Dead Bolt (24 page)

“So where does that leave me?”

“The spirits are making contact with you. As frightening as that may be, you should let them. Get yourself in a safe place emotionally, and the next time they reach out to you, allow it to happen, without fear, if possible. Probably the attic would be the best place for contact.”

My heart sank. “I was hoping you might suggest some sort of exorcism.”

“You would need a priest for that. You can go in armed with holy water and crosses if that’s a comfort to you, but it’s more about your resolution than anything else. There’s no magic elixir. The important thing is to remain resolute in their company. Remember, Mel, this is dangerous. You must protect yourself. Do not allow them to influence you.”

“How do I do that?”

“Bring with you items that remind you of who you are—amulets, symbols. The item itself is not important; it’s what it means to you that matters. If you can, do not go alone. But if you bring someone with you, make sure you can count on that person to remain resolute.”

“How about you?”

“I do not think I am a good candidate. The ghosts did not appear to us just now, did they? Perhaps they do not like me. But they did appear when you were with Katenka.”

I couldn’t imagine Katenka would remain resolute. Then again, I hadn’t shown much resolve, either, when I ran screaming from the basement apartment on the heels of a wet dog a couple of days ago.

“Have they appeared to you with anyone else?”

Graham
. Should I ask? I imagined how I might approach him:
“Hey, Graham, how’s it going? Look, I’d love it if you went back into the attic with me so we could allow angry spirits to manipulate us. Would tomorrow at ten work for you?”

I blew out a long breath. “Assuming I make contact and remain resolute, what do I do then? How do I actually get
rid
of them?”

“Usually they will make this clear to you. Perhaps there are unresolved issues you can help them with. If they don’t, you must demand they leave. Make it clear they no longer belong here. Repeat to yourself, and to them: ‘I am alive and you are not. I belong to this world and you do not.’ Something like that. It is crucial that you take control of the situation.”

My phone rang. I glanced at it: Graham. Had I somehow conjured him by thinking about him? I took the call.

“Standing me up seems to be a habit with you,” Graham said. “A less confident man would start to take it personally.”

I had completely forgotten we were supposed to meet to go over the green designs for the Daleys.

“Oh, Graham, I’m so sorry. I got caught up with something here at Cheshire House.” I glanced at my watch. Quarter after seven. “What’s your schedule like? Can you hang out with my dad for a bit? I’ll leave right now, be there in twenty minutes?”

“Sure. Get here when you can.”

I turned back to Olivier.

“A date?” he asked.

“I forgot I had a meeting. I’m sorry.”

“So no dinner for us?”

“I’m afraid not. Eat well.”

“You, too.
Bon appétit, et bon soir
.”

 

By the time I got home, Graham was sitting with Dad, Stan, and Caleb, beer and soda cans in hand, watching a football game in front of the enormous high-definition television that was Dad’s pride and joy.

“Where you been, babe?” Dad asked, his eyes glued to the television. “You hungry?”

“I’m afraid I lost track of time. Working late on that Union Street job. I’ll grab something to eat in a little while.”

“I thought you were gonna see that French guy tonight,” said Caleb.

“French guy?” Dad finally looked up. “What French guy? No one tells me anything around here.”

“Wait . . .” said Caleb. “Was I not supposed to mention it?”

Stan gave me a wink.

Graham followed me into the room down the hall that served as Turner Construction’s office. Stan kept things tidy here: There were two desks, three filing cabinets, a drafting table, and a big box of blueprints in one corner.

“French guy?” Graham said. “Dare I ask?”

“I told you about him. The ghost tour guy.”

“You’re going out with the
ghost tour
guy?”

“I’m not going out with anybody, not that it’s any of your business.”

“Huh.” He did not look pleased, which pleased me more than it should. “How’s Raul doing?”

“Broken arm, one broken rib. But I called on my way home, and he was in good spirits.”

“Good.”

