Home For the Haunting: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (13 page)

I noticed that Cookie, who at first claimed to be fascinated by everything spiritual, was now passing notes back and forth with an attractive man in his thirties. It was high school study hall all over again. I gave her a little kick under the table, but I couldn’t really blame her. If I hadn’t experienced ghost sightings personally, I would probably be much ruder than Cookie while listening to such things.

I wondered . . . did Annette now believe in ghosts? She hadn’t been specific, but clearly she’d seen something in the Murder House that had shocked her enough to call me in. Did she really think Linda’s death had something to do with ghosts? But if so, had Linda been killed in the Murder House? Then how had the body been moved to the shed? I had seen ghosts move lightweight objects such as papers and cause candles to flicker by creating a disturbance in the atmosphere. But no atmospheric disturbance—short of a tornado—was capable of relocating a corpse. That suggested human intervention. But who? Did the inspector suspect Hugh was involved? Or was she merely trying to set her own doubts to rest? As I knew only too well, the first encounter with a spirit can be traumatic.

A babble of voices and the scraping of metal chairs signaled the class was over, and I came out of my reverie.

“Listen, I’m going to take another look at that jewelry,” said Cookie. “I know I shouldn’t, but there are a few things I just
can’t
resist. Do you mind?”

“Take your time,” I said. I caught Olivier’s eye as he was saying good night to another student.

“You rang, madam?” he asked.

“What’s involved in holding a séance?”

“Why do you ask?”

I gave him the abbreviated story of what had happened at 2906 Greenbrier.

“So you don’t believe it was suicide?”

“I don’t know. She was clearly troubled, and drugs and alcohol don’t usually lead to sound thinking. But the inspector on the case is suspicious, and I trust her professional opinion.”

“And?” Olivier prompted.

“And what?”

“I am getting to know you, my friend. Something more is troubling you. What is it?”

“Even if it was suicide, I’m afraid there’s something going on in that house.” As I spoke, my previously unformed thoughts coalesced. “I’m worried that if Hugh moves back in, he might lose his own grasp on reality. It’s one thing to confront the demons of one’s past. It’s quite another thing to be savaged by them.”

Olivier nodded. “What is it you wish to accomplish in this séance?”

“To speak with the spirits—figure out who they are and what they want. And, you know, maybe solve a murder.”

“You have never done such a thing, I take it?”

“No. Can you help?”

“If you are to do this, it must be done right. You would agree with me, no?”

“Can it be done this weekend? Friday is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders.”

His eyebrows rose. “Well, in that case, yes indeed. We should take advantage of the timing.”

“I’ll have to check with the interested parties and see what they want to do. I’m supposed to do a walk-through tonight, so I’ll let you know what happens then. Maybe there will be no need for a séance after all.”

“Or perhaps there will be more need than ever.”

“So how would the séance work, exactly?” I asked. “How many people do we need, and can we summon the ghosts in some sort of controlled fashion? What if the spirit of the father is violent? Would we be putting people at risk?”

“Excellent questions all. I am a ghost hunter, not a medium. I believe we need an expert to make contact with the ghosts. You are a medium, of course, but you are still untrained and unsure. It’s best to have someone experienced to conduct the séance so as to control the situation better.”

“By all means, let’s call in someone experienced. Believe me when I say I have absolutely no ego attached to being the one who talks to ghosts.”

“I will make some phone calls to see if it is possible to set it up for this Friday. Presuming, that is, you still want to after your walk-through tonight.”

I nodded.

“Mel, I want you to know I am very proud of you,” said Olivier. “When I met you just a few months ago, you were afraid to go into the building by yourself. But this time you have not even asked me to accompany you on your walk-through.”

“Thanks. I guess I’m getting a little more accustomed to the idea. It helps to have a sense of what to expect.” I didn’t think I would ever become blasé about ghosts—it was just too weird an experience—but there was no denying that repeated exposure to the beyond had led to a certain amount of desensitization.

