Give Up the Ghost: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (4 page)

“Oh. I see. You’re one of
those
.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A psychic.” His tone was clipped. “As I said, my sister and I had grown apart, but I know she had . . . acquaintances who were as sketchy as her career implied. Is that why you dress in such an absurd fashion?”

I always wore my steel-toed work boots and carried coveralls in my vehicle for when I needed to crawl through dusty attics or basements, but most days I dressed in my friend Stephen’s designs. His clothes were influenced by his childhood growing up in Las Vegas with a showgirl mother, and featured a lot of fringe and spangles. Usually when first meeting with clients I dressed more conservatively, but this morning’s appointment with Andrew Flynt had been set at the last minute so he had to take me as he could get me. And, as Landon had just pointed out, my fashion sense wasn’t all that disconcerting when I was in “ghost talker” mode; people seemed open to esoteric fashion choices from their supernatural connections.

“I dress this way because I can, not that it’s any of your business,” I responded. “And no, I’m not a psychic. I sometimes see dead people, that’s all.”

“That’s . . . all?”

“It’s not by choice, believe me. It just happens. I saw your sister a moment ago. She was smiling and looked . . . happy. She came out of the apartment, paused and touched your face, and then got on the elevator. Going up.”

Landon’s face darkened. “I must say, it is in very poor
taste to make fun of someone who has just suffered a terrible loss. My sister’s body is still warm, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’m not making fun,” I protested. “Honest, I’m not. I’m—”

“Winning friends and influencing people are we, Turner?” Inspector Crawford appeared in the apartment doorway. Without waiting for me to reply, she turned to Landon. “Follow me, please, Mr. Demetrius.”

They disappeared into the apartment. I remained in the hall and watched the forensics team arrive, loaded down with bags of equipment. A few neighbors stuck their heads out of their apartments to check on the hubbub. I did my best to avoid their curious gazes.

I wondered if Chantelle would return. Why had she gotten onto the elevator? Where was she going? Had she ridden the lift all the way up, through the roof, and into the sky, Willy Wonka style?

The most pertinent question at the moment, for me at least, was if Chantelle’s death had anything to do with Crosswinds. A psychic who made enough money to live at the top of Nob Hill might have had plenty of enemies. Certainly Landon had insinuated as much. Not to mention that, at a thousand bucks a pop for a consultation, Chantelle could have had money lying around her apartment that would attract interest. The building had a doorman, but Gabe didn’t seem like a crack security guard. And even if he was, he was only one man and couldn’t be everywhere at once. A determined and skilled thief could easily find a way in. Not to mention a neighbor who needed money for the rent, someone delivering takeout to any of the residents, or a repairman here to fix the plumbing. Chantelle’s untimely death could as easily—no,
more
easily—have been due to being at the wrong place at the wrong time than to anything supernatural.

Probably it had nothing at all to do with Crosswinds and its ghostly weathervane.

“Turner!”

“Here!” I said, snapping-to without thinking. Then I regrouped. “You missed your calling as a drill sergeant, Inspector.”

“Funny,” Annette said, her notebook and pen ready. “Speaking of drills, you know this one by now. Tell me what you saw, what you did, and what you think. Add nothing in, and leave nothing out.”

I told her my very short story, including my earlier visit to the haunted Crosswinds. Her patented cop look suggested she thought I was holding something back. Which, this time at least, I wasn’t. But I didn’t take it personally. I could only imagine how often she was lied to in the course of a single day.

“You know, it’s downright eerie how often I find you at murder scenes,” the Inspector said. “I’m going to assume we’ll find some sort of connection between your latest haunted house and this situation.”

“Well, there
is
a connection—that’s why I’m here. Chantelle did a reading of the haunted house I’ve just been hired to renovate.”

“Her brother says she did readings of a lot of places, has done so for years. But she didn’t get dead until you arrived on the scene.”

“When you put it like that, it really is eerie.”

We both took a moment.

“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “That about it?”

I nodded.

“You can go. I know where to find you for follow-up.”

“Annette, do you have any idea when Chantelle was killed?”

“That’s up to the medical examiner to determine. And it’s none of your business. You be sure to let me
know if anything comes up over at Crosswinds that might be related to this, you hear?”

“Will do.”

She went back into the apartment, and I headed for the elevator.

“Turner.”

