She seemed pleased to invite me in and spent a few minutes cleaning off a stool for me to sit at the kitchen counter, tossing a small stack of newspapers and two plastic bags full of who-knew-what into an already junk-filled corner.

But her watery blue eyes flashed with fear when I asked her whether she ever . . . sort of . . . experienced otherworldly weirdness in her former boardinghouse.

“They might kill me, just for talking about them,” she whispered as she poured Diet Coke into two chipped coffee mugs that sported corporate logos—Microsoft for me, Google for her.

“These are ghosts we’re talking about?”

She nodded. Her pink scalp showed through the strands of thinning white hair, cut in a short, masculine’do. She wore an oversized men’s T-shirt advertising the services of a Mission Street auto care service, and scratched tortoiseshell glasses from which hung a bright, beaded chain that draped around her neck.

“I don’t understand,” I continued. “Why would they want to kill you?”

“Just for knowing about them, I guess. I think they want to be left alone. . . .” She waved a hand and got up to open a can of cat food for a fat orange tabby, which she spoke to in a high-pitched baby voice. She spooned the smelly food onto two small china plates decorated with pink and yellow flowers, tapping the spoon against the plates with a series of sharp tinks.

At the sound, another cat ran into the room and leapt onto the counter. This one had long white hair and deep blue eyes.

I might not have found any information about the history of the house itself, but I had read several articles about Hettie Banks’s arrest and sentencing for animal hoarding, and knew she wasn’t supposed to own any pets, much less cats. It was part of her probation agreement. When she was found to be keeping a multitude of felines in the garbage-strewn Cheshire Inn, Hettie had been taken into police custody and charged with cruelty toward animals.

After nearly four decades running the fifteen-room Cheshire Inn as a boardinghouse, Hettie sold the place to the Daleys and was now living in a two-bedroom condo. She told me she spent her days watching reruns of M*A*S*H, building a dollhouse reproduction of the Cheshire Inn, carrying on an Internet romance with a man half her age who lived in what she referred to as “the former Yugoslavia,” and, it seemed, flouting the conditions of her probation and the condo association’s no-pets clause.

I wondered why. The sale of a beautiful, well-located Queen Anne Victorian—even one that was run-down and redolent of too many cats—should have netted Hettie plenty of money to buy a big spread in the country where no nosy neighbors would spot her cat colony. Had she switched from hoarding pets to hoarding money? Sent it to her friend in the former Yugoslavia? Gambled it away in Vegas? Not that it was any of my business.

“I was hoping you could fill me in on the history of the house,” I said. “Usually I can learn a lot at the historical society downtown, but not this time. There’s nothing in their records on the house.”

She grinned. “There wouldn’t be, now would there?” “Why not?”

“I destroyed it all.”

I waited a moment before I spoke. I couldn’t fathom people destroying irreplaceable historic items.

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“The gal told me to.”

“What gal?”

“The ghost.”

“A gal ghost?”

“That’s right. I went down to the historical society and when the librarian answered the phone, I took the file and left, just as neat as you please.”

Wait a minute. The historical society required photo IDs before one could view their materials, to avoid just such a thing.

“Why didn’t the historical society come after you?”

She laughed. “I didn’t use my own driver’s license. I had one that belonged to a friend. She passed on a few years ago, bless her heart. I kept her driver’s license for just such an occasion. People always said we looked enough alike to be sisters.”

One mystery solved. Hettie was more than a little odd, and obviously cunning.

“So a ghost actually talked to you? A girl ghost?”

“One of ’em. Maybe two. It’s hard to tell.”

“Did they look like a person, like you and me?”

“You believe me?”

“I do. What else can you tell me about them?”

She sat down in a folding chair, pulled the plump tabby onto her lap, and stroked its ginger coat while she talked.

“At first it was little things . . . There were places in the house that were always freezing—a spot in the second floor walkway and one corner of the entryway.”

I had noted those, as well. I had the heating people out, and checked everywhere for possible sources of downdrafts. Nothing.

“Doors opened and closed on their own, dead bolts locked, and heaven knows I’d lost those keys years ago. Lots of knocking and scratching throughout the house. Real annoying.”

“And did you see anything?”

“You mean—whaddayacall ’em—applications?”

“Apparitions?”

“No, not really. A shadow sometimes. Over my shoulder, like.” She looked into her soda. “That one bothered me. It made me feel . . . just awful.”

I knew the feeling. “Did anyone else see any of this?”

“Oh sure. Not all of ’em, but boarders came and went; it’s the nature of the business. I had this one fellow . . . he was in the attic once, with my daughter. He swore he saw something, some sort of fight between ghosts, I guess. He moved out the next day. Janet denied it, though.”

“Janet’s your daughter?”

“Yep. Anyways, the ghosts used to scare my cats, too, but they still protected me. Soon as the law took my cats away, there was nothing standing between me and them. That’s what did it, why I moved. Well, that and the whole arrest thing.” She tugged on her oversized T-shirt and ran her tongue around in her mouth, as though poking at dentures. “I would never hurt the little kitty-witty-woos.”

She seemed to be reaching for dignity. It was the least I could offer her.

“Tell me about your cats.”

“This one here’s Horatio,” she said, picking up the orange cat. “Found him in an alley behind the Safeway. Heard him crying all the way from the parking lot. Scrawny little fella. But he’s real purty now.”

“He is,” I said, scratching the friendly tabby under its chin.

“And there’s another round here, white with long hair. That’s Pudding.”