Downstairs in the shop, Dingo was finishing up a makeover on Cookie. She was covered in chain jewelry and bedecked like an adolescent Goth. All she needed was heavy black eye makeup and black lipstick, and she would be the perfect Queen of the Dead.

“Remember that look for next year’s Halloween Party,” I said as I stripped her of the jewelry. “Ready?”

We bid farewell to Olivier and Dingo and headed out to my car.

“So listen,” I said, glancing over at Cookie from the corner of my eye. “I have to go and do a thing this evening, so I’m going to drop you off at BART.”

BART, or Bay Area Rapid Transit, is our local subway system. By and large, it is fast, efficient, and environmentally friendly. I would take it into the city more often if I could, but since I was usually running from one worksite to the next, it simply wasn’t practical. Still, it was a great train service.

“
BART
?” Cookie gaped at me, as though I’d suggested she ride a water buffalo while wearing her favorite Jimmy Choo shoes.

“Sure. Dad can pick you up from the Fruitvale station.”

“
I
don’t take BART. I have
never
taken BART. I don’t even know how to go about taking BART. Do I need a ticket?”

“Of course you need a ticket. It’s not free.”

“I don’t know how to buy a ticket.”

“Then this will be a whole day of firsts for you. Hanging out on jobsites, going to a ghost supply shoppy, buying a ticket for BART. Where will the adventure end?”

“Getting mugged and murdered on BART?”

“You’re not going to get mugged
or
murdered. Good heavens.”

“How do you know?”

“Because BART’s safe. I take it all the time.”

“Not at midnight, you don’t.”

“Actually, I do take it at midnight. And anyway, it’s nowhere near midnight.”

“It’s dark.”

She had me there. “BART’s perfectly safe.”

“Where are
you
going?”

“I have something to take care of.” Carting my sister around jobsites was one thing, but of this I was sure: I did
not
want Cookie tagging along on my ghost walk.

In the end, I had to park the car and go into the station to physically assist Cookie in buying a ticket from the machine, since BART really did suck at customer service. Once you knew what you were doing, it was a simple enough system, but it was far from intuitive; the uninitiated usually took a while to figure it out or were forced to rely upon the kindness of strangers. I had lost count of how many times I had helped some hapless tourist buy a ticket from the machines, get through the turnstiles, and figure out which train to take.

Of course, Cookie probably would have fared just fine with any one of the men who would likely have flocked to help her, but she got stuck with her sister instead. It worked out, though, so she could complain to me the whole time and try to wheedle me into driving her home.

“Just remember you’re going toward the East Bay, and take either the Fremont train or the Pleasanton.”

“I don’t want to go to Fremont!”

“
No
one really wants to go to Fremont. But that’s the direction the train goes. There will be an announcement, and it also comes up on the overhead board. And then you just hop off the train at the Fruitvale station.”

“I honestly don’t see why you can’t just drive me across the bridge. It isn’t that far.”

“Think of the environment you’re leaving for your children. How are they, by the way?”

“Fine,” she said glumly, and I realized, once again, that I needed to be a better sister. We had spent the whole day together, and I still didn’t know what was going on with her and Kyle. But how could I get her to tell me?

“Listen, Cookie . . .” I checked the clock on my phone. I could squeeze in a quick chat over a cup of coffee. “Why don’t we take a few minutes and grab something to drink? You can tell me what’s going on and what you’re really doing here.”

That was enough to compel her to head for the train. She fumbled while putting the ticket in the slot of the turnstile, and a man in a BART uniform rushed over to help. Not once, in all my years of living in the Bay Area, have I seen a BART employee help anyone with the ticket machine or the turnstile, or provide any sort of information. Or anything, for that matter. I was always unclear on what they
did
do, exactly. Perhaps they were all mechanics or engineers who kept things humming behind the scenes, but they
never
put tickets into the turnstile.

Safely on the other side, Cookie turned and gave me a tragic smile, then headed down the stairs for the train platform.