I turned around and saw the inspector with Landon Demetrius. He was wiping his fingertips with a wet cloth, presumably to remove fingerprint ink.

“Take this one with you,” Annette said. “Please.”

“I won’t stand for this,” Landon protested. “Surely I can help. My bags—”

“Will stay right where they are. Everything in the apartment is potential evidence until further notice,” Crawford said in her don’t-even-think-of-arguing-with-me voice. “Forensics has to process everything, I’m sorry to say. You’ll get your things back when they’re finished. On behalf of the San Francisco Police Department, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this may cause you, as well as our sincere condolences on the loss of your sister.”

“But surely, Inspector—”

“C’mon, Landon,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride. There’s no use arguing with the SFPD, I guarantee you.”

As I guided Landon toward the elevator, I read the thanks in Annette’s silent nod.

O
n the way down in the elevator, I glanced at my watch: I was due home for dinner in an hour. Landon stumbled next to me and I reached out a hand to steady him. He looked stunned, almost bewildered. Grief was a strange thing. Everyone has their own way of processing it, and none of us knows what that will entail until we’re faced with it.

“Where to?” I asked gently. “Were you . . . Were you planning to stay with your sister?”

“No, I have reservations at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. I’m a visiting professor at the university for the upcoming semester. I’ll be subletting an apartment but can’t move in until Monday. Until then, I’m in the hotel. But I dropped my suitcase and other things at Cheryl’s—I mean, Chantelle’s—apartment. We had planned to spend the evening together, and she was going to take me to the hotel after dinner.”

“Listen, how about you come home with me for dinner?” We arrived at the lobby and the elevator doors slid open to reveal Gabe doing some sort of Tai-Chi.

“Hell of a thing,” he mumbled. “Poor Chantelle. Did you see her?”

I nodded and asked him to retrieve my car, not wanting to engage further in this discussion.

I turned back to Landon. “Give yourself a chance to relax, have a drink and a good meal. I can scare up an extra toothbrush for tonight, and take you back to the hotel.”

“I appreciate the offer, Ms., uh . . .”

“Turner. Call me Mel.”

“Mel, I certainly mean no offense when I say I’m . . . I’m not really in the mood for a romantic dinner.”

I burst out laughing as a discomfited Gabe ran to retrieve my Scion.

“No worries. It’s not a
date
, professor. I’m inviting you to dinner with my dad, in our house in Oakland. Dad’s making his special lasagna.”

“Lasagna?”

“You know—big flat noodles, tomato sauce, lots of cheese bubbling up, special herbs. Dad serves it with a big salad and sourdough garlic bread. . . .” My stomach growled so loud I thought he might hear it. “Don’t you have lasagna in England?”

His eyes slewed over to me again. “Are you Italian?”

“Sure—that’s why my family name is Turner. Seriously, no, I’m a hodgepodge of lots of things, but Italian isn’t one of them. But remember, you’re in the good ol’ U.S. of A. We enjoy all sorts of cuisines: Italian, Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Indian. It’s a veritable smorgasbord.”

“You’ll have to forgive me—I fear I’m a wee bit jet-lagged.”

He swayed again.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

He paused as if to consider. “It’s been a good while,
I’m afraid. When the flight from London landed in New York there was a long wait to get through customs, and I had to run to catch my connection. There was no time to eat.”

“You’re gonna love my dad’s lasagna,” I said. “He’s quite a cook.”

“Really, I’d hate to trouble you. Why don’t you just take me to the hotel, if you would be so kind? I think I need to be alone for a while.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “But if you change your mind on the way over sing out.”

Gabe screeched up to the curb and handed me my keys, and Landon and I climbed into the Scion. I had just started driving when my cell phone rang, so I put it on speakerphone. It was my foreman, Raul, wanting to discuss some rebar reinforcement at the retreat center in Marin.

Landon was looking at me funny as I finished up the call.

“Everything okay?” I asked as we headed for the Oakland Bay Bridge.

He nodded and checked his cell phone. A map on the phone’s screen suggested he was following our route.

“You’ve had quite a shock,” I said. “I’m so sorry about your sister. Have you ever seen a dead body before?”

He gave a humorless laugh and blew a long breath. His gaze shifted from the phone to the panoramic view: the Golden Gate Bridge over our shoulder, Alcatraz Island and Treasure Island on our left, the East Bay and Oakland hills ahead of us. “Nothing like this. It’s all so very . . . unexpected.”

