Dead Bolt (18 page)

I nodded. All of us marked our tools, since it was so easy to mix them up on job sites, and these are the necessary items to ply our trade. Plus, they were expensive, and many of us got sentimental about our tools, whether they belonged to our fathers, or fit our palm just right, or reminded us of favorite jobs.

But it was always easy to distinguish my toolbox from everyone else’s, because Caleb had decorated the side of my toolbox when he was eight: MEL TURNER was written in crooked letters with multicolored magic markers. I got a few looks from some of the men, but it warmed my heart every time I saw it.

I left Graham to wander about on his own—the man knew his way around a construction site—and after speaking to Raul again, I checked in with the carpenters and the paint crew repairing the walls and ceilings. In earthquake country, old plaster had a tendency to crack. A lot. Lumpy, erratic lines showed previous repairs through the years, and often wallpaper was put up to mask this. The painters had stripped seven layers in the living room, ten in the kitchen. They had also stripped the carved wood fireplace mantels of several coats of paint, and the metal of paint and rust. Unfortunately, this made the fireplaces too “new-looking,” so after they had been restored and properly sealed, I would bring in faux finishers to place a little fake verdigris on the metal, and darken the recesses of the wood.

On my way upstairs, I gathered bits of the old wallpaper stripped from the walls. Along with progress photos, these mementos would eventually go into the scrapbooks I kept of each house Turner Construction renovated, carrying on my mother’s tradition.

Today I also wanted to investigate the old keys, trying them out systematically on all the doors and lockable cupboards in the house. And starting in the attic I would check for rodent activity—and/or cats—as well, just in case the strange noises I heard overhead yesterday were perfectly natural. All seemed quiet so far, but it was early yet.

From the third-floor hallway, I yanked open the access door to the attic and pulled down the ladder. Hesitating for a moment, I took a deep breath and climbed up into the dark space.

Even with the overhead light on, the attic was dim and shadowy. But there was nothing particularly frightening about it, I assured myself. I crouched down to peer at a crack in the wall near the baseboard.

Nothing but dust and cobwebs . . . and a man’s voice whispering behind me, low and urgent.

Whirling around, I tripped and fell on my butt. “Hello?”

I looked into the shadows and checked my peripheral vision for ghosts. No one was there.

Another whisper. This time it was a woman. Her voice was harsh and anxious, as though answering the man.

The voices were muffled, and seemed to come from behind a paneled wall.

Slowly, I approached, studying how the walls came together—yes, there could be a void there. I looked closer. The “door” was more like a panel cleverly concealed by molding, with no handle. But there was a very old dead bolt. Recessed, it was almost hidden by the molding, and had been covered in spackle.

My heart was pounding, but I refused to be intimidated by age-old whispers and errant shadows. Not so long ago, I helped figure out who had murdered the ghost who kept pestering me. Surely I could do that again. Or at the very least identify what it was these spirits wanted.

As soon as I started feeling around the door, the whispers stopped.

“I heard you,” I said loudly, trying my best to sound confident. “Is there something you want? I can see and hear you a little, but it’s unclear.”

No response.

“Are you talking to me?” said a decidedly human voice. Graham stood on the ladder, poking his head into the attic.

“
Graham
. You scared me!”

“Then I take it you weren’t talking to me,” he said, coming up the rest of the way. “Who
are
you talking to?”

“I . . . uh
 . . .
I thought I heard something.”

“Something?”

I remained mute. I didn’t really want Graham knowing the extent of my visions.

He fixed me with a serious look, halfway between impatient and caring, the one that always made me think of a moment we’d shared in a warm car in the middle of a rainstorm. So many years ago. And which now made me resent Elena-the-party-planner, who otherwise seemed like a perfectly nice woman.

“Have you seen something in this house, Mel?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because you look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” he said with a slight smile.

“Maybe.”

I turned back to the paneled wall, and started to investigate.

