Give Up the Ghost: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery Read online

  I had no trouble believing Andrew Flynt could be unreasonable. But more likely what had happened was that ol’ Skip Buhner here, with his lack of experience in historic renovations, had underbid the job with regard to both the budget and the timeline. That happened a lot with amateurs, and typically resulted in shoddy renovations. Turner Construction often lost bids because we were honest and realistic about renovation costs and schedules. Many’s the time a potential client who had gone with another construction company called to ask me for help. Just the other day a woman called out of the goodness of her heart, to tell me she should have gone with Turner Construction rather than the company whose low bid turned out to be too good to be true.

  “So I take it you didn’t keep records of where these spaces are, or what might be in them?”

  He shook his head and glanced at his watch again.

  “Anything else you can tell me about Crosswinds? Anything odd?”

  “Nope. Just glad to have that damned monkey off my back. Went on forever.” His radio crackled and he answered: “Be right there. Hold on.” Then he turned back to me. “I don’t know anything else. Is that it?”

  “For now. Thanks for talking with me.” I handed him my business card. “Call me if you think of anything else, will you?”

  “Sure,” he said, sticking my card in his jeans pocket where, I was pretty sure, it would be forgotten and run through the next wash.

  Chapter Nine

  I returned a couple of calls with my hands-free set while driving across town to meet Luz and her students near the campus of San Francisco State.

  Sandwiched between nice examples of the sort of Victorian town houses for which San Francisco was justly famous, the Mermaid Cove apartment complex had been built in the mid-1940s, a time when pragmatism ruled. I imagined that inside each cottage were simple boxy rooms: two bedroom, one bath apartments with a living room and small dining room/kitchen. The best feature of the complex, by far, was that the cottages had been built in a square around a central courtyard, forming a tiny little neighborhood within a neighborhood. Several of the residents had brightened up their cottages with little pots of geraniums and impatiens on their small front porches.

  “And here she is now,” said Luz as Dog and I approached, as though they had just been talking about me. She was standing at the mouth of the apartment complex with five young adults: three girls, two boys.

  “No way,” said one young woman with long dark hair, her generous mouth sporting retro deep-red lipstick. “That’s not her.”

  “Way,” Luz said.

  “Way,” I seconded.

  “You’re not even wearing scarves, or anything,” the student pointed out.

  I looked down at my sparkly dress. “This isn’t enough for you? What am I, Scheherazade? Hey, who likes dogs and wants to pet-sit?”

  “I will,” said one young woman, taking Dog’s leash and petting him.

  “His name’s Dog,” I said as she talked in a high voice to him.

  “Dog?”

  “Yep.”

  “Isn’t that sort of . . . obvious?”

  I nodded. “You can call him Doug, if you prefer. He’s not fussy that way. All right, let’s get to work, shall we?” I slapped my hands together and rubbed them vigorously. “I’m a busy person, things to see, people to do.”

  “I think you mean the other way around,” another of the students said. “People to see, things to do.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Mel, this is Sinsi, Carmen, Diego, Eddie, and Venus,” said Luz. “Everybody, this is Mel Turner. Despite her lack of scarves, she apparently talks to ghosts.”

  “Nice to meet you all,” I said, doubting I would be able to keep their names straight. “How about no one tells me anything about what’s been going on yet. Let me do a walk-through first, so I can feel what I feel.”

  “I’m not going back in there,” said Carmen . . . or maybe Venus. “Hey, could you get my toothbrush? Actually, just grab my toilet bag, will you? It’s the one with the pink flowers.”

  “I need my hair gel, too,” said another one of the girls. “It’s the blue tube on the shelf above the toilet.”

  “My iPod,” said one of the boys. “I think it’s on the coffee table in the living room.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t I do some reconnaissance first, try to see what we’re dealing with, and if need be we’ll get your stuff out after. Okay?”

  I stepped onto the front porch and reached for the doorknob.

  “Hey,” said Diego or Eddie. “This is serious. Are you sure you should go in there, just like that? You don’t have, like, a crucifix or anything?”

  Luz crossed her arms over her chest and raised one eyebrow. I knew she was grateful to me for coming, but the whole business of ghosts made her nervous.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I got this. I’m a professional.”

  Despite my bluster, I was sort of making this up as I went along because there was no one-size-fits-all approach to ghosts. Other than my grandmother’s ring around my neck, I didn’t have any ghost-busting equipment with me. Nothing to capture spirits, or to protect myself from ghosts. No EMF detector, no camera, nothing to detect their presence. But truth to tell while it’s always disconcerting to encounter a spirit, I’d never been attacked by one. Frightened by them, yes. Made uncomfortable by them, most certainly. But by and large my experiences proved what my ghost-busting mentor, Olivier, taught: Ghosts are remnants of the humans they once were, no better or worse than when they walked this earth in living form.

  I lingered on the doorstep a moment, took a few deep breaths, stroked the ring at my neck, and reminded myself of that.

