Murder on the House: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (Haunted Home Repair Mystery) (3 page)

Clank, shuffle, clank, scrape.

What
was
that?

And if this truly was a restless spirit, why should I be so surprised? I had been asked to the Bernini house to help broker a deal with the resident ghosts, after all. I just hadn’t expected to see anything right off the bat, much less in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

I took a deep breath and fingered the simple gold band I wore on a chain around my neck, centering myself. All right,
fine
. If this was a ghost, so be it. It was essential to maintain one’s resolve when going up against them. I’d learned that much, at least. Also important to keep in mind was that ghosts, being immaterial, can’t physically harm a person. I was pretty sure. Actually . . . maybe I should double-check that little factoid. Despite my so-called “promising ghost buster” status, I’d encountered only two situations involving ghosts, and to be honest they still scared the you-know-what out of me.

Slowly, cautiously, I continued down the hallway to where it ended in a T, the sound growing louder with each step.
Clank, shuffle, clank, scrape. Clank, shuffle, clank, scrape.

I took a deep breath, screwed up my courage . . . and peeked around the corner.

An old woman hunched over an aluminum walker was slowly making her way down the corridor. Her hair was a blue gray mass of stiff-set curls, and she wore an orange and yellow crochet afghan draped over her narrow shoulders. With each laborious step-push-step she made, her slippered feet and the walker sounded off:
clank
,
shuffle
,
clank
,
scrape
.

“Hello?” I said.

“Oh!” She let out a surprised yelp, one blue-veined hand fluttering up to her chest. “My word, you gave me a fright!”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, still basking in relief at the sight of a flesh-and-blood woman instead of a spectral presence. “I’m Mel Turner, from Turner Construction?”

“Oh yes, of course. How do you do? I’m Betty Bernini.”

“It’s so nice to meet you. You have an amazing place here.”

“Thank you. Come, we’ve been expecting you. The Propaks are in the front room.” She resumed her slow progress, and I fell in step, resisting the urge to offer to help.

“I’m afraid I didn’t hear the doorbell,” Mrs. Bernini said as we walked. “Who let you in?”

“Anabelle answered the door, but she showed me to the parlor—the wrong room, I take it.”

The clanking stopped as Mrs. Bernini straightened and fixed me with a steady gaze.

“Anabelle?”

“Yes, she’s a sweetheart.”

“Anabelle let you in.”

I nodded, suddenly feeling guilty. Was Anabelle not supposed to answer the door? Had I gotten the girl in trouble?

“Let me show you something.” Mrs. Bernini shuffled a little farther down the hall and opened the door to a bookshelf-lined study full of cardboard boxes, stacked furniture, and a cracked old leather couch. She gestured to an oil painting hanging over the fireplace. Done in rich old-master hues of blue, red, and burnt sienna, it featured a girl and a slightly younger boy. She stood with one hand on the boy’s shoulder, while he held a cocker spaniel puppy.

The girl had long chestnut brown curls, tied in pretty ribbons.

Peony purple.

A brass plate on the picture frame read:

Anabelle and Ezekiel Bowles. 1911.

Chapter Two

“T
his is so
exciting
!” said Kim Propak as she placed a tray of packaged cookies on the coffee table and perched on the edge of a worn brocade sofa. Her husband, Marty Propak, Mrs. Bernini, and I had taken our seats in a front room that overlooked the street. “I can’t believe they’ve already made contact! You’re
amazing
!”

With her pert blond pageboy and single strand of pearls, Kim Propak reminded me of a fiftyish Doris Day. Hard to dislike . . . but also a wee bit annoying.

I was still reeling from the fact that I’d been met at the door by a darling girl whose only sign of being dead was her old-fashioned dress and—I realized as I thought about it—her button-up shoes. I hadn’t had a clue Anabelle was not from our mortal world until after the fact. She hadn’t appeared transparent, or hazy, or not entirely “here,” like the other ghosts I’d seen. Nor had she floated down the hall, or faded in and out, or appeared in a cloud of black smoke, or in any other way seemed detached from reality.

Seeing
ghosts was one thing, but if I couldn’t tell the difference between a spirit and a real person . . . ? That was truly crazy-making.