Something had been scratched into the wooden header, then covered with paint. It was faint and hard to make out. I grabbed a carpenter’s pencil and a sheet of the paper we put down to protect the floors, and held the paper up to the wood. I rubbed the lead over the paper, as my mother taught me to do with crayons and old headstones at Oakland’s historic Mountain View Cemetery.

Words appeared: MEMENTO MORI
.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You’re the Latin expert.”

“Spanish.”

“Close enough.”

“And I speak a little, but I’m no expert. Memento—as in souvenir? And in Spanish,
morir
means to die.”

“
A souvenir of death?”

I stepped back and looked around, half expecting to see a ghostly presence in my peripheral vision. Was there something in this closet I didn’t want to discover? Or was it like the rest of the house, a possibly harmless little obsession with death . . . and therefore, life?

Surely this room couldn’t have been locked ever since Dominga lived here. With all the people coming and going in this house it must have been opened—and closed—repeatedly over the years. There wouldn’t be, say, an old rum barrel with a skeleton in it? That would be awfully . . .
Pirates of the Caribbean
.

“Mel, you okay?”

“Oh sure, just peachy.” Dead bolt or no, I was getting into that closet. I was scared. But I was also pissed off. Who were these spirits to be putting me through this, and to be pestering a young mother? “I’m going to go get my tools.”

I descended the attic ladder to the third-floor hallway and started down the stairs, noting a water stain near the ceiling. I really needed to take care of the roof sooner rather than lat—

I suddenly heard something overhead—a harsh scraping sound. I glanced up just as a toolbox fell from the upper floor.

Right toward my head.

I
jumped out of the way, throwing myself against the banister. With a sharp
crack
the railing started to give way under my weight. I grabbed the sturdier newel post and watched, my heart in my mouth, as a section of the wooden banister fell, shattering on the stone floor two stories down.

The toolbox landed on the step below me with a crash, gouging out a chunk of wood. Tools and hardware spilled, clattering and clanging.

Graham grabbed me from behind, swearing a blue streak.

I leaned back against the strength of his chest, and felt the rapid beating of his heart. One muscular forearm was wrapped around me, holding me just under my breasts.

A large metal nut made a
whoosh, clink, whoosh
sound as it rolled down several stairs.

I peered upward, but saw nothing but an empty hallway.

There had been no one there. And no toolbox.

“
Mel!
Everything okay?” yelled Raul as he charged up the stairs, slowing as he took in the tools strewn along the stairs, and the toolbox lying facedown. “What happened?”

“I was just coming from the attic. I have no idea where it came from.”

Raul turned over the toolbox. A name was written, clear as day, in magic marker: MEL TURNER
.

“It’s yours,” he said, looking at me curiously.

I nodded.

“Did you leave it on the landing, or the banister?” His voice sounded doubtful. Raul, of all people, knew how safety conscious I was.

I shook my head. “I left it in the entry hall. I was coming down to get it.”

He held my gaze for a long moment, then sat on the stairs. I slid down next to him. Graham remained standing, mute.

“Something strange is going on around here,” Raul said in a low voice.

I nodded.

“You think someone’s sabotaging us?” he continued.

“I don’t know . . . but I don’t think so. Not a normal person, anyway.” I picked up an old adjustable lug wrench and turned it over in my palm, appreciating the familiar weight. Even as a child I used to love the feel of my dad’s cold, heavy tools in my small hands. They seemed magical to me, enabling my dad to create houses from a pile of lumber and stone and cement. “Raul, do you believe in ghosts?”

He made the sign of the cross and muttered something in Spanish that I didn’t catch.

We sat for another minute. The fear receded, leaving anger in its wake.

“I’m going back in the attic,” I said, tools clanking loudly as I gathered them up and put them back into the toolbox.

Raul’s eyes held mine. “Are you sure? Maybe . . . maybe you shouldn’t.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Graham.

