Give Up the Ghost: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (12 page)

“A couple of months ago, they send out this big announcement, like they’re suddenly an auction house. I mean, who do they think they’re fooling? I don’t mean to cast aspersions but . . .” She trailed off with shrug. “Anyway, they claimed to be running an auction for an anonymous client. Sent out an e-mail blast and everything.”

“Who was their client, do you know?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t go. For all I knew that stuff was stolen, which is
really
bad karma.”

In another part of the world Nancy might have crossed herself. But we were in Berkeley, so it was all down to karma. I imagined she might leave an extra something out for her goddess after we left.

“Do you happen to still have the catalog?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly. “It’s possible I kept it, but no idea where it would be.”

I took in the desk, laden with piles of papers and folders. I wasn’t casting judgment—it looked a lot like my office at home.

“Probably I threw it in the recycling. The whole thing sounded fishy to me.”

“Okay. Thanks for all the info. Hey, about those andirons out there, under the brass bed. . . .”

We haggled a little, and in the end I bought the andirons, a few other decorative metal pieces that caught my eye, and three plaster ceiling medallions. Also a toilet lid for the downstairs bathroom in my dad’s house, which was a never-ending renovation project. Turner Construction’s home base proved that old adage about the cobbler’s child having no shoes.

Landon carried the toilet lid out to the car, but I had already made arrangements for my moving guy, Nico, with his big truck to pick up all the other items from the various salvage yards when I had finished shopping. Much easier that way.

Back in the car, we headed north on 580 toward Richmond.

To the salvage yard where I was once kidnapped.

“Y
ou seem rather hesitant to go to ‘Uncle Joe’s,’” Landon said. “Is it too grimy even for you?”

“Oh no, of course not. I’ll dive into a Dumpster for the right set of shutters.”

He stared at me.

“I’m not kidding.”

“I fear you’re not. That’s what worries me.”

I laughed. “You can’t be afraid to get your hands dirty in my business. Or anything else, for that matter. No, it’s just that I . . . had a bad experience at Uncle Joe’s a couple of years ago.
But
it’s right across the street from a great barbecue place. You like barbecue?”

“Of course. It’s been a while, though.”

“I’m guessing they don’t have a lot of barbecue in England.”

“They have kidney pie, and fish and chips. Excellent scones, and marvelous Indian and Pakistani food. Everything else is pretty much up in the air. The English
do
, however, brew great tea. I had a ten-dollar cup of tea at the hotel this morning and it was atrocious. A stale tea bag plopped into a pot of hot water.”

Isn’t that the way you
make
tea?
I wondered. Maybe that’s why I was a coffee drinker. Maybe I would change my mind in England.

“When you say you had a bad experience at Uncle Joe’s,” Landon said, “what do you mean?”

“I was sort of, um, detained there.”

“Were you shoplifting?”

“Of course not! It’s a little complicated, but basically someone didn’t want me involved in something so he tied me up and locked me in after closing.”

Landon stared at me, appalled.

“As it turns out, he didn’t really mean anything by it. And Zach’s become a good friend, so all’s well that ends well.”

“You are a most extraordinary person.”

“Thank you,” I said, though judging by his tone it wasn’t at all clear this was a compliment.

He gazed out the window, though the scenery along the freeway toward Richmond was not the type to appear on tourist brochures. It was a pretty ugly, nondescript drive, featuring big box stores, carpet warehouses, fast-food restaurants, and the like.

“Can you think of any unfinished business your sister might have had? Maybe something she always meant to tell you, or wanted you to know?” I thought back on my vision of Chantelle in the hallway, when she paused in front of us. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was trying to tell Landon something. “Could she have written you a letter, or maybe left a note . . . ?”

Landon looked startled. “How did you know that?”

“She did?” I said, at least as shocked as he that I’d gotten it right. “What did it say?”

He looked uncomfortable. “It’s . . . complicated.”

“Families are always complicated. Did it have anything to do with what happened?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Do you have it with you?”

He nodded. “I received it just before leaving England, and brought it with my papers. I wanted very much to have a conversation with my sister about its contents.”

“Landon, you don’t have to show it to me but if it might have anything to do with Chantelle’s death, you really need to tell Inspector Crawford.”

“I already called the inspector and read it to her over the phone. She’ll be dropping by to pick it up and ‘have another talk,’ I believe is how she put it.”

“When?”

