugged a monastery?”

“And his home,” Graham said with a shrug. “He has an extensive surveillance system. That’s not unusual these days for folks with lots of money. Factor in Elrich’s personality, and well, it’s safe to say there’s not much going on around here that Elrich doesn’t know about.”

I made a mental note not to do anything on the jobsite that I didn’t want Elrich to watch and possibly share with others—I could only imagine some lame
construction folly going viral—then followed Graham’s gaze to where the man in question was speaking to Detective Bernardino. The police officer appeared to be smiling and nodding obsequiously.

Ellis Elrich was okay-looking, though a bit bland for my taste: Of average height and build, he had light brown hair cut short and was clean shaven. A recent photo on the cover of
Forbes
magazine had indicated he had brown eyes, thin lips, small ears, and a mild expression. Altogether ordinary, though clearly there was a lot going on beneath the surface. One doesn’t build a motivational-speaking empire and become a self-made billionaire without having at least a few unusual qualities—or being unusually ruthless.

“What’s he like, for real?” I asked.

“Elrich?” Graham shrugged. “Pretty much what you’d expect: charming and very much in control. But if you’re asking me whether he had a pain-in-the-ass building inspector killed to get him out of the way, I would find that hard to believe. There are always ways to get around an uncooperative inspector. And even if McCall did somehow pose an insurmountable threat, I imagine Elrich’s methods of dealing with it would be more subtle than murder right here on the worksite, which would be guaranteed to trigger a police investigation.”

We stood in silence for a few moments. It was hard to know what was appropriate after a loss of life, even that of an unpleasant stranger. Not for the first time, I wondered how first responders coped with the awful situations they faced on a daily basis. Go home and hug their kids? Find a favorite bar and hoist a few? Catch a matinee and tamp down the emotions with an extra-large tub of buttery popcorn?

“So what are you up to now?” I asked.

“I should probably check in with Elrich, see if there’s anything I can do. Why don’t you head on back to the city? I’m sure you’ve got plenty of work waiting for you. Should I assume this puts the kibosh on your taking over this project?”

“The money’s tempting and the building is beautiful, but I think I’ll pass.”

“Had enough encounters with dead bodies, have you?”

I nodded. Not to mention beautifully dressed specters who made me break down and cry. I had enough on my plate as it was. And I was not a pretty crier.

T
he next day I found myself fighting the urge to throttle a stubborn building inspector who was holding up a job at a bed-and-breakfast in the Castro because he wanted yet another engineering review of an already overengineered garage addition.

I tried not to think about what had happened yesterday, but the scenario put me in mind of poor Larry McCall.

The truth was, there weren’t a lot of us general contractors who hadn’t wanted to kill an inspector from time to time. Of course, that was where it ended, and a responsible contractor knew it was necessary to find a professional way to work out differences.

It had been unsettling, to say the least, to find a dead body. Especially of someone I had been speaking to only moments before. Such a tragic and violent loss of life. But if I were to be brutally honest, the overwhelming sadness I had felt in that moment, the profound grief,
also had something to do with the weeping figure in the red dress.

Who was she?

Her gown was far too antiquated to have been from the United States. She must have been attached to the imported stones somehow; it was the only explanation. I knew from experience that ghosts hated renovation projects: The disturbance to their surroundings could be profoundly upsetting for them. So what would happen if a ghost’s home was dismantled, stone by stone, shipped overseas, and rebuilt in a new land?

Talk about confusing. And that wasn’t all; Pete Nolan had said workers had been chased out of the cloisters by a man with a broadsword. So maybe there was even more paranormal fun to be had at the Wakefield Retreat Center.

Graham had called last night to tell me that, indeed, the police were holding Pete Nolan as a “person of interest” in McCall’s slaying because the evidence pointed to his guilt. Graham also mentioned he was going to take advantage of the work stoppage to follow up on some new wind-energy technology being developed by a small firm in LA, so he was flying down for a couple of days and would return on Thursday.

After dealing with the stubborn building inspector at the bed-and-breakfast conversion, the next item on my to-do list was to check in with the B and B’s ghosts—the family that had built the house a century ago and who had wanted to remain. Fortunately, the B and B’s owners were happy to have them; they delighted in showing me a recent article about their haunted bed-and-breakfast that had come out in
Haunted Home Quarterly
. My name was mentioned prominently as the builder—and ghost buster—on the job.

I made a mental note to warn my office manager, Stan, who had been fielding an increasing number of query calls more interested in ghosts than in renovation. It was a worrying trend.

Once I settled things in the Castro, I met with Raul at an Art Nouveau house in Bernal Heights. Raul was by far my best foreman, and though I dreaded the day he would move on, I knew it was only a matter of time before he started up his own company. There had been spirits in this house once, too, but after an intervention, they appeared to have departed.

