Keeper of the Castle: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery Read online

  “Do you know her name, anything else about her?” I asked. I was going to have to figure out who this woman was and what she had to do with Donnchadh or this monastery.

  He shook his head. “But I shall keep her safe. I stake my life upon it.”

  I wasn’t convinced the poor guy had a life to put to the stake for anyone anymore, but I got the gist.

  * * *

  Alicia was waiting for me when I walked into the foyer of the main house.

  “Did you find the address of the warehouse?” I asked.

  “No. I’m sorry. It seems Mr. Libole removed the address on each invoice. I didn’t notice at the time, which was incredibly sloppy of me. I just had no reason to suspect he’d be keeping such secrets. Now I’m making phone calls—I’ll track it down, one way or another,” she said with determination. “I feel terrible that it’s taken me this long.”

  “I appreciate your looking,” I said, disappointed but trying not to show it. Alicia was so hard on herself there was no need to heap on more punishment.

  “But I was thinking about that other thing you asked me about. The security tapes from that night.”

  “Do they show anything?”

  “Nothing visual. But like I said, it has that strange voice on it. . . . Anyway, I thought you might want to listen.” She gave me a significant look. “Maybe you’d be able to understand something.”

  Our eyes held for a long moment, and she continued. “Brendan told me about your . . . abilities. With spirits. I’m . . . It’s amazing. What an incredible thing to be able to contact people from the other side.”

  “I don’t . . .” I was about to deny it, to decry my rotten luck. But then I decided that Alicia was right. I had just spent much of the afternoon chatting with a man from the fifteenth century, or thereabouts. It hadn’t been the most scintillating conversation I’d ever taken part in, but when I thought about it, it was nothing short of miraculous.

  I nodded. “Thanks, Alicia. I’d love to listen to that tape.”

  She led me to a small, windowless cubicle in the basement not far from the Discovery Room. It was full of electronic equipment, from computers to surveillance monitors displaying several sections of the monastery, the surrounding woods, and portions of the perimeter fence.

  Alicia cued something up on one of the computers and hit play.

  The voice was ghostly; no doubt about it. Covered in static and fading in and out, it was a strange, ethereal whispering that rose to weeping and wailing. The same wailing I’d heard when I first found Larry McCall. I didn’t have to understand the words to feel the chills going up and down my spine.

  “Is that . . . ? She’s speaking Spanish, isn’t she?”

  Alicia’s eyes were huge. “I think so. Or Portuguese, or maybe Italian. It’s really hard to make out.”

  “I keep intending to learn Spanish,” I said. “But so far I’m restricted to construction-site vocabulary. Which is quite limited. And somehow I doubt a centuries-old ghost would be speaking about circular saws, which for your information is sierra circular.”

  Alicia smiled. “She . . . The poor woman sounds like she needs help. Do you . . . do you think we have to help her, somehow?”

  I couldn’t help but note that Alicia was now using the pronoun “we.” It felt nice to think that now we were in this together, that I had an ally here at Elrich’s eccentric estate.

  “I think you may be right,” I said. “She needs something. The first step would be to get someone to listen to this and interpret it for us.”

  “I’ll copy it to a thumb drive for you.”

  There were plenty of guys in my employ whose first language was Spanish. But I didn’t want to ask any of them for help. They were already freaked-out enough, what with the goings-on at the project. Besides, I knew another native Spanish speaker who might be able to help.

  Luz. She was the perfect person. Unfortunately, she hated ghosts. The woman wasn’t scared of anything in this life except ghosts. And clowns. But I was desperate.

  Time for her to face one of her fears.

  * * *

  “You want me to do what?”

  After promising Alicia I’d let her know what I found out, I hopped in my car and zoomed across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco State University, where I cornered Luz in her office.

  “Just listen to the recording and see if you can make anything out.”

  “Who’s on the recording, Mel?”

  “It could be stray radio waves.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s behind door number two?”