I sorted through the rolls of blueprints until I found the set for Cheshire House. I laid the heavy roll on the drafting table and spread it out. We flipped through the electrical, plumbing, and basic structural drawings.

“As you know, the only insulation in the attic is old newspapers,” Graham said. “First order of business is to seal the air leaks and blow cellulose into the wall cavities and between the floor joists.”

“Not a problem. We can remove siding if need be, but a lot of those spaces can be accessed through the eaves and crawl spaces.”

“The old windows are awfully drafty. I don’t suppose you’d consider replacing them with double-paned reproductions?”

One of my many pet peeves: replacing perfectly serviceable, gorgeous wood-and-antique-glass windows.

I gave him a look.

He smiled. “Didn’t think so. All right, fifteen double-hung and twenty or so casement windows that leak so much they might as well be wide-open. We’ll need to dismantle and refurbish the wooden parts, seal the leaks, repair the broken channels, retie the lead weights, and then order custom-fitted storm windows.”

“I stumbled across a new resource for reproduction storm windows: Heartwood Lumber. Have you heard of it?”

“I haven’t been over there for years. I’ll check them out and have them give us a quote if it looks like a good product. How about gray-water reclamation?”

“I thought the city didn’t permit that yet.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

“I’m not hearing any of this.”

Gray water is the runoff from washing dishes and clothes, from showers and baths. As long as homeowners use environmentally friendly soap and don’t pour anything toxic down the sink, this water can be filtered and used to irrigate ornamental plants. In drought-prone California, reclaiming water this way is an environmental boon. It also prevents flooding the sewer system with water that doesn’t need to be treated. Though a brilliant idea, gray-water reclamation has few fans at city hall because building permit offices aren’t set up to deal with the newfangled idea. More than a few environmentally conscious homeowners have their homes plumbed to code, and the minute the inspector signs off, they merrily dismantle the plumbing and install gray-water systems.

Everyone knew it happened, but a contractor could lose her license if she participated in this kind of code violation.

“Is this your idea, or Jim’s?”

“Jim liked the idea. I think it’s helping him let go of his dream of wind power. He floated the windmill idea by some of the neighbors and it didn’t go over big.”

“Hey, what was up with Jim, acting like you were making a move on Katenka?”

Graham shrugged.

“He totally lost his cool. It seemed . . . out of character.”

“Katenka gives off something . . . It’s probably just a guy thing. But she’s a beautiful woman, and having her look at another man . . . That sort of thing can drive a husband crazy.”

“Was she looking at you that way?”

“I think it’s the only way she knows to look at a man. It’s a kind of protective reflex, sending out signals that she needs to be taken care of until some schmuck comes along and does.”

“I guess she found that in Jim. I’m curious, though. Doesn’t it seem kind of odd that such a normal, attractive guy would have to go to Russia to get a wife?”

“What, you don’t think it’s true love?”

“He’s educated, intelligent, well-off, and good-looking. You’d think a man like that would have no trouble meeting interested women in a place like San Francisco.”

“You think he’s good-looking?”

“Not really my type, but yeah. Sure. Don’t you?”

“Can’t ask a guy a question like that,” he said with a shrug. “I guess he’s okay.”

I smiled. “He’s not as handsome as some I could name.”

He took a step toward me. “A man who might be more your type, you mean?”

I
nodded. “Matt’s pretty good-looking, for instance.”

Graham paused. The corners of his mouth tightened. “Matt.”

“In a British bad boy sort of way.”

He snorted. “‘Bad’ I’ll grant you. But that ‘boy’ is fifty if he’s a day.”

“Late forties, maybe. And you know what they say: Age is only a number.”

“He’s far too old to party like he does.”

“Why are we talking about Matt again?”

“You brought him up.”

“Okay, let’s get back to the subject. You don’t find it strange that Jim went to Russia for a wife?”

“It’s not like she was a mail-order bride, Mel. They met online and decided to get together. Like thousands of people do these days. She just happened to live in another country.”