Raul and I went over the double-paned glass we were installing to increase the old home’s energy efficiency. This was tricky. If the existing sashes weren’t thick enough, or the window structure itself wasn’t sturdy, we could end up replacing the original glass as well as remilling the sashes and sills; by the time we were done, there might be nothing left of the original. I understood the energy-saving reasons behind it, but it hurt my heart to dump the wavy old window glass. Historic renovation demanded creativity and compromise.

Even while hashing out these details with Raul, my mind kept wandering back to Pete Nolan. True, I didn’t know him, and he had been upset with Larry McCall, but it was hard to believe that a quick fit of temper could result in such a tragedy. Still, as SFPD inspector Annette Crawford so often reminded me, most murders were the result of exactly this sort of scenario: some stupid disagreement that got out of hand.

Way
out of hand.

Thinking about my last couple of big jobs, I realized that both the Castro B and B and the Bernal Heights house had contained entire spirit families that were trying to tell me something about crimes in the present. At
least in the case of the Wakefield project, I didn’t think the spectral Lady in Red was connected to the building inspector’s death. There was too much separation of time and space; if the spirit had come here with those ancient stones, what possible connection could she have to Larry McCall?

Once I wrapped up my day, I headed to Pacific Heights to pick up my ex-stepson, Caleb, whom I had talked into joining me, my dad, and our friend Stan at Garfield Lumber’s annual barbecue.

“I don’t know why I have to go to this lame barbecue,” grumbled the seventeen-year-old. His chestnut hair fell so low over his forehead it almost covered his near-black eyes, which was probably the idea. I tamped down the urge to brush his hair back so I could see his expression.

“It’s . . . fun,” I said. Which was sort of a lie. “Anyway, it’s tradition.”

“Not the same thing.”

The truth was, Garfield Lumber’s operation was old-school. The nails were kept in the same bins they had been in since 1929; the long wooden counter was scarred and gouged; the slower-selling items on the shelves acquired a thick layer of dust. And if you stepped into Garfield without knowing what you were doing, the staff could be downright rude. There was no Helpful Hardware Man here. “Don’t Waste My Time” was Garfield Lumber’s unofficial motto. If you valued your life and all your body parts, you didn’t mention a certain huge store that catered to the DIY crowd.

On the other hand, once they got to know you, the folks at Garfield would go the extra distance to make sure you had what you needed to get the job done right. In a rapidly growing and ever-changing region like the
Bay Area, Garfield Lumber was untouched by trends and entirely predictable.

I loved it. Probably because it was a place I always had been—and would always be—“Bill’s girl Mel.”

“You have to eat,” I continued. “Right?”

“Stale hot dogs? Oh, yum,” Caleb said in a snarky tone that reminded me a little too much of myself.

There was no denying the barbecue was no great shakes; at Garfield Lumber, even their hot dogs tasted like they’d been around a while. But no one seemed to mind. It was a rare chance to mill around with folks who were normally in a rush, to chill out and knock back a beer or two while swapping jokes, tales of construction mishaps, and the occasional bits of delicious gossip.

“Besides,” I said, “it’s important to Dad. He wants to show you off, introduce you to his friends.”

That got him. Caleb was sullen as all get-out lately, but my dad’s opinion mattered to him.

It had taken a while, but my dad had finally welcomed Caleb into the Turner clan. I had married Caleb’s father, Daniel, when Caleb was five and had been his proud stepmother for eight years. I adored him, and the hardest thing about leaving Daniel had been accepting that I would no longer have any legal ties to Caleb, who felt like my own son. My heartbreak was lessened when I realized that Caleb was as loath to give me up as I was to let him go. Caleb’s mother and I had always gotten along well, and she was happy to allow Caleb to spend time with me when she had to travel for business, especially because Daniel’s new wife was not enthralled with the idea of being a stepmother. Now that Caleb was seventeen—a difficult age—I was in the peculiar position of being able to speak to him not as a parent but as a trusted adult one step removed.

We headed over the Bay Bridge, which connected San Francisco to Oakland and the East Bay. The bridge consisted of two spans that met at Yerba Buena Island, and the eastern section was brand-new, the old one having failed in the last serious earthquake to hit the area. Its single tower soared skyward in a dramatic sweep.

I enjoyed the novelty but held my tongue. The last thing Caleb wanted to talk about was architecture.

“So we’ll pick up Dad and Stan at the house and then head on over to the barbecue. I’ll take you back after, or your dad says you can spend the night if you want.”

“Whatever.”

But his interest was sparked when we turned the corner onto the street where I lived in an old farmhouse with Dad and Stan.