  “It could be a woman saying something in Spanish. Or Portuguese. Or maybe Italian.”

  “Is this a ghost?”

  “It’s a recording.”

  “Of a ghost?”

  “Maybe. They’re the security tapes that are supposed to run all the time—there was no visual at all, but some audio, at the time Larry McCall was killed. Probably the killer erased them on purpose, but it’s just possible it’s something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Every time this one ghost comes by, the temperature plummets. Sometimes ghosts drain energy sources, like flashlight batteries and that sort of thing. It’s possible the ghost came by during the murder, or perhaps was even attracted by the violence, somehow, and her energy ruined the recording. Maybe.”

  Luz gave me her one-eyebrow-raised stare.

  “Just listen and tell me if you can make anything out. For Graham’s sake.”

  She glared at me, but settled down to listen.

  “She’s praying,” said Luz after a few moments. “I think she’s saying the rosary.”

  “That makes sense—I saw her carrying beads.”

  “And . . . she’s looking for her room.”

  “What room?”

  “The presidential suite, of course.” Luz gave me a look. “She doesn’t say.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She’s . . . hungry. Very hungry. She keeps repeating that: “Tengo hambre, mucho hambre.”

  “Is that what she’s saying? This makes a lot more sense. . . . I thought she was saying she had a man.”

  “Hambre, not hombre,” lectured Luz. “This is why pronunciation matters.”

  “Yes, Professor.” I actually had been confused, but mostly I said it to annoy Luz and keep her tethered to her usual snide sense of humor.

  “Wait . . . ,” said Luz. “Play that part again.”

  The recording was scratchy and faded in and out. A listener had to be pretty creative to figure out what was being said; a lot of words could have gone a number of different ways.

  “I think . . . she’s a prisoner. Was there a prisoner being kept here?”

  “At a monastery? I don’t think a woman would have been kept there.”

  “Is there a way to find out for sure? How much do you know about the building?”

  “I’ve been reading up, but it was an old building, inhabited for a very long time. Plus there are huge gaps in the records. But I would be surprised to hear of a woman prisoner being kept at a monastery. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Seems odd, but what do I know?” she said with a shrug.

  “Does she say anything about a man being killed with a bag of mortar? No names or descriptions? Or anything about a treasure?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I can make out, but I’ll take it home and listen to the recordings again, see if I can hear anything else.”

  “You don’t have to, Luz. You’ve done a lot already, and I know how this freaks you out.”

  She shrugged, but seemed agitated, almost angry. “She . . . she’s obviously in need of something. I’ll take them home and listen again, just in case.”

  “Thank you.”

  She just nodded. Yep, agitated for sure.

  All this time, when Luz said she was afraid of ghosts, I thought it was in an abstract “ghosts are profoundly disturbing” kind of way.

  Now I wondered: Had Luz experienced something she did
n’t want to tell me about? If so, why wouldn’t she have confided in me? But looking at her now, the stubborn tilt of her chin, the determined look in her eyes, I realized: Luz Cabrera did things on her own time, in her own way. It was that determination that had helped her claw her way out of her working-class neighborhood and through graduate school, that had given her the fortitude with which she approached the vicissitudes of life and all the difficulties that the world of social work threw at her.

  I supposed we all had to come to the spirit world in our own fashion.

  * * *

  As I drove back over the Golden Gate Bridge toward Marin, appreciating the picture-perfect late-afternoon sun glinting off the ocean and the almost comically fluffy white clouds over the Marin Headlands, I realized that although Donnchadh’s revelations about his love for the Spanish-speaking Lady in Red were fascinating, they brought me not one step closer to figuring out what was going on. So I stopped by the house, filled Alicia in on the little the recordings had revealed, grabbed the paperwork on the job to go over one more time, and snagged Keeper of the Castle.

  Then Dog and I headed back to the hospital.

  Graham was in that strange, vacant sleep. His eyes were encircled by patches of solid black—not blue like a black eye, but true deep purple-black. It was disconcerting.