“I . . . Thanks. That would be great.” I realized that I liked the idea of Graham having my back, quite literally. “Raul, would you check out the dining room ceiling, make sure the handprints aren’t something normal, like grease prints?”

Raul had been a professional housepainter before becoming my foreman and would recognize grease. Like water stains, grease prints would show up, rather ghostlike, through the finish paint. The only way to be rid of them was to use the proper primer.

It wouldn’t explain how the prints had gotten up there in the first place, but I wanted to eliminate any possibility of a natural cause.

With a heavy sense of foreboding, I readied myself to return to the attic. Up the flight of stairs, down the hall to the ladder. The square access loomed overhead, dark and yawning, like the mouth of a hungry monster. I swallowed, trying to slow my pounding heart. Still, my fear stoked my determination. I started to climb.

The whispers were louder this time, but again stopped when I approached the hidden panel door.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Graham.

He shook his head. “I don’t hear anything.”

Turning back toward the hidden closet, I reached out and laid my palm against the door. Nothing felt out of the ordinary.

“About last night . . .” Graham said. “I wanted to explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain, and this isn’t the time to talk about it anyway,” I said, examining the lock. “We aren’t . . . whatever it is you think we might be but we really aren’t. Hand me that X-ACTO knife, will you?”

I did
not
want to talk about this here, or now. Or possibly ever. Besides, I needed to concentrate.

Graham handed me the knife. Rust and spackle filled the indentations at the top of the lock’s screws, and my screwdriver couldn’t gain purchase. I started scraping.

“I’ve known her for some time—”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“But—”

And then I did the most remarkable thing. I set down the knife, put my fingers in my ears, and started chanting
la la la la la
. Just as I had when I was twelve.

“I’m not listening,” I singsonged.

Graham’s jaw clenched.

“Talk to me, dearest,” he said, his voice gravelly.

“Dearest”? What kind of game was he playing?

I unplugged my ears. “I
said
, I do
not
want to talk about it.”

His dark eyes were velvety black in this light. I noted the strength of his jaw, the stubble sprinkled on his cheeks, the scar bisecting one eyebrow.

“Then we understand one another?” he said.

“We understand nothing. Because there is no ‘we.’ ”

He took a step toward me, and I moved away to keep a distance between us. We started circling one another, our booted feet clomping on the broad wooden planks of the attic. I could have sworn I heard far-off music, a mournful sound like a church hymn. I thought of the old pipe organ sitting in the corner of the basement storage closet, covered in a tarp. It used to have pride of place in the parlor, and looked like it had been there for centuries, though the date on it was 1896.

I felt an overwhelming rush of déjà vu. I had been here before, said these lines before, to a man such as Graham.

“I had to escort the lady to the ball,” Graham said. “And after all, you were there with your ‘husband.’”

He said “husband” with great disdain.

“Why did you fawn all over her? Was it to make me jealous?” I replied. “Charles would never have noticed. You know how he is, thick as molasses in January. Be gone, sir. Your lady friend requires—”

Graham closed the distance between us in a single stride, grabbing me by the upper arms and pulling me to him.

“I can’t stand that he gets to touch you,” he growled. His mouth moved toward mine. His lips hot, demanding . . .

A loud crash resounded from below, and the surreal moment was over.

“Who’s Charles?”

“What ‘ball’?”

We stared at each other. I was shaking more now than when I’d nearly fallen from the stairs a few minutes ago. What had just happened?
What
were we talking about?

More whispering noises came from behind the door. Falling to my knees, I grabbed the screwdriver, determined to open the hidden door. This time the screwdriver gripped, and I applied as much force as I could muster. Slowly, the rusty old screw began to turn.

From below came another sound: a man crying out.

Another shouting, “Call nine-one-one!”

I dropped the screwdriver and leapt to my feet. Graham beat me to the attic ladder and headed down the stairs, taking them two at a time. I followed close on his heels.