Dead Bolt (7 page)

We stood there awkwardly for a minute, not meeting each other’s eyes, instead looking around at the hustle and bustle.

“All set for Stan’s party tonight?” Dad broke the silence.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll pick up the cake and should be home a little after five. Could you and Caleb start decorating when he gets home from school?”

He gave a brusque nod and walked away. I watched as he spoke briefly with Inspector Crawford, then strode off toward his dented Ford truck, climbed in, and drove off.

T
urning my back on the crime scene, I took a moment to look over the exterior of Cheshire House.

Like most Queen Anne Victorians, it showed its best face to the street. Tall and elegant, two turrets of differing heights and stepped-out features gave the house asymmetrical charm. A flight of stone steps led to a heavy oak door topped by a stained-glass transom. Jigsaw-cut gingerbread woodwork—some of which I had to have remilled—embellished every eave, corner, and window frame. Multicolored decorative shingles—many of which needed to be replaced—formed an intricate pattern on the steeply pitched roof. And a wrought-iron widow’s walk sat atop the highest turret, just for show.

Curved leaded and colored glass sash windows marched up one turret; two of the openings were temporarily covered in plywood, as they had slumped so badly they were currently being restored by a talented stained-glass artist in Carmel. The exterior paint was peeling, and scaffolding had been set up on one corner to accommodate trim repair and painting prep. The small front yard was a disaster area of dirt, weeds, dust, and a few hopeful bushes that were struggling to survive.

To my eyes it was one big, gorgeous project.

I moved my car to a legal space and brought Dog back to Cheshire House with me. Katenka and Jim didn’t mind having him on the job site, as long as he stayed in the messy construction areas. As soon as we entered the house and I undid his leash, Dog barreled past me and up the stairs, barking at something I couldn’t see.

Knowing Dog as I did, I realized this wasn’t necessarily indicative of ghostly activity. He ran after nothing all the time, in what I assumed was a bid to seem useful and on the job.

The real fellow on the job at Cheshire House was Raul Ramirez. Raul was smart, competent, and almost preternaturally calm in the face of construction mishaps. He had failed the contractor’s exam, undoubtedly because of his limited English writing skills, not a lack of knowledge. He was taking classes at City College and planned on retaking the test. I wished Raul only the best, but if I were completely honest, a part of me was relieved that he wasn’t yet licensed. Good foremen were worth their weight in gold, and I knew how lucky I was to have him. He kept the subcontractors in line, and everyone on task and on schedule. He was also blessed with people skills, which was important because he interacted with the clients on a daily basis. Having a foreman like Raul freed me up to move around, keeping several jobs in various stages of completion going at once.

Or investigating ghosts, as the case might be.

True to form, Raul wasn’t impressed by the crime scene across the street, and made sure the crew kept their minds on their work. According to our schedule, the final in-wall electrical and plumbing was to be completed today so that the walls could be repaired. Then the last phase of the painting prep—patching and priming and sanding—would begin. The finish painting would start after that, presuming I could pin down Jim and Katenka on their final color choices.

Raul and I went over the schedule and the thousand details that come up every day on a construction project, and then I took a walk through the house, checking in on the various workers. A small crew was removing paint and shellac from the original redwood wainscoting and crown moldings that featured egg and dart, acanthus leaf, and dentil designs. Once it was stripped back to the original wood, we would dress it in a mahogany stain. Victorian architecture could be rather gloomy inside with all the dark trim, but the wood was too beautiful to cover up. Since Jim was willing to foot the bill for the laborious process of stripping, I was more than happy to oblige.

Besides, Katenka had showed a definite taste for the gloomy in her design decisions. She might be afraid of ghosts, but she had had no qualms when faced with one of Cheshire House’s more unusual features: The repeated motif of acanthus leaves surrounding winged skulls topped by angels holding scythes, as though snuffing out life.