  I sat by his side and thumbed through all the paperwork associated with the job, but found nothing pertinent. So I brought out the novel. Keeper of the Castle really was a darned good read. I was completely absorbed in the travails of the star-crossed couple when my phone rang.

  Nurse Ratched glared at me. I apologized and jumped up to take the call out in the corridor.

  My stomach fell when I saw the readout: Valerie. My ex-husband’s wife and my stepson Caleb’s current stepmother. And one of my least favorite people.

  Of course, I was also one of her less than favorite people, so if she was calling me, it was probably important. I swore under my breath and then answered the phone with all the sincerity I could muster.

  “Valerie, what a surprise. How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m exhausted.” If the woman on the other end of the line had been anyone else, I might have taken this more seriously. After all, Valerie was now pregnant. But since she had always claimed to be exhausted prepregnancy as well, despite having no job and employing both a maid and a gardener, I wasn’t all that sympathetic. Like that of a lot of underemployed wealthy people I’d met in my line of work, Valerie’s exhaustion seemed to expand to fill her vast number of hours of having nothing to do but gaze at her well-massaged navel and complain.

  “And I just got a call from the police,” she continued. “Caleb was picked up in Golden Gate Park.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “What?” Now she had my attention. “Where? What happened? Is he okay?”

  “He and his little hoodlum friends were picked up for vandalism.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I wish. And Daniel’s out of town, and Caleb’s mother is AWOL, as usual.”

  Angelica was a caring mother, though she was a big-wig financial type and did travel a lot for business. But unless I missed my guess, she had arranged for Caleb to stay with Daniel and Valerie while she was gone. Daniel, no doubt, had interpreted this as Caleb staying at the house, not as Caleb needing any active parenting. But Caleb was at an age ripe for screwing up.

  “I’m a little busy, Valerie. I’m actually up in Marin on a job, in the hospital, and . . .”

  “You’re in the hospital?”

  “No, a friend of mine was hurt.”

  “Oh. Sorry to hear that. Anyway, if we don’t get Caleb by six, he’ll have to spend the whole night in jail.”

  Valerie was fond of using the royal “we.” We both knew she meant if I didn’t get Caleb out, he’d be there all night. And she probably wasn’t all that worried about him staying the night with the cops. She was simply stating a fact. Picking up the phone to call and tell me about Caleb’s situation was as far as Valerie was willing to commit herself.

  Why did I even try to fight this sort of thing? I wondered.

  I sighed and gave in to the inevitable. I quizzed Valerie until she coughed up all the pertinent information, and she accused me of being mean only once. Then I made a couple of phone calls and learned where to go and how to go about getting Caleb released into my custody. That led to the next question: What did I do with him once I got him? I called Dad to see if he’d be willing to have Caleb at the house for a bit, until his parents returned and came up with a plan.

  When I got back to the ICU, I surprised Nurse Ratched standing by my chair, immersed in Keeper of the Castle. Probably the sexy bits.

  She let it fall onto the chair, and blushed.

  “I’m almost done with it—why don’t I leave it for you when I’m finished?”

  “Oh, I don’t . . . Oh,” she stammered.

  “You won’t believe how it ends,” I said. “It really is a darned good book.”

  * * *

  “Vandalism? Seriously?” I shook my head. “Vandalism?”

  “Why do you keep repeating the word?” asked the sullen teenager in the passenger’s seat, nursing a black eye.

  “Because I really can’t believe you. I mean, at least with shoplifting, maybe you get a candy bar or something out of the deal. But what possible motive could you have to vandalize Golden Gate Park?”

  Caleb just shrugged. He would be listening to his iPod except that I had confiscated it, so I knew he could hear me. Whether he was actually listening was another matter. The arresting officer at the station had been kind enough to pull me aside and suggest Caleb had gotten in over his head with a few guys who were known to be punks. They had spray-painted on some of the walls of the park, but when a couple of the guys started snapping off newly planted saplings, Caleb had intervened and received a black eye for his trouble.