Feeling mildly guilty, I assured myself Cookie would throw herself on the mercy of her fellow BART riders and make it home to Oakland without too much trauma. Just to be sure, I called Dad and told him to expect Cookie’s summons from the Fruitvale station.

“You put Cookie on
BART
?”

“Why is everyone so shocked by this concept? I’ve been negotiating BART since I was in middle school.”

“You’re a different person from your sister.”

Yes. I’d noticed.

A
nnette had already arrived at Murder House, and was standing by a royal blue sports car.

“Nice car,” I said.

“Thanks. It was my present to myself when I turned fifty. Pretty sure it’s a middle-aged crisis, but I look so good in it I don’t mind the stereotype.”

“You’re fifty?” I had wondered. Her skin was smooth and unwrinkled, but I could never quite tell; she had an ageless look.

“Fifty-five, actually. It took a few more years to save up. Anyway, you have all your equipment for this walk-through?”

“Yep.” I pulled a sports bag out of the back seat of my Scion—which looked decidedly cheap next to her lovely waxed fantasy. “Are Hugh and Simone here already?”

“I called to make sure my presence tonight was all right with Hugh, and Simone said we should get started without them. Given her tone of voice, I’m not one hundred percent sure they’ll be showing up at all.” She shook her head. “Lord knows I wouldn’t want to step foot in a place where I’d seen such horrors.”

“I know what you mean. That part seems hard for me to conceive of as well.”

I heard the distinctive sound of wheels rolling along a wooden porch.

“Whaddaya doin’ at the Murder House?” Monty asked, coming to rest at the end of the porch nearest us.

“Must everyone insist on calling it that?” Annette snapped.

“What else would I call it?” he asked.

“How about 2906? That’s the address,” Annette responded.

“But there was a man there killed his family,” he began. “He—”

“Yes, thank you. I know the story. Why are there lights on?”

“They go on and off all the time. All over the house,” said Monty. “I even heard the heater come on from time to time and the sprinklers go off. A person might wonder why. A person might think maybe ghosts were still keeping house.”

Inspector Crawford’s carefully maintained professional attitude seemed as though it were fraying at the edges. This kind of talk was clearly out of her comfort zone, and though a part of me was still enjoying her discomfiture, the bigger part of me felt compelled to step in.

“A person might
also
think that maybe all those things can be set on timers,” I said. “Just a thought.”

“So you don’t believe in the ghosts? I thought you said—”

“Just because there was a murder doesn’t mean there are ghosts necessarily,” I said, cutting him off before he could mention what I’d foolishly told him, that I thought I’d seen a face in the window. In fact, I was trying to ignore what I thought I’d seen flickering in the windows, along with the quick little quiver at the front drapes and the fog on the pane as though someone were leaning too close and breathing on the glass.

I was hoping to go in fresh.

Still, given what had happened in that house, there were bound to be some decidedly unhappy, tormented spirits within these walls. And at least one murderous one—not exactly the Dearly Departed Dad of the Year. I hoped Olivier was right—that the ghost of a violent murderer could not kill anyone anymore. He could scare the hell out of you, but he couldn’t physically attack.

All this speculation and fearmongering was foolish; I knew that. The only way to deal with ghosts was to be firm in one’s resolve and to understand that they can’t actually hurt you. Being in their presence is spooky and makes you feel off-kilter, but it’s not deadly. At least, I hoped so.

I paused on the front stoop of the Murder House, Inspector Crawford by my side.

“Hugh gave me the key,” she whispered, and held it out to me.

“No need to whisper,” I whispered in return.

“Then why are
you
whispering?”

I shrugged. “Peer pressure.”

On the blue door, surrounded by peeling paint, was the knocker that had caught my attention earlier: a hand holding a ball. I stared at it, thinking of what Rosie had said. I loved these things, but . . . something about it seemed sinister, just resting there up against the door, holding that ball.

“Hey,” I said to distract myself. “Now that we’re ghost-hunting buddies, may I call you Annette?”

