Home For the Haunting: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (9 page)

“I, um . . .”

“She passed. A couple of days ago, but I didn’t even know. Amazing to think that someone so important in my life could pass, and I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel a thing. Had no idea until Ray called me last night. Then the police came. We talked for a long time.”

“I’m so very sorry, Hugh. Is there anything I can do?”

“Do you know our story?”

“I’ve heard a couple of versions. . . .”

“On that night, I remember the smell of dinner cooking. I think it was chicken casserole. My favorite. There was someone at the door, and my oldest sister Bridget went down to answer it, but I guess Mom got there first . . . There was the sound of a tussle, and Linda was headed downstairs to check it out when she saw my father at the foot of the stairs, plain as day in the entryway, a gun in his hand, pointed at our mother. Linda was about to say something when . . .”

He held his hand out and pointed as though it were a gun, then pulled the trigger, his eyes taking on that now familiar faraway look.

“Boom.
Boom
. Two shots. One in the back”—he reached behind himself and patted a spot behind his left shoulder, then tapped the side of his neck—“one in the neck. The neck. Carotid artery. No chance.”

There was a long pause.
In for a penny, in for a pound.

“And your sister, Bridget?”

“Blunt force trauma. He used a big log for the fire. Up against the side of the head.”

“But you escaped.”

“Linda saved me. She came into my room and barricaded the door behind her, then made me go out the window with her. I fought her; I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t want to go.”

“How old were you?”

“Linda was fourteen, I was ten. Almost eleven. My parents had agreed to have my birthday at the beach that weekend. It was his last promise to me. Broken, of course, when he killed half my family, then himself.”

“I’m so sorry, Hugh. It’s . . .”
Unimaginable
was what I was going to say, but this man had not only imagined it but lived through it. “It’s awful. No one should have to go through something like that.”

“It was my fault, really. Please”—he held up a pale hand—“don’t say it wasn’t. I’ve heard it from one therapist after another, but the truth is that if I hadn’t gotten sick, Mom would have taken us all to the beach house. I suppose my father still would have killed himself, but at the very least Mom and Bridget would have been spared. But I’ve always been the sickly sort. . . .”

He pulled out a drawer of the file cabinet and brought out a big box of photos. He grabbed a handful and shuffled through them, picking and choosing some to show to me.

“Here’s my father and mother on their wedding day.” He gazed at the photo for a long moment before handing it over. The photo was faded; they were both dashing in sixties-era clothing, she in a simple white shift and small veil, he in a dark suit. They were laughing and pushing wedding cake into each other’s mouths. I looked up to see Hugh’s sad, distracted eyes fixed on me. “Hard to imagine what he would do to her later, isn’t it?”

There were no words. He passed more photos to me: babies, little children on the beach, his father holding a boy about two years old in strong arms.

“Is this you?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You look a lot like your father,” I said, before realizing perhaps I shouldn’t underscore his resemblance to a killer.

He smiled faintly.

“Yes, I took after his side of the family. There was a strong family resemblance between him and my grandfather, as well. I used to think I would grow up to be just like him, and I was proud. Of course, now that I look like him . . . well, it’s a dubious honor.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re anything like him.”

“It’s funny—the last time Linda and I were in the house, just a few days ago, she saw me at the bottom of the stairs, and she thought she was seeing our father’s ghost. But it was just me. But I thought to myself, that’s a poem:
‘I am my father’s ghost
.
’
”

He paused for a long moment, then picked up a pencil and a piece of paper and scribbled something.

Again, I felt at a loss for words. I wondered whether everyone who spoke to Hugh wound up feeling like a reluctant psychiatrist. I wished I could channel Luz, to know what to say or do. But then, I guessed this was why Luz didn’t pursue a career in therapy, preferring instead to teach. She said she didn’t like hearing people’s problems. Luckily, she made an exception for her best friend.

“Anyway . . . ,” Hugh said at long last, putting down his pen and turning back to the pile of snapshots. He gave me another handful, a series of photos taken on a fishing trip, he and his father and Ray standing together, wearing matching plaid hunting jackets. “The reason I asked to talk with you is that I understand you do specialized renovations?”

“I do, yes. That’s my business, Turner Construction. We do historic restoration, that sort of thing.”

“I’ve kept the house preserved, just as it was when we lived there. When . . . it happened. At first, of course, I was just a kid; the house was kept in a trust for me and Linda. We didn’t need the money—between life insurance and my uncle, Linda and I were fine. And then . . . Linda was slipping away, and in a way, the house seemed like our last concrete connection. She signed over her power of attorney to me and didn’t seem to care what I did with the place, but I wanted to keep it. I’m not sure why. . . . A part of me thought I could keep it enshrined and perhaps work out what happened. If I could only mature enough, learn enough, understand the world enough, I might be able to figure it out. Figure it all out.”

There was that far-off look again.

“And have you?” I asked at last, after it seemed he wasn’t talking anymore.

He shook his head. “But no matter how many times I go through there, no matter how I cast my mind back, it makes no sense. My father had taken a large life insurance policy out on himself and my mother not long before, but . . . his didn’t pay out, of course. Suicide isn’t compensated. Luckily for Linda and me, being
murdered
is covered, so we collected on our mother’s policy. It’s possible he meant to kill her in order to collect, and took the same policy out on himself to avert suspicion, but things got out of hand. Maybe killing his own daughter pushed him over the edge, so he wound up killing himself.” Hugh shrugged. “He shot himself in the chest before killing himself with a shot to the head. Maybe he meant to graze himself, make it look like he’d been injured in the attack as well, but the muzzle slipped. Maybe . . .”