  Helping fuel my anger was the realization that I had driven straight to Oakland without stopping to pick up Dog. I had called Alicia, and she’d agreed to take him for a walk and feed him, but I still felt guilty.

  “Did you tell Bill?” Caleb asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What did he say?” Caleb’s voice caught on the last word.

  I glanced at him and caught the glint of tears in his eyes. My bluster left me just as soon as his left him.

  “Well, you know my dad. He wanted to know how you intended to clean up the mess you made.”

  Caleb looked out the window at the dark park and swiped at his eyes surreptitiously.

  “Let’s swing by and see how bad it is. That way we can come up with a plan.”

  “It’s a washable kind.”

  “Washable spray paint?”

  “I heard about it at the Garfield Lumber barbecue. It was my idea.”

  “Defacing public property was your idea?”

  “No, using the washable kind of paint.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. The cop also told me that Caleb had apologized and offered to clean up the damage, which made the other punks he was with hoot in derision.

  “Anyway, for now, Dad’s cooking dinner, and you’re staying with him,” I said. “I’ll bring you back tomorrow so you can start cleaning the place up.”

  “And after that?”

  “I don’t know yet. I imagine Dad will have some suggestions. It’s a good bet the phrase ‘elbow grease’ will be mentioned.”

  “Hey, I heard about Graham. Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yes, I think so. He has a very hard head. And he looks like a panda—check this out.” I showed him the photo on my phone.

  He smiled for a moment; then his face fell.

  “Mel, I’m . . .” His voice wavered again.

  I reached over and tousled his rich brown hair. “I know. You screwed up. We all screw up from time to time. But you just used up your Get Out of Jail Free card. Next time, I’m telling them to go ahead and throw away the key.”

  * *
*

  It felt great to be home, in the embrace of family. Dad was making chicken soup, and the scents of sage and marjoram wafted through the house, reminiscent of countless Thanksgiving Day aftermaths. The actual day of Thanksgiving celebration was always fun, what with the traditional roast turkey and as many friends as could crowd around the dining table. My mother had never believed in turning anyone away, so Thanksgiving Chez Turner was always an event. Half the workers of Turner Construction joined us, bringing contributions of homemade tamales and guacamole and pies, many experiencing their first Thanksgiving since arriving in this country.

  But it was the day after Thanksgiving I’d really cherished as a kid. My dad would get up early and fix some sort of elaborate breakfast of leftovers, then start the soup from the turkey carcass. The aromas would wake me up and wrap themselves around me like a warm hand-knitted shawl. The day would be spent hiking in the redwoods, or going to a matinee, or playing Monopoly. The Turners weren’t Black Friday shoppers, more like Black Friday hangers-out. My parents almost never just did nothing, so this was a magic day.

  Today Dad was making beef stew for dinner; the chicken soup was merely an afterthought from last night’s leftovers. Dad liked to keep busy in the kitchen, multitasking while he listened to the radio.

  Watching Caleb as he clumsily chopped carrots for a salad, I felt sad that he had no such memories. In many ways, he was incredibly lucky. His well-to-do parents could afford to give him the best of everything, including a first-rate education. He was healthy and had more than enough to eat. But he had never known the kind of consistent emotional warmth and support that I had enjoyed, the rock-solid certainty that I belonged and was wanted. Growing up, I had found it stifling at times and had to be out on my own for a while before I fully appreciated how good I had it, but still.

  Vandalism?

  I had a hard time accepting that Caleb had gone along with something as stupid and pointless as vandalism, washable spray paint or not. I didn’t need Luz’s social work expertise to tell me this was a cry for help, for attention, for guidance. Not for the first time, I wondered how much to intervene. It wasn’t my place to tell Caleb’s parents what they should be doing, much less to suggest that he move in here with Dad and Stan and me. But unless something changed, and soon, Caleb could get himself into real trouble.