She gave me a snide look but inclined her head slightly. “Sure; why not? But I think we should take it easy on the whole ‘ghost-hunting buddy’ thing. I’m still a skeptic.”

“And yet you’re here with me, and we’ve got a bag of ghost-busting equipment,” I wasn’t above rubbing it in a little.

“Fine. Whatever. But if you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, I will make you very sorry. Now, I’ll hold the EMF dealie. It’s cool-looking.”

“How do you even know about the EMF dealie?”

“I’ve been boning up. Watched a marathon of
Ghoul Getters
. Very informative.”

“I’ll bet.”

I unlocked the front door and pushed it in, allowing it to swing wide. It opened with a little puff of air, like a sepulcher. The slight creak of the door didn’t help any—it seemed to echo in the abandoned house, site of those long-ago murders.

It smelled rank. Musty, with the still, funereal air common to unopened and unloved homes.

Annette was rattled. So was I, but that wasn’t news for me. For this tough homicide inspector, however, it was something rather new.

But, as was my wont, I was immediately distracted by my other profession. In addition to being a ghost buster, I was a general contractor. The architecture immediately grabbed my attention. The lines of the house were beautiful: graceful, asymmetrical, and elongated in the Art Nouveau style. In home building, Art Nouveau was a subset of the Arts and Crafts movement, which was a reaction to the stiff, dark woods and overwrought decorations of the Victorian era. The Arts and Crafts movement ushered in an era of cleaner, more natural lines and, in the case of Art Nouveau, curving lines stylized from recurring motifs taken from the natural world, like lilies, irises, and reeds.

Unfortunately, the interior decoration wasn’t Art Nouveau in the least. It was as though we were stepping onto the set of an early-eighties television sitcom, one in which the cast had gone home for the evening, leaving stacks of newspapers and magazines spread out on the low brass-and-glass coffee table. I spied a
People
magazine circa February 1984. Silk ivy and ferns hung from butterfly hooks in the ceiling. Walls were painted ash mauve and dove gray and hunter green. They were colors from the early eighties, and I imagined that had Jean Lawrence not been gunned down by her husband, she might have redecorated soon to keep up with the times.

As Hugh had told me, it was a place frozen in time. Untouched, I presumed, since the murders. In fact, at the bottom of the stairs a patch of tile had been taken up, leaving only the subfloor, rough with chalky gray remnants of mortar. Crime scene cleaners often took out portions of floors or sections of walls that couldn’t be cleaned of blood. It looked as though someone couldn’t stand to see the results of violence that had seeped into the grout—and who could blame them?

“I can’t decide whether I feel more foolish or afraid.” Annette interrupted my little trip down architectural lane, and I realized I was supposed to be contemplating long-ago murders and contemporary ghosts, not architectural history.

“Welcome to my world,” I said, setting one steel-toed boot-clad foot inside, treading heavily on the inlaid mosaic tiles of the entryway.

Lights were on in the foyer, in the kitchen, and at the landing at the top of the stairs.

Straight ahead of us was a central stairway, there was a hallway to the right, and to either side were openings leading to a parlor in one direction and a dining room in the other. The dining room had a built-in hutch. Light sifted in through the tall windows from a streetlamp, just barely illuminating the room in a gray light.

Annette kept looking over at me, as though expecting me to go into a trance or roll my eyes or some other equally impressive movement that indicated I was in touch with another dimension.

“I can’t promise I’ll feel or see anything,” I said, rubbing the plain gold wedding ring that hung, solid and warm, on a chain around my neck. The ring was a present from my mother, who had inherited it from her own mother. It was the closest thing I had to a rosary. It made me feel connected to my mother, as she had worn it for years before giving it to me, saying it would connect the generations of Turner women.

I concentrated on it, took a deep breath, and tried to send out signals of welcoming and beckoning. Which was a bit of a joke, because the ghosts always appeared to me unbidden, but it was worth a try.

“You can’t . . . call them, or something?”

I shook my head. “Hate to disappoint, but I’m not really that kind of medium.”