This sort of design used to be a reminder of the sanctity of life, a warning to be good and pure while you could, because you never knew when your time would be up. It was a holdover from an era when death and dying took place at home, surrounded by the living, rather than in sterile environments, dealt with discreetly by hospital workers and funeral homes, the way it now was for most of us.

One of my favorite features of the house was its five fireplaces. In the finest Victorian tradition, the hearths were not meant simply to provide heat and a cheery blaze. They were robust combinations of display shelves, seats, decorative panels, and works of art, a complex ensemble that served as a room’s focal point. Though distinct, each was adorned with glazed tiles with relief decoration, an overmantel with a paneled frieze, a mosaic hearth, and a fire-back, a thick iron plate placed at the back of a hearth to protect the wall and reflect heat into the room.

Two of the fireplaces had their original firebacks, with the acanthus leaf motif, but the other three were missing. Searching Craigslist, I had found some possible replacements. The seller had identified them as “old fireplace things—thick sheets of metal with embossed designs.” Worth a look.

“Mel, you got your coveralls with you?” asked Andrew, the plumber.

“Always,” I responded. I might traipse around in skirts and dresses, but as a contractor I was always prepared to crawl through cobwebs. “What’s up?”

I crouched down with him and looked through a gaping hole in the corner of a third-floor bedroom, where his crew had removed a small corner sink. Back when the building was used as a boardinghouse, each renter had his own sink in his room, while sharing the toilet and bath down the hall. Katenka and Jim had decided to remove the sinks in favor of more traditional bedrooms.

“What do you want us to do with the pipes left in the walls? Easiest thing is to just cap them and leave them,” said Andrew. By “easiest,” he meant “cheapest.”

“Let me take a look.”

I donned my coveralls and crawled through the hole in the wall, then squeezed under the eaves to check out where the old pipes connected to one another. Could some of the troublesome knocking and banging be coming from them? Old houses didn’t need ghosts to make strange sounds at all times of day and night—that’s just the way they were. Some called it character.

One reason Turner Construction was in demand was that we did the job right, not only by meeting code requirements and following basic installation guidelines to the letter, but also by not leaving a mess, even if it was unseen, in the walls or crawl spaces. You never knew when those messes would come back to bite you.

“No, go ahead and take them back to the junctions with the new copper pipe, and remove all of these old lead ones. Abandoning them isn’t a very elegant solution,” I said.

Andrew barely refrained from rolling his eyes. He was two days behind on the job here, which meant he was now operating on his dime rather than the Daleys’, since the delay was his own fault. He was anxious to move his crew on to the next paying gig. I understood, but I wasn’t willing to cut corners for the sake of anyone’s schedule, not even my own.

As I walked down the third-floor catwalk, a hallway with a railing open to the floor below, I thought I heard something overhead. A scratching, whispering noise.

And the metal-on-metal scraping sound of a heavy bolt unlocking.

There was no one in the attic. The hatch was closed.

I stood still and held my breath, straining my ears, trying to tune out the saws, banging, and radio noise of the workers throughout the house.

More scratching. That could be rats. Or the cat Katenka thought she heard.

But whispers?

Dog ran up next to me, barking and whimpering, agitated and intrigued, the way he was when he treed a raccoon.

After another moment of hesitation, I reached up, grabbed the string, and pulled open the attic access door. The whispers grew louder.

Was it . . . could it be
calling
me?

“Mel?” The voice startled me. It was Raul, coming up the stairs. All sounds from above ceased.

“Hey, Raul.”

“Before you go today we need one of the Daleys to sign off on the paint schedule.”

“Right,” I said, glancing back up into the dark nothingness of the attic.

“What’s up, puppy?” he petted Dog, then addressed me. “Something wrong?”

“What? No, nothing’s wrong,” I fudged. “I was just about to check the insulation.”

“Newspapers.”

I nodded. Back in the day, newspapers were a common form of insulation. And as free materials go, they weren’t bad. As any homeless person could tell you, they’re cheap and effective. Newspapers pulled out of walls and ceilings of old houses could also help date a home, and made fascinating reading.