“She said she was looking into something, and that she would be in touch this afternoon.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence. I got off the freeway in Richmond, headed down Macdonald Avenue, and pulled into Uncle Joe’s gravel parking lot. The salvage yard was in a less than desirable part of town. The massive hangarlike structure, junk-filled yard, and potholed parking lot were all surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped by a roll of barbed wire.

I lingered in the car for a moment, studying the salvage yard. On the one hand, I had managed to extricate myself last time I was here, which made me feel rather badass. On the other hand, just looking at the place made me feel a little claustrophobic. But it was the middle of the day, and I had a man with me who would not, I felt reasonably certain, try to trap me within the salvage yard. And I had my cell phone, and an attitude.

“Are you quite all right?” Landon asked. “Would it be better if we just left?”

“I’m fine,” I said, grabbing the door handle. “Let’s go.”

The attendant behind the register in the open warehouse was paid minimum wage, and was not as invested
in the yard as Nancy and her employees were. I had never seen a manager, much less the owner, Uncle Joe, who was reportedly an old man who liked to fish.

So I was almost sure the pimply kid sitting at the counter wouldn’t be able to tell me much. But I was going to give it the old college try.

While Landon flicked through a rack of “vintage”—read: old—clothing, distaste registering on his face, I approached the register with a big smile.

“Hi! I’m here about the Crosswinds Collection?”

“The what?”

“The Crosswinds Collection. You guys were hosting it here, I guess, doing some sort of auction?”

“We’re not an auction house, lady. Try Clars in Oakland, on Telegraph.”

“Someone told me that a couple of months ago, Uncle Joe’s put out the word that you had the Crosswinds Collection, even did up a little brochure and sent out an e-mail.” As the words left my mouth I realized just how ludicrous they sounded. This wasn’t the kind of place where it would ever even occur to management to stage an upscale auction; still less likely that they would know how to go about such a thing. Uncle Joe’s was a just barely legal, cash-only business that didn’t bother with records or receipts that the IRS might want to audit. The idea that Uncle Joe’s maintained a mailing list was ridiculous.

Could Nancy’s memory be faulty? She seemed as surprised as I that the auction was at Uncle Joe’s.

“Dunno.” The young man shrugged and turned back to his iPad.

“Any chance I could speak with your boss?”

“He’s fishing.”

“Anybody else I could talk to, a manager, maybe?”

“You want to leave him a note, I’ll pass it along. But I can’t guarantee anything. He’s not what you’d call hands-on.”

I was getting that feeling.

I wrote a note asking the manager to call me, and pushed it across the counter. He put it in a drawer under the counter, where I imagined it would remain, along with the Chinese takeout menu and the mélange of soy sauce packets, paper clips, plastic spoons, and old napkins.

“Hey, is the barbecue at CJ’s still good?” I asked.

A glimmer of interest. “The best.”

“Want me to bring you some?” I offered in a blatant attempt to win the young man over.

“Nah. I had Chinese. Thanks, though.”

“Do you know Skip Buhner? Or Andrew Flynt?”

He shook his head.

“How about Chantelle?”

“Chantelle? The psychic lady? She was awesome! Dude, she got killed though. Did you hear?”

“I did, yes. Did her name ever come up in relation to anything here at the salvage yard?”

He looked confused. “Nah, Dude. She’s like a famous lady, lives in the city, I think. Not likely to hang out at a dump like this, right? I mean, what kind of people would hang out here?”

I refrained from pointing out that
we
were hanging out here, and thanked him for his help. I saw Landon examining a card table loaded with old electronic equipment: stereo receivers from the 1970s, a CB radio, and the like. He was leaning over from the waist and holding his hands clasped behind his back, as though afraid to touch anything.

“Wait. One more thing: Do you have any weathervanes?” I asked the young man.

“Weather what?”

“Do you keep decorative metal someplace special?”

He gestured to the far corner, past long aisles of doors. This was where I had been trapped that one time. I hurried through, hoping to put those demons to rest.

No weathervane, but I did find a heating grate that might fit well in an Art Nouveau house Turner Construction was finishing up in Bernal Heights. Then I noticed larger metal pieces piled up against the chain-link fence next to one of the open warehouse doors.

Several lengths of wrought iron seemed to be from the right time period. I knew a metal artist who could probably fashion them into a widow’s walk for Crosswinds. I hadn’t measured the exact length needed, but after years in this business I was pretty good at guesstimating, and I thought there would be enough.

Landon joined me, and I pointed out the scrollwork.

