Give Up the Ghost: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (21 page)

“Could very well be,” he said, not looking up from the computer screen. “Mr. Buhner does a good deal of business with the store, so he might have simply attached his client’s name to keep things straight.”

“Mr. Buhner does a lot of business here?”

“Oh, sure. Mostly in trade. His wife simply can’t get enough of our Americana collection,” he gestured toward a corner that featured eagles and wooden items painted in red, white, and blue. Most were rather primitive wooden carvings, but there were also some fine examples of framed cross-stitch samplers and the like.

“This would be his wife, Karla, the Realtor?”

“That’s her! You know her?”

“Sure, we go way back.”

“Well as you know, she lives right around the corner. Darling place, and just about the cutest garden you’d ever like to see, isn’t it?”

“
So
cute. It’s right around the corner, you say?”

He nodded. “I just sold her a new whirligig: half the fins are red-and-white stripes, half are blue with white stars! As the kids would say, it’s adorbs!”

I drove around one corner, but all I saw were standard suburban houses with standard suburban lawns. So I made a U-turn and went back the other way, and there it was: a midcentury ranch-style split-level with an
American flag waving by the front door. The mailbox was carved to look like Uncle Sam, and the picket fence–enclosed garden featured mini-lighthouses and figurines of frolicking children and several whirligigs, one of which was painted in the stars and stripes.

None of this captured my attention, however. I was too distracted by the weathervane on the roof. It was shaped like a ship, and had a lovely copper patina.

Oh no they did
not
.

I stopped the car with a jolt and jumped out, passing through the cute little picket gate with nary a glance at the oh so Americana decorations. On the door was a brass knocker shaped like an eagle with its wings spread. I banged loudly.

I could hear voices, and then Karla swung the door wide. Her welcoming smile faded to a guilty, hangdog expression when she saw me.

“Mel,” she said, breathless. “What are you—?”

“We need to have a conversation,” I began, barging into the house. “Is Skip here?”

The contractor was lurking near the kitchen, looking just as chagrined as his wife. A hand-painted wooden sign over the doorway read
KARLA’
S KOUNTRY KITCHEN
.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” I said. “I would have figured you for a modern, Eichler-type home.”

“There’s a place for tradition,” said Skip, puffing out his chest a little. “And in this, our great nation, we can all do with a little home-grown patriotism.”

“I get the flags, but are you saying a purloined weathervane is somehow patriotic?”

Skip and Karla exchanged glances, and I lost my temper.

“I am
done
, do you hear me? Done with subterfuge and skulking and guilty looks. One woman has been
brutally murdered, and someone made an attempt on my life, and I want somebody to start talking.”

“We had nothing to do with any of that!” Karla gasped. “It’s all a silly misunderstanding, really. Honestly. Now, let’s all sit and have a cup of tea and talk.”

“I’ll skip the tea, but thanks.” At this point I wouldn’t put it past her to slip a little hemlock into my teacup.

“Please,” she said, gesturing to a sofa upholstered in blue denim, adorned with a red-and-white-striped afghan. “Sit.”

I sat. Karla and Skip perched in wing chairs on the other side of a low coffee table.

“All right, all right. It’s true,” Skip began. “I kept the weathervane for myself. It’s just . . . They didn’t want it, and I thought it would be perfect for Karla.”

“I’ll admit it,” Karla said. “I’m an absolute
nut
for Americana!”

Skip winked at her, and she beamed.

“But . . . why didn’t you
say
anything?” I asked. “I thought you wanted to speed up the sale of Crosswinds.”

“I figured you’d find another one from the same era,” Skip said. “How hard could it be? And then I wouldn’t have to go into the whole story.”

“You knew perfectly well I was trying to track down the original items from the house. Chantelle said—”

“Why does everyone believe that kook was right?” demanded Skip. “What I saw—” He cut himself off with a shake of the head.

“What did you see?”

He shook his head some more, and looked down at his hands, folded together almost primly on his knees.

“Please tell me, Skip. It might be important,” I said.

“The ghost, or whatever it is.” When he looked up at me, his eyes were shadowed. “I
heard
it. Yelling at us to
get out, to leave. That’s why . . . I put up those walls, hoping to close it in. I thought . . . I thought if I could just shut it all away, it wouldn’t be able to get to anyone. And then Chantelle comes in and suddenly the Flynts are wanting to tear everything up. I knew it would be trouble. I
knew
it.”