I had been in the attic before, several times. When I first took on the project, I looked through every nook and cranny of the house, and I had returned to the attic with the electrician, the structural engineer, and a city inspector. Each time I was up there I felt a strange, otherworldly sense of the weight of a gaze upon me, a tingle at the back of my neck. But for all the attention I paid to my peripheral vision, I had seen nothing, heard nothing I could pinpoint.

At first I ascribed the feelings to the usual spookiness of attics and basements, those liminal areas between the everyday and the unusual. The parts of the house that were not regularly filled with human life and breath. But now . . .

“I’ll go talk to Katenka,” I said. “I’ll try to get her to make a decision.”

As I closed the attic door, something fell. I jumped out of the way as it clanked to the floor. I scooped it up. It was a rusty metal ring, holding half a dozen very old keys.

“Where’d that come from?” Raul asked, looking overhead.

“Must have been stuck in the recess, somehow. The door felt hard to pull open; maybe the keys were lodged in the frame.”

Raul looked at them with interest. “Be nice if they’d open some of the old doors in this place, so we don’t have to take the locks apart. I like the look of them.”

“Me, too. I’ll have to check them out, and then I’ll see if Katenka wants to keep them, along with the old locks. If not, I’ll split them with you.”

Raul smiled. “You can keep ’em. I’ve got dozens.”

“So do I.”

I took the sheaf of spreadsheets from him, grabbed the book of color samples, and headed downstairs, hoping I could convince Katenka to either state her own color choices or go along with mine.

We were at the point in the renovation where the Daleys needed to make a thousand and one aesthetic choices. Unfortunately for me, they refused to hire an interior designer. I couldn’t really blame them—personally, I disliked the sort of cold, overly designed look of so many professionally “done” homes that appeared as though they were laid out for an
Architectural Digest
photo shoot rather than ready to live in. In such places a bottle of dishwashing detergent left out on the pounded copper countertop looked like sacrilege.

Still, interior designers had staffs and schedules and budgets, so they were simple for a general contractor like me to work with. Having to decide on every interior decision, from grout color to stain tone, made the average homeowner want to tear their hair out in a matter of days . . . or hours.

Which reminded me—Katenka and I needed to make time to visit what was referred to as “the wailing wall of knobs” in the San Francisco Design Center.

I was almost to the main floor when I heard something.

A moaning sound?

Relief washed over me when I realized it was accompanied by the crackle of a baby monitor. Katenka was in the dining room, the receiver clipped on to her belt. The “moaning” I thought I had heard was simply Quinn, lulling himself to sleep with a cooing sound. My imagination was running rampant.

Katenka stood next to the horsehair settee, looking down at it.

“Katenka?”

As I approached her, she spoke without looking up. “Emile was going to reupholster this. Who will do it now?”

“I’m sure we can find another upholsterer,” I said, wondering why she was focusing on this, of all things. “This place won’t be ready for nice furniture for a while yet.”

She seemed to shake it off. “You are right.”

“Hey, look what we just found up in the attic.” I held up the old key ring.

She wrinkled her nose. “Is rusty.”

“True.” It always amazed me when people didn’t get excited around such discoveries. This was the fun of old houses, the traces people left behind. In my time I’ve found everything from perfume bottles to personal papers to old celluloid collars. The homeowners rarely wanted to keep them, which was one reason my bedroom was beginning to look like a museum. Most of us in the historical renovation biz become rabid amateur historians . . . sometimes exhibiting a little hoarder mentality when it comes to old stuff.

“We were going to try the keys in some of the old locks, see if they work,” I said. “Or, if you’d rather, we could just change out all the old locks for new, as we’d originally decided to do.”

“New is better, I think.”

“So you don’t want the keys?”

“Why would I?”

“As a memento?”

She just stared at me. I was going to take that as a no. On to the next order of business.