“Who’s
that
?” asked Caleb, nodding at a shiny black stretch limousine parked at the curb.

One didn’t see a lot of limos in my neighborhood. It wasn’t prom season, and unless my dad had become a high-rolling drug dealer while I wasn’t looking . . .

As we pulled up, I recognized Ellis Elrich—flanked by two muscle-bound, unsmiling men, who could only be bodyguards—on the sidewalk, talking to my father and Stan. Dog was bouncing around, barking wildly and ineffectually while wagging his tail, as was his wont.

Dammit
.

When Dad had asked me last night how the trip to Marin had gone, I’d kept it vague, and soon enough his attention was captured by trying to figure out his new smartphone, with one eye on a baseball game.

It wasn’t that I had been keeping Larry McCall’s murder a secret, exactly. But I was a little tired of having to explain why someone died whenever I got near a
construction project. It was downright eerie, when I stopped and thought about it.

And since I hadn’t been planning to sign on to the project anyway, I didn’t see the point.

I climbed out of my Scion with caution.

“Here’s my girl,” said Dad in the kind of booming, cheerful voice he reserved for Very Important Clients. My father wasn’t easily impressed, but he did feel that the client was king and took that to its logical extension.

Dad wasn’t a large man, but even now he retained the muscles of a life lived on a construction site, though he had a prominent beer belly and thinning gray hair. Today he was wearing his usual outfit of worn blue jeans and a formerly white T-shirt.

Ellis Elrich, for his part, was wearing what I was certain must be a very expensive suit.

“Ah, the famous Mel Turner.” Elrich turned his attention to me, and I understood why everyone was so gaga over him. Charisma. The man had it in spades. There was an intensity to his gaze, a keen intelligence that was apparent from the start. Or maybe it was just his aura—now that I was in the ghost business, it was easier for me to imagine that we all emitted energy, some more clearly than others, and that the people around us sensed and reacted to that energy. “May I call you Mel?”

“Of course. But what—”

“And allow me to introduce my driver, Buzz, and this is Andrew, and Omar.”

“Hello,” I said. Buzz nodded in reply, but Andrew and Omar remained silent and stoic, flanking Elrich, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

“And who’s this young man?” Elrich asked.

“I’m Caleb.”

Elrich put out his hand, and to my surprise, Caleb shook it, standing up straight and nodding in a sort of “hail-fellow-well-met stance.

“Nice to meet you, Caleb,” said Elrich. “You look like you play soccer.”

“Yeah, and baseball.” Caleb nodded. “Too short for basketball.”

“Ah, well, soccer’s more poetic, anyway. And remember what Satchel Paige said: ‘Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way.’ There’s always another way.” Elrich gave Caleb a warm smile before turning back to me. “Mel, it is
such
a pleasure. I was so disappointed we weren’t able to talk yesterday.”

“Well . . . it was understandable. Under the circumstances, it would have been awkward to keep the sherry hour going.”

He held my gaze for a long time, then nodded. “In any case, I know this seems sudden, but in fact, I had spoken with Graham previously about whether Turner Construction might take over the Wakefield job, or even work together with Pete Nolan. Now, with what happened yesterday . . .” He trailed off, his expression somber. “Anyway, we’re in a real race with time, and I hear you’ve done joint projects in the past.”

“Only one, and it was a highly unusual project.”

“I think you’ll agree this project is pretty unusual, too,” said Elrich. “Not only will Wakefield serve as a retreat center for the Elrich Method, but it is a pilot project for incorporating green techniques in historical renovations. I understand that’s a particular interest of yours.”

I nodded. Clearly, Graham had been talking. “Why do you call it ‘Wakefield’? Is that the original name of the monastery?”

“Yes, it’s a rough translation from the original Gaelic. But it’s perfect for a retreat center—don’t you think? As ‘waking up to the world . . .’ And speaking of history, Graham mentioned you’re an anthropologist, which is ideal for this project. It combines history, culture, and architecture. It’s an archaeologist’s dream.”

“I’m not really that kind of anthropologist.”

Elrich smiled. “But you are the best in the business, are you not?”

“Among the best. There are other talented folks out there.” But would they do as good a job as my crew? And more to the point, would they be able to cope with spirits on-site?

“I really need your help, Mel. I can’t just let this project grind to a halt. Nolan’s workers don’t deserve to lose their jobs over this. And combined with your own crew, you can employ all those people and accomplish a great reconstruction. Win-win. Not to mention it’ll give Graham Donovan the chance to work on the most exciting project of his career, and be a prototype for green construction in the future. I don’t have to tell you that this is the kind of building that can make history. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I’ll make sure you have the resources you need to do it right.”