It seemed Hugh had thought everything through. Probably at three in the morning, when he was supposed to be sleeping. I wasn’t surprised—it was hard for
me
to stop thinking about any of the deaths I had encountered recently, and I was only tangentially involved with any of the victims. I could only imagine that if it happened to your family, especially as a child, you would roll it over in your mind persistently, doggedly, unconsciously, like a tongue worrying a sore tooth. Perhaps you would ponder the senselessness of something like this until quite literally losing your senses.

Could that be what had happened with Linda? Hugh may be a poet laureate, but he was obviously fragile. It didn’t seem like it would take much to push the poor man over the brink into entirely losing touch with reality.

“Oh, here’s something else you should see.” He went to a bookshelf and pulled down a white screen. Then he crossed to the opposite corner and turned on the movie camera I had noticed when I first walked in.

Bluish images flickered on the screen. I recognized young Hugh and Linda, playing with their father in the surf on Ocean Beach. I recognized the locale by the distinctive Seal Rock and the Cliff House restaurant in the background, jutting out into the Pacific.

“Old home movies?”

He nodded, eyes fixed on the playful images. “Wait a moment; the next sequence was filmed inside the house. You can get a sense for it by watching carefully.”

As promised, moments later the scene shifted. It was a holiday of some sort, a large dinner on the table, a nicely dressed group gathered around the table.

“Would you be willing to give me a bid on redoing the house?”

“But, Hugh, I don’t understand why you would want to have anything to do with it, after . . . after what happened.”

“Don’t you see? I have no choice. That house defined me, made me what I am today.”

“But . . .” It wasn’t my place to make this observation—I barely knew the man. And I knew that uninvited advice was just about the most exasperating thing to experience. But I couldn’t help myself. “Wouldn’t it be better to not let it define you anymore? You’re a brilliant success as a poet; couldn’t you just enjoy that about yourself?”

Hugh didn’t seem offended by my unsolicited advice. He just shook his head.

“I have to put the house back in order. Just as it was.”

“Didn’t you say you left it just as it was?”

“There have been some changes, the unavoidable effects of time.” He rifled through the box and pulled out another album, this one strewn with yellow sticky tabs. He flipped to one of them to show a picture of a young girl and her mom, presumably one of Hugh’s sisters and his mother, in a kitchen very much of the period. “But I have pictures here, and I want you to restore it so it’s just the way it was then. Same wallpaper, appliances, everything. A lot of it is still there, but it’s shabby, mildewy after all these years.”

“I just don’t . . .” I began, wondering whether this was some sort of brilliant scheme or just a sign of mental illness. I wished Luz were present to form a professional opinion. I should have called her when I heard that Hubert wanted to meet with me.

On the screen, the images spoke, but there was no sound other than the clicking and whirring of the camera. The film had faded, so the colors were washed out to shades of blue and yellow. I tried to ignore it, but I noticed the images out of the corner of my eye, the way I often saw ghosts. It felt almost nightmarish to witness such remnants of happy memories, before tragedy struck.

I was about to come up with an excuse to leave when I heard the sound of keys in the front door. Simone walked in, a canvas tote full of groceries in each hand. She dropped them in the hall and hurried toward us.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, switching off the camera. “I’ve told you, you can’t watch these films alone. Hugh, I asked you what you were doing.”

Her hair was swept up in a simple bun, and she wore a fashionable wool coat over a simple but chic red dress, matching lipstick, and fine gold jewelry. A few steps up from the stained sweatshirt and jeans she’d worn to Monty’s the other day.

Hugh gave a far-off look and shook his head. Simone looked as though she’d been through this routine before; when her husband had no response for her, she swung around and fixed her gaze on me.

“This is about that house, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Hugh asked me to come over so we could talk about it.”

“How soon can we get back in there, do you know?” She flicked a switch to rewind the movie. “The police haven’t been in touch.”

Her words surprised me. I had expected Simone to be protective of her husband, to say he shouldn’t be going back there, that it wasn’t good for him.

“I don’t really . . .”

“Have you asked her about taking the job?” she said, addressing her husband.

“I did ask,” he replied. “But she has yet to answer.”

Nothing got past this guy.

“I, um . . .”

“Isn’t this the sort of thing you do?” Simone demanded as she removed the reel from the camera, then unlocked a box sitting on a bookshelf and placed it inside. Then she started gathering the snapshots that Hugh had scattered atop the desk. I thought of the theory that opposites attract; Simone seemed to have all the energy and focus that her husband lacked.

“Renovating old places,” she continued. “Bringing them back to their glory days . . . ? And if possible, talking to the ghosts? I read all about you in
Haunted Home Quarterly
.”

“So, you believe the house is haunted?” I asked her. “The neighbors mention lights going on and off.”

She waved a hand. “I had the place wired as a ‘smart house’ so we could turn lights on and off from afar, that sort of thing. That’s not the haunted part. It’s the thoughts, the memories that plague Hugh. Those are the real ghosts.”

Despite myself, my curiosity was stoked. Why were Hugh and Simone so intent on having the place put back to the way it was?

Though it seemed macabre, it would be interesting to do a walk-through of the Murder House with Hugh.

I had to admit that, as with so many historic homes, something about the house at 2906 Greenbrier called to me. And not just the faces I had seen in the windows. For some time now, I’d had the feeling that my unique talent might be to seek out and find homes filled with pain and strife, and maybe, by renovating them and communicating with their ghosts, bringing them back to life. My mother used to find homes that felt warm and inviting, and she and my father made a pretty penny over the years bringing those homes back to high standards and reselling them. So maybe I’d inherited her talent but added my own unique, rather dark twist.