“W
e tried our best to talk Chantelle into changing her mind, taking back what she said. It was all so absurd,” said Karla, patting Skip’s hands reassuringly.

“And yet you stole the weathervane,” I pointed out.

“It really wasn’t like that. That junk sat in the garage for months, and Andrew didn’t want to deal with any part of it.”

“So you set up the Crosswinds Collection auction at Uncle J’s.”

Skip shrugged. “I figured if we kept it exclusive to their mailing list, word wouldn’t get out. No one comes over here from the other side of the tunnel.”

“You invited Nancy, from Griega Salvage.”

“We did?” He shrugged again. “Well, she didn’t come. Proves my point.”

“And did any of the Flynts work with you? The man at the shop mentioned a Mr. Flynt.”

Skip shook his head. “That was just a formality. The only Flynt really interested in anything was Lacey, but even she didn’t want to be saddled with getting rid of it all, though she did demand a cut of the profit.”

I studied him for a moment, trying to discern whether or not he was telling me the truth.

“Okay, how about you skedaddle on up to the roof and bring that weathervane down.”

“Couldn’t you just put up a reproduction?” asked Karla. “All this emphasis on originals, it’s absurd, really.”

“It’s probably for the best, sweetheart,” said Skip as he rose and left the room to do my bidding. “I’m beginning to feel strange about having anything from that place in—or
on
—our home, anyway. It’s . . . That Crosswinds is a bad place.”

Skip left Karla and me staring at each other for an awkward moment.

“Do you have any more photos from Crosswinds?”

She looked guilty again, and hesitated.

“Karla, please just give me all that you have. I’ll take them back to Crosswinds. I think this might be part of what stirred up the ghost of Peregrine Summerton—people have been removing his photographs.”

She pressed her lips together. “If he didn’t want people to take them, he shouldn’t be sprinkling them about the house.”

I saw her logic, but I wasn’t sure Peregrine—or any ghost—was totally in charge of what he managed to manipulate in the material world, much less how the effects might be experienced by the living. But at this point I wasn’t willing to discuss the intricacies of crossing the veil with Karla Buhner.

“In any case,” I said, “I’d like to bring back all the photos I can.”

She crossed over to a rolltop desk and extracted a large manila envelope. As she handed it to me, she asked, “Do
you
think Crosswinds is a bad place?”

“No.” I was rather fond of the huge old mansion. “Old
buildings are like people. Crosswinds has a lot of unresolved issues, but then so do a lot of us.”

She tittered nervously.

“What do
you
think about all of this, Karla? Who might have killed Chantelle?”

“Oh, oh I couldn’t! My, my,” she blushed and wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“It seems like it’s somehow embarrassing to you?” I was fishing; I couldn’t quite figure out her reaction.

“Why would
I
know anything about the embezzling?”

“I’m sorry? Embezzling?”

“I thought you were talking about . . . the embezzling.” She blushed some more.

“What embezzling?”

“At Tempus, Ltd. Oh dear, did I say something wrong?”

Skip Buhner’s boots tread heavily on the roof above our heads. I could hear the wood shingles cracking.

“What embezzling would that be?”

She waved a hand in the air, then stroked a pillow embroidered with a train and yet another eagle. “It’s all just silly gossip. Stephanie was very upset, because apparently there were allegations of someone skimming off the books at Tempus. And somehow it had to do with Chantelle.”

“How? How would Chantelle have any access to Tempus finances?”

“I simply have no idea. Really, I’ve told you all I know, and so much more than I should have.”

There was a great deal of thumping and the sound of splitting wood overhead. I looked at the ceiling, wondering if I should offer to help.

Karla smiled brightly.

“Well, now,” she said. “He’ll just box that
weathervane right up for you, and you can be on your way. The sooner you finish up at Crosswinds, the sooner we can put the house back on the market!”

•   •   •

I stopped by Mi Pueblo for the provisions Dad had requested, and arrived home to find the air redolent with corn
masa
and spices, reminding me of the Mission District.