“See the workmanship here?” I asked. “You can tell it was soldered by hand because there are no marks of joinery the way there would be if it were cast from a mold. And the patina’s great. There’s almost never a maker’s mark on old wrought iron, unfortunately, but this is still a lovely piece.”

“What would you use it for?”

“I was thinking of the widow’s walk.”

“Why do they call it that?”

“Women used to stand up there to look for their husbands coming back from sea.”

“And they so often didn’t come back,” he said with a pensive nod. “So even though this scrollwork wasn’t original to Crosswinds, you think it might do?”

“It might.” Our gaze met and held as we crouched over the metal. “I hate to disillusion you, but I don’t know what the Crosswinds ghost wants, and at the moment am only operating from Chantelle’s directions. I wish I could talk to her, get a little more detail.”

Only then did it dawn on me: This was Landon’s recently deceased sister I was talking about.
Idiot.

“I’m so sorry, Landon. Sometimes I get so focused on my job I forget . . .”

“No, no.” Landon waved me off. “That’s quite all right. I understand. The important thing is to try to figure this out. Perhaps putting the house to rights will allow the ghost to communicate with us and tell us what it knows.”

“Like I was saying, though, we don’t know that Chantelle’s death had anything at all to do with Crosswinds, much less with the haunting of Crosswinds.”

“True, but . . . it’s the only thing I can think of to do at the mo—”

He was cut off by a shout.

“Watch out!
Car!
” the young man behind the counter yelled.

I was still trying to process his words when Landon sprang up and grabbed me, half carrying and half throwing me to the ground ten feet away. A terrible screech of metal on metal rang out as a big black truck veered off the road and smashed into the fence. The metal pieces crashed and scattered, and a column and various sections of lumber smashed onto the very spot where we had been standing a moment ago.

We had barely rolled over to see what had happened when the truck was thrown into reverse and, tires screeching, raced down the street.

Landon and I stared at each other in shock.

“It’s official,” I said finally. “Uncle Joe’s is, hands down, my least favorite salvage yard
ever
.”

“T
here’s an old saying,” Landon said in a quiet voice. “If someone’s trying to kill you it’s a good sign you’re onto something.”

“It could have been an accident,” I suggested. “This part of town is a little dicey.”

The young salvage yard attendant had run toward us, swearing a blue streak. But no one managed to get a license number or a description of the driver.

“It was a nice truck, though,” said the young man. “I know trucks, and that was a shiny, late model.”

“What make?” Landon asked.

“Dunno.”

So much for his expertise.

Only then did I realize Landon was favoring his right leg. His pants were torn at the knee, and the fabric was stained with blood. “Landon, are you hurt?”

“Nothing serious.”

“Come on, I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“
No.
Listen to me, Mel, it’s not serious. My ribs, on the other hand . . .”

“At least let me look at it—I’ve got a first-aid kit in the car.”

“I have a better idea,” he said, glancing at the young man who was holding his head and staring at the mess of iron and lumber and twisted fence. “Let’s put some distance between us and Uncle Joe’s. Why don’t you take me back to the Claremont, and we can clean up there.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I’m just going to tag those iron pieces for Crosswinds, and then we’ll get you fixed up, right as rain.”

As I had told Landon, at salvage yards you have to strike while the iron’s hot. Even when people are trying to kill you.

•   •   •

The elegant old hotel sat white and beaconlike on the side of the hill. I had been to the bar there a few times because it offered a spectacular view, but I had never seen the guestrooms.

When Landon opened his door and waved me in, I decided I hadn’t been missing much. The room was nice enough but underwhelming, as if someone had tried to take this historic building and make it look like a standard Hilton: There were ugly bedspreads and ugly blackout draperies and ugly lamps. But then I was often disappointed by the attempts to bring historic buildings into the modern world.

“So, did you check out room four twenty-two yet?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Landon said. “But I did ask the staff at the front desk. I was told you’re quite right, a little girl’s ghost is said to linger there. Some guests actually request that room, hoping to interact with spirits from the beyond.”

“Well, as my father would say, there’s a lid for every pot. Why don’t you take a seat, and either, um, take your pants off or rip them the rest of the way.”

“They’re a dead loss anyway,” he said, slowly lowering himself to sit on the edge of the bed and grimacing. He ripped the right pants leg open as I went to the bathroom to get soap and a damp washcloth.

Good.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to be alone in a hotel room with a pantsless Landon Demetrius III.