  Then I pushed in the plain, unadorned door and stepped into a living room with a large window looking onto the courtyard. To one side were a small dining area and a kitchen. The lines were plain, with no moldings or built-ins except in the kitchen, which had beautifully crafted original wood cabinets. I spied one tall, narrow cabinet, which probably housed a built-in ironing board, an old-fashioned convenience I wished houses still had. It was so much easier than getting out the screechy foldable ironing board. But that was back when a good housewife did things like iron on a daily basis.

  The kitchen was sparkling clean and neat, the bright yellow tiled counters empty, the linoleum floor freshly mopped. The ancient refrigerator was an ugly avocado green, but otherwise appeared spotless and hummed quietly to itself.

  Other than the kitchen, however, the apartment was a pigsty. The students had fled in the middle of the night so the apartment was still full of their stuff, arranged willy-nilly as in so many student apartments: a hodgepodge of salvaged furniture and expensive electronics. There was an old couch with the stuffing peeking out from one arm; a simple pine table with two mismatched straight chairs; a folding beach chair in front of a large, bulky TV, the old-fashioned kind, that was hooked up to what looked like a gaming system.

  They’d been here all of three days, were full-time students, hadn’t arranged their furniture but had found time to hook up their gaming system? I could see Caleb fitting right in at college.

  I held my hands out at my sides, palms up, then took a moment to breathe deeply and tried to feel for vibrations, as I’d seen Olivier do when I trailed him around haunted locales, but in this regard I was a bust as a ghost buster. I couldn’t really make anything happen. Instead, I usually just hung around—or clambered over roofs—until some ghost took pity and contacted me.

  As far as methodologies go, it left a lot to be desired.

  So I wasn’t surprised that this time, like most times, I didn’t feel anything.

  A simple arch in the living room opened onto a short hallway that led to two bedrooms and a bathroom. The bathroom counter was littered with toiletries, two hair dryers, and several towels hanging listlessly from a rack. The bedrooms wer
e disheveled: Sheets hung off the twin beds, and clothes were strewn everywhere.

  Either this gang had been visited by a poltergeist, or they were typical students.

  I lingered for a few more minutes, but didn’t see or feel anything unusual. Finally, I went outside to join an anxious-looking Luz, still standing outside with the students.

  I took a moment to greet an ecstatic Dog.

  “You see anything?” asked Sinsi. I think. Maybe it was Carmen.

  I shook my head. “Not much, except that you guys are slobs. Except for the kitchen. Somebody gets props for that.”

  The students exchanged wary glances.

  “What did I say?”

  “That’s the weirdest part,” said the student I thought was Eddie, and the others nodded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We didn’t clean the kitchen. The ghost did.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’ve never cleaned the kitchen. It gets cleaned at night. We’re sleeping and we hear something, and when we get up we see this . . . thing, or whatever it is, in the kitchen. Cleaning.”

  “Doesn’t matter how messy it is when we go to bed,” said Sinsi. “We wake up and that place is spotless.”

  “Have you seen it happening?”

  One of the girls shook her head. “Not, like, as a person, or anything. Just—you can see stuff getting done, moving around and stuff.”

  “Mops the floor and everything,” said Venus.

  “Doesn’t touch the rest of the apartment, just the kitchen,” Diego chimed in.

  “Is that normal? I mean, have you ever heard of something like that?” asked Carmen.

  “No, can’t say that I have.” I studied the students for a moment, then looked at Luz, who had a hoo boy expression on her face.

  “Just out of curiosity: Are you sure this isn’t something you can live with?” I asked. “I mean, a lot of people would pay extra for that kind of service.”

  They gaped at me, and Carmen made the sign of the cross.

  “It’s not right,” Sinsi muttered.

  “They’re scared, Mel,” Luz weighed in.

  Venus nodded. “Last time, she started yelling at us to keep it clean, to get out of her house.”

  That wasn’t good, I thought. Sometimes harmless hauntings ratcheted up over time, grew more intense or more threatening. Even if this spirit didn’t mean to hurt anyone, it could be difficult to live with something like that. Nothing like sharing your living space with someone who was unpredictable, intimidating—and dead.

  “Gotcha,” I said. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going inside as a group, and you’re going to grab whatever you’ll need for the next few days. I don’t want anyone going back in until I figure out how to resolve this, and while I’ll do my best to be quick about it, I can’t guarantee how long that will take.”

  “Let’s hope not long,” Luz said. “Okay, gang, let’s hustle. Inside, grab your stuff, and out. Quick like bunnies.”

  Dog and I stood in the doorway to the kitchen like a security detail while the students hurried into the bathroom and bedrooms and brought out their things. Diego unhooked his gaming system and Eddie cradled his iPod to his chest like a lost child.

  Finally, as they carried their things out to Luz’s car I asked her, “What do you know about the history of the apartment?”

  “Nothing really. I was hoping you could just go in there and tell that thing to go toward the light, or whatever. I gotta say, I’m a little disappointed in your abilities.”

  “Get in line. I’m not the one who claimed to be good at this, remember?” I said with a smile. “So have you talked to the landlord?”