Stan, Dad, and Luz were in the kitchen with Sinsi and Venus and Eddie, filling corn husks with
masa
and meat in a red sauce, then wrapping them up. Dog wagged his tail, on high alert for any and all edible items—and “edible” was a loose term—that might hit the floor. He took a quick break to greet me with enthusiasm, and then returned to scrap patrol.

“Hey, Mel,” said Dad. “Venus here tells me there are sweet tamales with raisins and pineapple and coconut in them. You believe that?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” I said, putting the bags on the counters.

“Oh, great,” said Eddie, rooting through the bags. “We needed more corn husks.”

“And some tamales are wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks,” Dad continued. “Whaddaya make of that?”

“I guess you use what you have at hand, right? So how many tamales are we making?” I asked no one in particular, eyeing the already huge pile of yet-to-be-steamed tamales.

“These are chicken but we’re also making pork,” said Venus. “And I promised your dad if we had extra I’d show him a couple of sweet variations—he’s got some raisins in the drawer.”

“And I’m guessing that’s why he requested a
pineapple?” I asked as I drew the spiky fruit out of the paper bag.

“Ah, perfect!”

Stan and I shared a smile. There was nothing Dad liked better than complaining about having to cook, and then cooking for a big group. Especially if he could make it a group project.

A quick peek in the living room confirmed Dad had brought out our old family camping gear: sleeping bags and foam mats. A bed had been made up on the couch—I recognized Caleb’s flannel comforter.

Diego and Carmen were sitting at the dining room table giving Caleb advice on his college applications. By the way Caleb was looking at Carmen I was pretty sure he already had developed a crush on the young woman. She was probably only a year or two older than he, now that I thought about it. I still hadn’t gotten used to the fact that my ex-stepson was very nearly old enough to vote.

“Oh, Dad. I invited my friend Trish to come by.”

“Don’t know if we’ll have enough to eat,” he said.

Not only would there be far more than any of us could eat, he was probably going to wind up inviting the whole neighborhood soon.

“So, I was thinking,” I said as I sat down next to Luz, grabbed a corn husk, and made a little boat out of the soft
masa
. “What if their landlady knows perfectly well that there’s a ghost in that place? Dingo knew about it, after all.”

“Who’s Dingo?”

“Little old man who works at Olivier’s Ghost Shoppe.”

“Ah.”

“Wait,” said Sinsi. “So you think maybe she
knows
there’s a ghost, and that’s why it’s cheap?”

“I wondered about that. That blows,” said Venus.

“Maybe not just that,” I continued. “Call me a cynic, but what if she knows the renters will go fleeing into the night, and she gets to keep first month, last, and security deposits?”

“That would be a pretty low-down thing to do,” said Luz.

“Yep. It would,” I agreed. “But she seems awfully hard to get ahold of. Keeping herself scarce for some reason, maybe?”

Luz nodded. “Okay, clearly we need to track her down and make her give the money back.”

“Maybe,” I said, wrapping up the tamale and starting on another. “Or . . . maybe we should have the students sign a four-year lease at that below market rate, and then get rid of the ghost so the students can live there in peace. Let the landlady feel a little of the pain.”

“I like the way you think,” she said with a grin.

“What’s that rattling sound?” I asked.

“The penny at the bottom of the pot,” Dad said. “You put a penny in the water for the tamales, and when it’s nearly gone the penny starts to rattle. Let’s you know the tamales are almost done.”

“That’s clever.”

“Sure as heck is. Who needs the newfangled stuff when there’s good old human ingenuity?”

Dad and Eddie launched into a discussion of simple ways of doing things versus “newfangled” ways. It was on the tip of my tongue to point out to Eddie the irony of such views coming from someone desperate to get his iPod back, but reconsidered. I was becoming as grumpy as my father could sometimes be.

Trish arrived, and said something in Spanish to the students, who burst into laughter and shouted in reply. Since my Spanish was limited to a little construction site
vocabulary, the conversation left me behind pretty quickly. Still, it was fun to see Trish in a social setting. I knew she had traveled to Cuba and all over Latin America, and worked with Pastors for Peace and Doctors Without Borders. But I had never actually seen her outside the library.

“Where’s my margarita?” Trish asked, turning to me. “We need to talk.”