“I would think that in the Bay Area, an employed, decent-looking, heterosexual man would have found a suitable woman easily enough. Unless something’s wrong with him.”

“Like what?”

“That’s my point. Maybe he’s . . . odd. Odd in ways that aren’t immediately apparent.”

“Odd in ways that would lead him to murder an old man in cold blood for . . . what? For wanting to buy his house? For yelling about the noise of construction?”

“I haven’t figured out that part yet.”

He started rolling up the blueprints. “You won’t figure out that part, because there
is
no such part. I know you think finding true love is hard for women, but it’s not all that easy for a guy to meet the woman of his dreams, either.” He tapped me on the head, gently, with the roll of blueprints. “Even for those of us who are good-looking and employed.”

“Didn’t take
you
very long,” I muttered as I rooted around in my satchel for the catalog on reproduction storm windows from Heartwood Lumber.

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing,” I said, handing him the catalog. “Emile Blunt spoke Russian. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

“More surprising than strange. Why?”

“Emile never struck me as a linguist.”

“Maybe his mother was Russian. There are a lot of Russians in San Francisco. Have been ever since the gold rush days; and even before then, they traded furs up and down the west coast into Canada. Fort Bragg’s an old Russian outpost. Go out to the Richmond district and you’ll find fresh pierogi in every store. Good stuff.”

“I suppose so. But the last time I spoke to him he acted as though he didn’t know the difference between Ukrainian and Russian, which would be really odd for a Russian speaker, wouldn’t it?” I said. “How about this: Why would someone dig up the yard to disinter cats?”

“Excuse me?”

“The backyard of Cheshire House was dug up to remove the bodies of the cats that had been buried there over the years. But why? Hettie Banks wasn’t charged with killing cats, and the folks at the animal shelter admitted her cats were healthy and well cared for. Hettie was released with a slap on the wrist, once the media flurry died down.”

“You are just a bundle of questions tonight, aren’t you?”

“I find myself in a very weird situation.”

“I don’t think it’s good for your mental health.”

“Thanks so much. Anyway, I have a mental health professional on call.”

He grinned. “Great to see Luz the other night. But I have a few questions of my own. Are we going to keep avoiding talking about what happened up in the attic between you and me?”

“We already talked about it. I think the ghosts were influencing us.”

“You think that was all?”

“That’s not enough? Olivier says they sometimes pick up on latent emotions and exploit them.”

“Olivier Galopin.”

I nodded.

“What sorts of ‘latent’ emotions do you and this French guy have?”

“He didn’t try to kiss me when we were in the attic, if that’s what you mean.”

Graham looked at me for a long time, then came to stand near me. Too near. “In the interest of science and ghost busting, maybe we should try it without ghosts around. See what happens.”

My heartbeat sped up, and I tried to remain casual.

“I doubt Elena would approve.”

Graham chuckled. “Probably not. All right, then. If I can’t have a kiss, may I at least take home a copy of the blueprints?”

“Help yourself,” I said.

As he left, I couldn’t help but think:
He gave up awfully easily
.

 

The next morning I arranged for Steve Gilman, the foreman from Matt’s Vallejo Street job, to spend some of his time at Cheshire House. Luckily, Matt’s job was in its final stages so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. I oriented him to the work in progress and familiarized him with the subcontractors he didn’t already know. I also wanted to introduce him to Katenka, but no one was home in the basement apartment.

I was about to head out to meet Luz across town at the botanica when I looked up to see a large Heartwood Lumber delivery truck pulling into the driveway.

At the wheel was Dave Enrique.

“This is a surprise,” I said as he swung down from the cab.

“I asked to make the delivery. I . . . I wanted to talk to you again.”

“About what?”

He rubbed his arm, then took out a cigarette and lit it.

“You caught me off guard the other day, asking me about this place. I just wanted to say . . . Mrs. Banks would never hurt anyone. She may be eccentric, but she’s good people.”