“I thought maybe you were rubbing that ring for a reason.”

“You mean, like a genie’s bottle?” I teased. “It’s not Aladdin’s lamp.”

“Look,” said Annette, compulsively looking behind her. “Once I stepped through the looking glass, I’m open to just about anything.”

Annette really was beyond her comfort zone. I reminded myself of just how hard this all was for me—still was—but especially the first couple of times it had happened. And I had the proof of what I was seeing, while this homicide-hardened cop had to take my word for it all.

“The thing is . . . I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just sort of hang around and . . . I don’t know; it’s like the ghosts can sense there’s someone who might be able to see or hear them so . . . sometimes things—”

Bam bam bam . . . bam!

Annette and I practically leaped into each other’s arms. When the banging stopped, we looked at each other, chagrined, and pulled back in embarrassment.

Before I could say anything, Annette strode to the door, peeked out the eyehole, and then cautiously opened the door while standing to the side.

No one was there.

Annette closed the door and met my eyes. I thought it best not to mention that I had been pushed into the shed, and someone banged on the door four times in exactly that pattern.

“Probably the neighborhood kids,” I said. “I met a few of them the other day, when we were working at Monty’s house. Actually, you met Kobe, the leader of the baby hoodlums. They’re morbidly fascinated with this place, and the tales of yore.”

“Little ghouls.”

“We were all ghouls at that age, don’t you think?” I said as I started to look around the living room. The couches, the piano, a cupboard that held Lenox china figurines. Other than the dust, it could be anyone’s home that hadn’t kept up with the times. Like the stereotypical Grandma’s house. “In fact, the song they were singing was set to the tune of
‘Lizzie Borden took an axe. . . .
’”

Annette was doing that one-eyebrow lift thing she did.

“You have a terrible singing voice; you know that?”

“That’s not the point. I’m just saying, there’s a reason kids like horror movies. I know some people never grow out of it, but a lot of times I think kids like to be scared because they don’t really believe bad things can happen. When they grow up and realize just how bad the world can be, the fascination tends to fall away.”

“Or sometimes they live out their twisted fantasies, and then people like me have to step in and clean things up.”

That was a depressing thought. She was right, I supposed, but
sheesh
. What a hard way to make a living.

Beyond the odd furnishings and the reminders of the tragedy within these walls, the artistic lines of the house called out to me. The entries were a series of arches using flowing Art Nouveau lines, all distinct from one another. The railing on the stair was metal, twisted and free-form in a stylized pattern of flowers and leaves. Everything from the crown molding to the baseboards was just a little different from the norm.

My father would go nuts over this place. In fact, if you stripped out the furniture and wall-to-wall carpet—which I was certain covered up beautiful floors with, most likely, an inlaid wood design—and redecorated with the relatively simple furniture from the era, this house would be a showcase, a rare example of well-preserved Art Nouveau in a city that favored the Victorian.

The fireplace was perfect. It rose from floor to ceiling, its carved surface a mellow beige marble, asymmetrical and stylized. On the right was a trio of young, long-haired mermaids with graceful, elongated tails. They looked up and to one side, where a young man writhed among the reeds near shore. In the distance was a ship, as though the sailor had been lost. Or had he been found? The wind and rain were indicated by the swirling lines of the carving, everything smooth and curvy.

“The oldest daughter, Bridget, age seventeen, was found right there in front of the fireplace. Bludgeoned with a piece of firewood.”

Annette’s grim words shook me from my artistic reverie.

“The mother was there, blunt force trauma as well, then shot.”

Annette strode back across the front hall and stopped short of the stairs.

“According to the deposition, Linda saw her father standing here, at the bottom of the stairs.”

We both stepped back as though afraid of standing on the same spot where he had stood.

I started feeling the sensation of my own breathing, hearing the harsh sound. The beating of my heart seemed to fill the space. I couldn’t tell whether it was, indeed, the presence of something else making me feel this way, or if it was my imagination.