Marty Propak seemed to notice my discomfiture at his wife’s effusive enthusiasm. No Rock Hudson to her Doris Day, he was a small man with thinning, short-cropped curly brown hair graying at the temples. His mild brown eyes were obscured by the frames of heavy tortoiseshell glasses, which gave him a scholarly air.

“I must confess, we didn’t expect you to see anything so, er, soon. Or so easily.” Marty sat forward on the old red brocade couch, his hands clasped primly together. “And the . . . uh . . . little girl . . . what did she seem like?”

“Anabelle? She was very polite, very sweet,” I replied, taking off my sweater. The front room, unlike the rest of the house, was warmed by a space heater and felt quite snug. Many people with huge houses wound up using only a small percentage of their space—I had the sense this was a truly lived-in room.

“This is so exciting!” Kim repeated with a happy sigh, clapping her hands together as though vowing that she
did
believe in fairies.

But I knew, from my admittedly limited experience, that those reaching out from beyond the veil weren’t carnival attractions or exciting oddities to be exploited for the entertainment of live humans. From what I could tell, ghosts were souls in need: usually confused, sometimes angry, and often looking for help.

Which begged the question: What did Anabelle want?

“Mrs. Bernini,” I asked, “are you related to the children in the portrait?”

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Bernini shook her head. “We found that painting up in the attic. It must have been there since my husband, Angelo, and I moved in years ago. I had half a mind to throw it away—I confess I thought it was a bit insipid!—but my young friend Portia said it was worth money, that it was a portrait of the children of the family who built the home.”

“Portia Kirkbride has an antiques store on Castro Street. She’s helped us to piece together some of the early history of the house,” Marty explained. “It was built in 1901. The original owner was a physician, apparently from a well-to-do family, and respected in the early days of medicine here in the city. He was instrumental in establishing the San Francisco Physicians’ College. That’s one reason we were attracted to renovating the property.”

As I listened to Marty, my attention was focused on Mrs. Bernini. I knew her husband had passed away last year, after sixty years of marriage. The couple had raised numerous foster children in this house. Their finances had taken a turn for the worse when Angelo became ill with cancer, and his final medical bills had eaten through their nest egg. Maintaining a house like this in San Francisco must cost a fortune, which I assumed explained the odd decorating choices, lack of heat, and neglect of basic maintenance.

“Have you seen the ghosts yourself?” I asked Mrs. Bernini.

“I never
saw
any of them, exactly. A glimpse here and there, at most. My Angelo saw things on occasion, and a couple of the children were, well, sensitive. Poor little Homer was quite taken aback—he really found them frightening.” She handed me a framed school photo of a redheaded, freckle-faced boy with a rather goofy smile. I couldn’t help but think of Howdy Doody.

“So cute,” I said.

“He’s a man now, of course.” Her smile faded, and her eyes appeared troubled. “Lately, though, I think the spirits . . . the haunting . . . has gotten worse.”

“Ghosts are often disturbed by changes—especially renovations.”

“That’s what
I
said!” said Kim, leaning toward me conspiratorially. “I’ve been boning up. So to speak.”

“The neighbors told me there was a tragedy associated with this house,” said Mrs. Bernini. “I guess maybe that’s why we got it so cheap—well, that and the fact that this area wasn’t as desirable back then. But I always loved it here, so I never really believed the stories. But lately . . . I’ve been hearing terrible sounds.”

“Sounds?”

“There’s a loud scraping noise overhead.” Her thin shoulders rose toward her ears and she shivered. “It happens all the time these days. And then there are occasional horses’ hooves outside, and the sound of marbles rolling along the floor. . . . In fact, we have found a number of marbles over the years.”

My eyes flickered over to a fishbowl half-filled with marbles. Mrs. Bernini followed my gaze, nodding.

“Also, we used to have an old radio here, which was original to the house. It had a mind of its own: used to play whether it was turned on or not.”

Kim blinked. “What did it play?”

Mrs. Bernini shrugged. “Old-timey music. Once when Homer was visiting it started up, and he got so mad he finally took it to the antiques shop—that’s how I first met Portia. I liked the music, myself. The sound that really bothers me is the scraping. It sounds like something’s being dragged, and then the bed in the master moves.”