I couldn’t wait to hear what she had found, so I fixed her a drink and we left the others to finish making the tamales while we went into my home office.

Trish had a big smile on her face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I found her.”

“Her? Her who?”

“Flora Summerton.”

“Seriously?”

“I read the Rutherford letter you read, the one that describes how Flora ran away from her engagement ball when the clock struck midnight on her eighteenth birthday. And I got to wondering what she was running
to
. She might have gotten married, of course—”

“Wait—didn’t the letter say Flora was in love with a sailor?”

“It did, but that seemed more like idle gossip to explain why Flora spent so much time on the widow’s walk gazing out to sea. Think about it: Where would Flora have met a sailor? Young ladies of her social class did not hang out down at the docks. That got me wondering: If Flora wasn’t up on the widow’s walk looking for the ship bringing her lover home, what was she doing up there?”

“Getting a breath of fresh air?”

Trish laughed. “Maybe so. Or maybe she was imagining a different life for herself in a faraway land. People in the past weren’t all that different from ourselves, Mel.”

That was more true than Trish realized,
I thought. “So what were her options?”

“How about missionary work?” Trish opened the file and handed me some photocopies. “I thought about her being a schoolteacher, or a nurse, then realized I might find a clue in the archives.”

“I thought you said the Summerton family didn’t leave many records?”

“They didn’t—but family papers aren’t the only kinds of records. So I looked up Peregrine Summerton’s will. Turns out he was a big supporter of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. For years he sent an annual donation and left the organization a substantial bequest. Then I checked the records of the church the Summertons attended, and what do you know: Flora was a member of the church’s Missionary Sewing Circle, and helped to raise money for overseas missions. The ladies of the sewing circle were especially fond of supporting women missionaries. Nothing in the church records suggested Flora had gone on a mission, but there are large gaps in the records. So I dug a little deeper.”

Trish paused and took a sip of her margarita, licking salt off the rim.

“You’re amazing,” I said.

“I’m a
librarian
.”

“Well, then, librarians are amazing.”

She smiled. “One of the databases the Historical Society subscribes to includes old newspapers devoted to covering overseas missions. I started reading the issues for the months after Flora’s disappearance and finally found a reference to her in an article about missionaries in Hawaii.”

“Flora went to Hawaii?”

“To Maui, to be precise.”

“You’re getting a kick out of this,” I said, enjoying her enthusiasm.

“Flora Summerton must have been a gutsy young woman. Just imagine what it took for her to leave her home and everything she knew, and sail off into the sunset to a foreign land. I went back to the Rutherford Family Papers and read some of their earlier correspondence. Apparently the neighbors were buzzing about how disappointed Peregrine Summerton was in his sons. He was fond of saying that his daughter Flora was ‘twice the man my boys should be.’”

“Yikes. Sounds like a fun family dynamic.”

“Indeed.”

“Did you find anything about Peregrine Summerton being a photographer?”

“Actually, yes!” She brought out a copy of a small handbill. “He had a show of photographs, right there in the ballroom. ‘One hundred faces of Flora,’ he called it. It was really much more about the wonders of photography than about Flora herself, but she was his favorite model. A young John Caruthers, heir to the copper-mining fortune, saw the show and fell in love with Flora. He asked for her hand in marriage right there and then, without even meeting her!”

“So Flora escaped her father’s home and marriage to a man she didn’t love, and made a life for herself in Hawaii?”

Trish nodded. “It turns out that she also became entitled to a small inheritance from her grandmother upon reaching her majority, which helps to explain why she waited until her birthday for her dramatic escape.”

“Did Flora ever return home?”

“Good question. I wondered that myself.” She handed me a photocopy of a pamphlet entitled
California
Women of Distinction
. “This little gem was published in 1910 to support the fight for women’s suffrage in California. A library patron requested it, and I looked through it when she was done. It consists of a number of very short biographies, including several women missionaries. According to the pamphlet, Flora met a young American physician in Hawaii. They married, but she was widowed after only a year when he died of some sort of fever in the islands. Then she received a letter from Peregrine saying he was ill and wanted to see her, and take one more photo of her, before he died. He obviously knew where to find her, but had left her alone until he fell ill. Perhaps her dramatic exit led him to see the error of his ways.”