“So,” I said as I knelt before him and organized my first-aid kit, setting out the gauze and cotton balls, hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin. “Besides a little-girl ghost, the Claremont holds another distinction. They used to have fire silos on the outside of the building. There were entrances on each floor and this long spiral slide that would deposit you out on the ground.”

“Is that so?”

“This might sting a little,” I warned him.

“I believe I am man enough to handle it,” he replied. “Ignore any screams, and should I faint, well, that will be all for the best, won’t it?”

At my expression he added, “I’m kidding, Mel. Do your worst, I’ll be fine.”

I carefully washed away the dirt and blood on his leg with soap and water, though his shirttail kept intruding. “You should probably take your shirt off, or at least pull it away from the wound.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and unbuttoned his shirt, baring a torso that was . . . just lovely. I kept my focus on his wounds, but I was by now a pro at seeing things in my peripheral vision, and his chest was hard not to notice. Either he was naturally ripped or he spent a lot of time thinking about the cardinal equation while working out at the gym on the Cambridge campus.

I blew out a breath.

“Are you all right?” he asked me. “The sight of blood make you queasy?”

“No, not at all,” I said, and started to clean the gash
on his knee. No way was I going to admit what was really bothering me. I wished he’d button his shirt back up, but he was looking at his side, gently probing his ribs, where a large area was red and already purpling.

“I should be the one asking you: Are you all right?” I said.

“I enjoy starting the day with a broken rib or two. Makes me feel manly.”

I smiled. Once I had cleaned the wound, it was clear it wasn’t too serious. Still, he wouldn’t be balancing on that knee anytime soon.

“So anyway, as you might imagine, kids made it a sport to evade hotel security and slide down the fire escapes as often as possible. The silos were torn down a while ago, unfortunately. Those were good times.”

“You Oaklanders make your own fun, don’t you? Using the cemetery as a park, sliding down emergency fire chutes . . .”

“And running from drive-by shootings. Sure. We know how to have a good time.”

He smiled. I applied salve and a small bandage to his knee. As it turned out, his ribs were the biggest casualty of the day. But if he hadn’t thrown me to the side, I might well have landed in the hospital.

“Listen, Landon, thank you. I think you may have saved my life.”

“Nah, you’re tough. You probably would have survived.”

“Well, in any case. Thank you.”

“You are most welcome. Mel, you mentioned that you had trouble at that salvage yard in the past. Any reason to believe this ‘accident’ wasn’t an accident?”

“I have no idea.”

“Assuming it wasn’t,” he said in a very quiet voice, “I don’t expect it was the first attempt on your life.”

“No.”

Our gaze met and held.

I had finished bandaging his leg but was still kneeling on the floor in front of him. I started to stand up but didn’t realize my leg had fallen asleep and fell over on my side.

Smooth, Mel.
Real smooth.

“Mel, are you all right?” Landon, despite his injuries, leapt up to give me a hand. “Come, sit down.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and he stood before me. Now his bare chest was right at eye level.

“Are you sure
you
weren’t hurt earlier?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I said, looking anywhere but at him. “I think you twisted midair so that I would land on you, ensuring your injuries, and my safety. Pretty smooth move.”

“Nothing James Bond wouldn’t have done. Say, would you like to see the letter from Chantelle?”

“I would love to.”

He crossed over to a small writing desk and pulled the letter out of the top drawer, then passed the envelope to me.

“A real letter,” I said. “On paper, with a stamp. I’m impressed.”

“My sister was old-fashioned in some ways. It had to do with the ‘vibrations’ of computers—she preferred pen and paper. She still had an old-school answering machine because she didn’t trust voice mail. Yet another way in which we saw the world differently.”

It was written in dark purple ink on light green paper. The script was upright and easy to read:

Dearest Landon,

You and I haven’t been terribly close over the years, and the last time we spoke you warned me
of this very thing. But please believe that I know what I’m doing. I am putting things into place, and will soon be able to pay you back every penny. I know you would say that what I’m doing is wrong, but you and I have never seen eye to eye on such things. Dad always said you were a good little soldier, while I was a free spirit and in this, if nothing else, he was correct.

I have a line on someone now, someone with more dollars than sense, and he’ll pay through the nose. With luck, I’ll have everything settled by the time you arrive!

Love, Chantelle (your Cheryl)

Below her name was a little drawing that looked like a ship with sails and a flag, with a pole through it.

“That drawing . . . ,” I said. “It looks like the weathervane from Crosswinds.”

“Does it?” he peered over my shoulder at the note. “I assumed it was a doodle of some sort.”