  “Not yet. Get this: The kids haven’t even met her, they just have a PO box to send their rent check, and she mailed them the keys.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I guess I should try to track her down.”

  “Don’t you have classes to teach?”

  “Classes don’t start until next week. There are incessant faculty meetings, of course, but as for my own prep work, as you know, I am the soul of efficiency.” This was true. Luz was hyperorganized, and so on top of things that I wondered if it was some really effective form of OCD. Probably, though, it was just the hard-won habits that led a girl with a less than privileged background in East LA to win a scholarship to an Ivy League college and then to graduate school.

  Across the little courtyard, I saw movement behind a curtain.

  “Maybe there’s an easier way. These neighbors must all know one another.”

  I knocked on the door of the apartment facing the students’ rental.

  An unsmiling woman, likely in her seventies, answered. Her gray hair was in a twist atop her head, and she was wearing what looked like a polyester jogging suit, red with a white stripe. Perfect for running a marathon in 1982.

  “Hello,” I said. “My name’s Mel Turner.”

  “I don’t want any,” she said.

  “Any what?”

  “Whatever it is you’re selling.”

  “Oh, no—sorry—I’m not selling anything. I promise. I just wondered if I could ask you about Unit B.”

  She shrugged. “You thinking of moving in?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should take that personally, so I let it slide.

  “Could you tell me anything about it? Anything at all?”

  “All I know is it never rents for long. People move in, then move out within a couple of days.”

  “Really. Do you know the landlady?”

  She shook her head. “The units are all owned by different people.”

  “But the owner of Unit B just keeps renting it out? Has she ever arranged for a cleansing, or anything?”

  “I don’t keep track of housecleaning services.”

  “I meant a spiritual cleansing . . . ?”

  “A what, now?”

  “It’s like a spiritual sweep of the place, meant to get rid of . . . spirits.”

  She looked at me much the way I would have, a few years ago. Not unkindly, but with sympathy, tinged with worry. As though I’d gone off my meds.

  That was back when I thought the little boy I’d seen when I was a child was an imaginary friend. Back when I would have sworn that when people were dead they were gone, end of story. Back when I thought my mother was just plain weird when she refused to allow my father to buy and flip certain houses because they had a bad aura.

  Now that I had, apparently, inherited my mother’s sixth sense, I had been forced to eat a certain amount of crow.

  “Do you happen to know anything about the history of these apartments? You haven’t had any trouble in your unit?”

  “The plumbing keeps backing up, I’ll tell you that much. And the hot water runs out after about five minutes.”

  “What about odd noises? Things moving around . . . ?”

  She shook her head and went back into her place, slamming the door. Friendly.

  I knocked on a few more cottages, but no one answered. It was the middle of the day; most folks would be at work.

  Finally, I turned back to the students, who had finished loading their stuff and were now picking at their nails and looking at their phones.

  “This blows,” said Sinsi. The others nodded in agreement.

  “So, this place is cheaper than the other units?” I asked.

  “I don’t know exactly, but probably,” said Diego. “It’s well under market value, I can tell you that much. Have you seen what places rent for in the city these days? We’ve got no shot against the Google techies.”

  “You can say that again,” said Venus.

  “So, what do we do now, chief?” Luz asked.

  Good question.

 
“Okay, it’s a ghost who’s a neat freak. What say I go mess things up, see if I can annoy her?”

  The students looked shocked.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Luz asked.

  “It’s worth a try, right?”

  I went into the kitchen and started to throw things around. Luz hovered in the doorway of the apartment, clearly worried.

  “Helloooo?” I yelled as I flung open cabinets and tossed a dish towel to the floor. “Anyone home?”

  I started to smell fresh baked apple pie.

  “Anybody?”

  The canned goods in one cabinet were lined up in straight rows. I rearranged them.

  Suddenly, the aromas of cinnamon and fresh dough enveloped me. The scents might be coming from another unit, I supposed. Maybe Friendly from across the way had been in a hurry to take a pie out of the oven. But scent was often my first indication of a spiritual presence; cigar smoke or citrus or perfume sometimes lingered from days past.

  “Is anybody here?” I tried again. “Is this your kitchen?”

  I opened a drawer. Inside, mismatched cutlery was arranged in neat stacks. I pulled the drawer all the way out, shook it so the silverware was one big jumble, then pushed it back in.

  I waited.

  Nothing.

  I gave up and headed toward the door. “Sorry, Luz. I guess she’s not in the mood. Maybe I should try at night. Sometimes it’s easier to make con—”

  Behind me, there was a deafening crash.

  The silverware drawer had been pulled out and thrown to the floor, sending the spoons, forks, and serving utensils skittering across the linoleum.

  Luz screamed and ran out the door.

  • • •

  “It’s all right, Luz,” I said as I urged her to have a seat on the half wall, the students milling about her.

  “Is she okay?” Carmen asked.

  “You okay, Luz? Estás bien?”

  “Of course,” Luz said with a frown, gruff with embarrassment at having lost her composure in front of the students.

  “What happened in there?” asked Eddie, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Did she come after you with the egg beaters? Dude, she did that to me once, I was freaked.”