“Your bed?”

“Used to be, but once Angelo got sick, we moved downstairs. I went up the other day for the first time in years, but my knees protested. The playroom—”

“
I
think we should let Mel discover such things on her own, don’t you?” interrupted Kim with a tight smile.

“Oh, of course,” said Mrs. Bernini as she nibbled on a cookie.

Kim was probably right—I had purposefully avoided gleaning too much information about the Bernini estate beforehand, preferring instead to come in “cold.” Still, something about Kim’s officiousness rubbed me the wrong way.

“Where do your children live now?” I asked Mrs. Bernini.

“They’ve fanned all over the world. That’s how it is with foster children—some are here just briefly. The ones that were here longer term, I keep in touch with all of them. I just love e-mail, don’t you? And I just learned to Skype. Several of them came for Angelo’s funeral; it was lovely. But only Homer’s right here in San Francisco. He has his own deli off Bayshore Boulevard, near where Goodman’s Lumber used to be? He does very well.”

Kim started describing some of her decorating plans, which would be important information when—if—renovation began. For the moment, though, I was more interested in getting a feel for the home’s bones, for the vibrations in the walls.

“. . . and then a floral wing, with rooms named after flowers. I was thinking, maybe, the Rose Room, and the Bluebell Room, and the Lilac Room. Oh! The Posy Room! Wouldn’t that be
cute
?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “And the Rose Room will be pink and red, the Bluebell Room will be blue, the Lilac Room will be shades of purple, and the Posy Room could be . . . hmm. Well, fiddledeedee, we’ll work that out. . . .”

I listened with half an ear and studied the room. There were numerous examples of what Realtors referred to as “deferred maintenance” and what everybody else called long-overdue repairs. I noted signs of dry rot around the windows, and a web of cracks in the plaster. The chandelier had pulled away from the ceiling, exposing its wiring, and was missing several of its crystal drops. There was another old water stain on the ceiling, indicating a serious problem with the roof. Over time, water damage could be devastating to a structure.

I knew that Mrs. Bernini couldn’t afford to make the needed repairs, and yet she wanted to stay in her home. This was where Kim and Marty Propak, formerly of Fort Wayne, Indiana, came in. They had taken over the house payments, and had agreed to a price for the house upon her death, when ownership would transfer to them.

“We don’t want this to be just another bed-and-breakfast.” Kim beamed, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “It will be a
haunted
bed-and-breakfast! I’m writing a book about the renovation, with pictures, and plans and everything! It won’t be just Marty and me, of course. Betty will live here just as long as she wants. Which I know will be a long, long time!”

Kim smiled and squeezed the elderly woman’s thin arm. It might have been my imagination, but I thought Mrs. Bernini looked a little pained at the familiarity. Or perhaps I was sensing her awkwardness at knowing her housemates were waiting for her to die.

“Oh, and I should mention that we’re being discreet about our plans for the moment,” said Marty. “We want to present the idea to the neighborhood when everything’s set to go, to cut down on interference. This neighborhood is very . . . well . . . people have strong opinions.”

I nodded. Neighbor relations were always a challenge. Add the prospect of a year or so of construction into the mix, and things could get volatile. It was smart to go in armed with finalized drawings, permits, and work orders.

“We’ve been working with an architect, but we wanted to settle on a contractor before going any further. Also, Mrs. Bernini’s opinion is very important to us. We want her to be happy.”

A soft knock on the door cut me off. It was the man in overalls, the one I had seen in the garden from the window of the empty parlor.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said as he set a vase full of roses on a side table. “Just wanted to let you know I finished up trimming those bushes, Mrs. Bernini. I’m going to start on that water feature next.”

“Oh, that’s lovely. Please come in, Gerald. I’d like you to meet Mel Turner.”

I, for one, was relieved to know this fellow was not a specter. I had wondered after I spied him from the empty parlor. He carried pruning shears in one hand and wore a straw hat over his auburn hair. He wasn’t chubby, just tall and big-boned, his hands in what must have been extra-large leather work gloves. He had a full beard and a ruddy complexion, and wore a plaid shirt, the combination of which made him look like a lumberjack or a refugee from the Scottish Highland Games.