“No. . . . I’m pretty sure that’s the weathervane. Karla showed me a photograph of it this morning.”

Our eyes met for a long time.

“So maybe your sister’s death really does have something to do with Crosswinds.”

He nodded.

I reread the note. “She says you warned her about something?”

“I can’t remember what, but I’m sure it was something general, such as don’t play with people’s hearts.”

“And she owed you money?”

He nodded. “Chantelle did well, relatively speaking. But she always lived beyond her means. I—I feel as though I shouldn’t be speaking ill of the dead.”

“You’re really not. All of us have some good and some bad in us; it’s how humans are. Right now we’re just trying to figure out what happened to your sister.”

He went to gaze out the window. “Chantelle had gotten herself into financial trouble, and not for the first time. You saw where she lived. Do you have any idea how much that apartment cost? Though I suppose her business required her to convey the right image.”

“Nothing succeeds like success?”

“Just so. But Chantelle was also a spender. She didn’t drink, she didn’t take drugs, but she did like to shop. You should have seen the number of shoes the woman had.”

“Oh, sure, me too,” I lied. “Can never have enough shoes. I wonder: Do you think this note suggests she was . . . well, blackmailing someone?”

“I hope not. It does sound that way, though it could mean she had found a wealthy client whom she was able to string along. Unfortunately it doesn’t give the slightest hint as to whom the poor mark was—unless you’re right, that this drawing is of the Crosswinds symbol. And truthfully, she’d been rather . . . obsessed with the Flynt family since she met them.”

“She mentioned them to you?”

He nodded. “When I received the offer from Berkeley I phoned her to say I was coming to town. She was very excited about her association with the Flynts, even suggested I meet them, and perhaps invest in their latest venture, which was some sort of antiaging enterprise, I believe. I take it they’re quite wealthy.”

“Very,” I said with a nod, thinking back on the information the Internet search had turned up about the Flynts. Grandfather George, son, Andrew, and his wife, Stephanie, were all involved in numerous public ventures and charities, and all, apparently, had more dollars than sense.

“Okay. . . . So where does this leave us?” I wondered aloud. “How do we find out who Chantelle was blackmailing—assuming she was actually doing such a thing?”

“I’m going to guess that Inspector Crawford would say it doesn’t leave us anywhere,” Landon said. “And that we should stay out of it.”

“True. But I have work to do at Crosswinds, anyway. I planned to go over tomorrow afternoon. I’ll look through the place more thoroughly, and see if the ghosts can tell me anything.”

“The ghosts.”

It wasn’t a question, exactly, or an acknowledgment, but a statement.

Landon sighed and collapsed back onto the side of the bed. He hunched over and with his bared torso, his chin resting on steepled fingers, he looked like he could be a modern day
Thinker
. He was gorgeous. Really gorgeous, like his sister.

“Cheryl—I guess I’ll go ahead and think of her that way, now that she’s not here to object—she and I were so close as kids,” he said. “Our parents died early, and we didn’t have much, so we clung to each other. But when I went into the military, and she went off to ‘find herself,’ things changed.”

“You were in the service?”

“Started out enlisted, but I wound up getting some training, going back to school. I’m good with computers.”

“I hear you’re
great
with computers.”

“You looked me up?”

“Of course I did. You looked me up too, remember? You discovered the Diogenes Theorem. Very impressive.”

The corner of his mouth kicked up, just barely. “Do you even know what the Diogenes Theorem is?”

“Not a clue. But I hear it’s pretty good.”

Now he smiled for real, a brilliant smile that made him even more attractive. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

“Yes, I guess it is pretty good. It certainly made me a lot of money. But then I got tired of the cutthroat world of business, and secured a lectureship at Cambridge thanks to the cachet associated with the Diogenes Theorem.”

“I hear academia’s pretty cutthroat too. You should meet my best friend Luz. She teaches at San Francisco State. Have you ever thought you may have gone from the frying pan into the fire?”

A humorless laugh. “I may well have. The funny thing is I really enjoy teaching. Calculus is my favorite, hands down. There’s something so gratifying about watching students have that ‘aha’ moment.”

“I only know enough to cut the right angle, I’m sorry to say.”

He fixed me with a keen look. “Methinks there might be a little bit more to it. Not to mention, a little more to you than meets the eye.”

Once again, our gaze held just a beat too long. I turned around too quickly and stepped on the first-aid kit, which flipped up and knocked over the bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

We hurriedly cleaned things up, then I packed the first-aid kit, shoved it under my arm, and fled.