I feared I was already carrying a good deal of Pudding’s long white hair on my black sweater.

“I understand you had a number of cats in the Cheshire Inn.”

She jutted her chin out like a stubborn child. “Most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. . . . Me? Cruel to my babies? Someone called the animal control on me, but I wasn’t like one of them people you hear about. Yes, I buried the cats in my yard when they passed away, but what am I supposed to do? Pay for a pet burial plot somewhere? I don’t have that kind of money. Besides, this way I got to visit them. Planted daisies on their graves. The law came and dug it all up. Dug everything up. It was a disgrace.”

“What do you know about the man you bought the house from? Junior?”

“A grown man who referred to himself as Junior—let’s just start with that. He was real old when I met him. One foot in the grave. Guess he lived there his whole life. Told me only to rent to men, and he was right about that.”

“How do you mean?”

“I had my girl there with me. Janet. That was a mistake. The ghosts don’t like girls.”

“Did they do something to her?”

“At first she hated it there. Said they pulled her hair. But then she started to love the place, maybe too much. She didn’t want to go when I sent her away to live with her daddy, when she was in high school. Never did have no problem with men—least not most of them—but the ghosts were meddlesome around girls. Locked doors, ran the showers.”

“Do you think I could talk to your daughter?”

She looked at me suspiciously. “What for?”

“Just to hear what her experiences were.”

“I guess it’d be all right. . . . She works over to Emeryville, on the other side of the bridge. She drives the . . . whaddayacallit? The shuttle that takes people from the BART station to the stores. She came to see me the other day, so I don’t expect to see her again for a while. But sometimes she’s at the animal shelter. So when you go ask them about me being some crazy lunatic animal hoarder, maybe you can talk to her right there and then.”

“I don’t think you’re a crazy lunatic animal hoarder, Hettie.”

“You don’t?”

I shook my head. “Janet’s an animal lover, too, then?”

“Don’t know if I’d call her that, exactly.”

“No?”

She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate.

“Hettie, do you know who turned you in?”

“Anonymous, they said.”

“What about the boarder who moved out? The one who said he saw ghosts in the attic? Do you have any information on him?”

“That was ten years ago, maybe more. He used to work for a lumberyard in the East Bay; don’t know if he’s still . . .” Her pale eyes narrowed. “Hey, why you looking into this? I thought you said you were renovating that old place; you were a lady builder.”

“I am, yes. I’m the general contractor on the job. But I thought that while I looked into the architectural history, maybe I could find out something about the less savory aspects of the place, as well.” I chose my words carefully. “Did anything bad ever happen in the boardinghouse while you were there? Was anyone hurt? Did anyone pass away?”

She stuck her chin out a little and shook her head. “I took good care o’ my boarders. Even the spirits were just annoying. Mostly, I let ’em have the attic to themselves. That’s why that one fella got so scared: He and Janet went into the attic. I never went up there, never used it.”

“Katenka Daley, one of the new owners, thinks she’s being menaced by a ghost. Or several ghosts.”

“I guess she is, then. I told that man, the guy who bought it, not to bring his wife and child into that house. But he didn’t listen.”

“When was this?”

“Before he bought it. My Realtor showed me the offer, and I said I wanted to meet the buyers. Couldn’t let ’em walk into that without a warning, could I? Wouldn’t be right.”

“Did the new owner, Jim Daley, say anything to you?” She shrugged and hugged the cat closer to her plump chest. “He laughed at me, same as the others. But that little gal who bought it, the Russian? She came by and said she heard cats in the walls still. But that’s not possible, is it? I would feel terrible if we left one behind. I was in jail at the time, or I woulda helped to gather them all up, find ’em homes. But my girl was there, at least.”

“You mean Janet?”

“That’s right.” She got up and gestured for me to follow her. “You know, if you want to talk about the house, you should check this out.”

Hettie had re-created a Cheshire Inn in miniature. It was an amateur effort, closer to a dollhouse than a precise architectural model, but it was a beautiful rendering of the house, using dark woods and patterned wallpapers, all the fireplaces built with tiny tile facades. It was helpful to see a three-dimensional rendition of the place, and to talk about the structural changes Hettie knew about. Junior had operated the place as a boardinghouse pretty much as-was, but when Hettie and her husband took the place over, they added small sinks in each room. The bathrooms were precisely that: rooms with only baths in them. The toilets had only toilets.

In the attic, I noticed Hettie had misrepresented one area—I recalled the layout well enough to remember there was something different there.

“Do you know what this is, here?” I asked as I pointed to a line in the interior that didn’t match up with the exterior, as though there were a void in the wall.

She hesitated before shrugging her shoulders. “Like I said, I didn’t really go up in the attic much, so I sort of fudged it.”

Then she fixed me with a steady gaze. “Be careful there, Mel. They don’t like young women.”

“One more question,” I said. “Did you know the neighbor with the upholstery shop across the street, Emile Blunt?”

Her eyes seemed to flash, but she averted her gaze and looked down at her cat.

“Emile? A little.”

I hesitated. “He passed away this morning.”

Her pale eyes flew up to mine. “Emile? How?”

“It looks like a burglary. He was shot.”

She took a deep breath, shook her head.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“The ghosts. They didn’t care for him, not one bit.”

“Why not?”

“He lived at the Cheshire Inn for a couple of months when his plumbing busted. Seems like they took a shine to him. They wanted him to stay.”

“To stay?”

“Like, for good. Forever.”