“I understand. Are you British?”

“Pardon?”

“Your inflections are British, but you don’t have an accent.” I was trying to fit all this together with the fact
that he was Chantelle’s brother. “And your name’s Demetrius—that sounds Greek?”

“Greek on my father’s side, but I was born in Britain, then brought to upstate New York when I was still an infant. But I left the States many years ago. Perhaps British culture has had an effect I’m not aware of.”

“I see. What do you teach?”

“Maths.”

“We say math, here. Singular.”

“Right-o.”

I started to laugh. “You can’t help it, can you?”

Landon seemed to relax a bit. “I guess not.”

“I’m surprised to hear your specialty is math. I would have guessed English literature, or perhaps history.”

“While I rather fancy that idea, what makes you think so?”

“You seem very . . . erudite.”

“Wouldn’t a maths—
math
—professor also be erudite?”

“I suppose so. It’s just . . . never mind.”

Traffic feeding onto the Bay Bridge did its usual rush hour stop-and-start tango, but once we made it onto the bridge itself we moved along at a good clip. Twenty minutes later we had arrived at the Claremont, a massive old hotel painted a pure white perched on the side of a hill in Oakland. Because it is located near the University of California many assume the Claremont is in Berkeley, but it is in fact a historic Oakland gem.

I pulled up in front of the main hotel entrance and turned off the engine, waving away a doorman who came to open my door.

“Do you want me to come in with you, help you get settled?” I cringed as the words left my mouth. Landon wasn’t a young foreign exchange student; he was a grown-up college professor.

“I’ll be quite fine,” he said as he got out of the car. “Thank you for the ride.”

“Landon,”
I called, and he ducked his head back in the open door. “If I were you I would stay away from room four twenty-two. Just in case.”

“And why might that be?”

“Supposedly a ghost of a little girl hangs out in that room.”

He looked incredulous. “And you know this how, exactly?”

I shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of the haunting, but I hear things. Might make it hard to sleep, is all I’m saying. You’ve already had one shock today.”

“Thank you, Ms. Turner. I shall take your words to heart. It has been . . . very interesting to meet you.”

And with that, Professor Landon Demetrius III hurried into the hotel.

•   •   •

I headed across town to Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, where I live with my father, my ex-stepson Caleb, and our old family friend Stan Tomassi in a big old farmhouse. It was by far the largest home on the block, and at one time was surrounded by orchards until, one by one, the fruit trees were forced to yield to developers. Small houses sprung up, closely packed together. It was the kind of neighborhood, rare in urban areas, where working people raised their families and knew their neighbors. On weekends Fruitvale’s old men—including my father, Bill Turner, the founder and erstwhile head of Turner Construction—hung out in their driveways fixing old cars and “shooting the breeze” with whoever passed by, while packs of kids played games in the street. People here hung their laundry out on clotheslines, mowed their own
lawns—such as they were, given California’s drought—and looked after their own kids.

Fruitvale was a stark contrast to the neighborhoods Turner Construction typically worked in, where the only people visible on the street were the ones who couldn’t afford to live there: the gardeners, the nannies, and the housecleaners.

Living with my father hadn’t exactly been part of my life’s plan, and moving out remained one item on my very long to-do list. But there was no denying that this neighborhood, and this old farmhouse, welcomed me home with the warmth and comfort of a hug. Never was this more appreciated than on the days I stumbled upon dead bodies.

And most welcoming of all was the shaggy silhouette of Dog’s head in the living room window. I could hear him barking through the glass, which was his way of greeting his loved ones.

Dog was a stray I picked up from a jobsite, and in an effort not to further complicate my life I had refused to name him. As though that would help keep him from becoming a member of the family. That ship had long ago sailed, and Dad had decided it was high time we give Dog a real name. I had argued that since he now answered to Dog, and had a profoundly limited vocabulary—
cookie, walk, Dog
—it would be best not to confuse the poor canine any more than he already was.

So Dad alighted on the name Doug. “It’s close enough he won’t get confused.”

And in this Dad was right. The only ones confused by the name change were the humans: None of us could get used to the new name, so we started to say “Dog” and shifted to “Doug,” resulting in: “Come here, Daw-ugh.”

The neighbors had begun to make fun of us, asking, “How’s Daw-ugh?”

Aw, life in the ’hood.

Standing around in the kitchen were Stan, my teenage ex-stepson Caleb, and my best friend, Luz. Visitors at the table were not uncommon for the Turner household: Dad liked nothing better than to cook for a big crowd, and anyone passing by was likely to be invited to stay for dinner. The air was redolent with the aroma of oregano and tomato sauce; on tonight’s menu was something Dad liked to call “Turner special” lasagna, which included spinach for my sake—because according to him I’m a “health nut”—but also hamburger, because Dad is a big believer in beef.

I greeted the gang, petted Dog, poured myself a glass of the cheap red wine already open on the counter, and gave them the basic rundown of my day, including what happened when I showed up at Chantelle’s apartment.

“Again?”
Dad said, slathering butter and minced garlic onto a huge sourdough boule. “Again with the bodies? What goes on at these client meetings of yours?”

“It didn’t happen at the client meeting,” I said. “It was afterward. And there’s absolutely no connection to Crosswinds. Probably.”

“Wow, are you talking
Chantelle
Chantelle?” asked Luz. Luz was dark-haired and slender—but she ate like a linebacker, thereby ensuring her status as my dad’s favorite. Though she worked like a fiend and was a well-published professor of social work at San Francisco State, she still managed to maintain a finger on the pulse of popular culture.

“Um, I guess so,” I said. “She’s a psychic . . . ? Or,
was
a psychic, on Nob Hill?”

“You’ve never heard of her?” asked Luz. “Chantelle’s pretty well-known.”

“Yeah,” Caleb chimed in. Caleb had been only five years old when I married his father, and the only thing I
regretted about the divorce was losing my status as his stepmother. Happily, Caleb was as loath to give me up, and we had stayed close. He was now almost a man, working on college applications and getting ready to graduate from high school. I was still stuck on how cute he used to be in his Batman underwear.

“Chantelle does these huge shows, like seminars?” Caleb continued. “People pay serious money to hear her talk, and hope she’ll pick them out of the crowd and do a reading. There are billboards and commercials. Even
you
must have noticed them.”

“I don’t know anything,” I said, unconsciously parroting my dad:
nobody tells me anything around here
. San Francisco—and the surrounding Bay Area—was the kind of place that hosted music/arts/food/wine festivals darn near every weekend, and Oakland had started a First Friday art walk that was hugely popular, with local restaurants offering canapés and happy hour drinks. There were museums galore: the DeYoung and the MOMA and the Legion of Honor. Cliffs enticed adventurous folks to hang glide, the waves were full of surfers, redwood glens beckoned hikers.

I took advantage of none of these things. All I did was my job. And talk to ghosts. One of these days I was really going to have to get a life.

Speaking of which, at that moment Graham Donovan walked in the door.

Graham was an attractive man, well muscled from years of working on construction sites. He now made his living as a green building consultant to rich people, and had recently become semifamous in the field due to his innovations at the Wakefield Retreat Center in Marin.

Over the past several months Graham and I had embarked on a full-fledged romance. It had gotten to the point
where even I—who may have been a tad relationship-phobic after my marriage fell apart—had started referring to him as “my boyfriend” in public. Sure, we fought at times about certain green technologies—especially those that messed with my historic renovations—but on the whole it was a satisfying, comfortable relationship. Maybe
too
comfortable. My dad liked him, Stan liked him, Dog liked him (though, Dog liked most people, especially those who slipped him treats now and then), and Caleb liked him. Sometimes I wondered if I could extricate myself from this relationship even if I wanted to. It made me hyperventilate to think about it too much.

There were too many of us to fit at the small pine table in the kitchen, so we took our seats in the dining room. No sooner had we served ourselves generous hunks of steaming, gooey, fragrant lasagna, than Luz brought up what was on her mind.

“So Mel, I was hoping I could talk you into checking out an apartment—actually, it’s a small cottage. The place seemed too good to be true, and I guess it is. Nice place, reasonable rent, walking distance to campus.”

“I’m not really looking to move, Luz.” I glanced self-consciously at my father and then at Graham, who had been making noises about our moving in together. “Not yet.”

“That’s not why I wanted you to look at it. It might need your special help.”

“Uh-oh,” groused Dad with a roll of his eyes. “Here we go.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“The students say it’s haunted. They’re afraid to stay there.”

“You want me to get rid of the spooks?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know, Luz, my schedule’s pretty full these days. But there are people who do this professionally. Have the students call Olivier, see if he can help.”