I looked up to see Graham walk through the front door.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him as I set my tools on the plywood worktable in the front hall.

“I’ve got a meeting with Jim tomorrow, and I wanted to check out the insulation potential in the walls, take some measurements, that sort of thing. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. Make yourself at home.”

“Cute toolbox. Is that Caleb’s handiwork?”

I nodded. All of us marked our tools, since it was so easy to mix them up on job sites, and these are the necessary items to ply our trade. Plus, they were expensive, and many of us got sentimental about our tools, whether they belonged to our fathers, or fit our palm just right, or reminded us of favorite jobs.

But it was always easy to distinguish my toolbox from everyone else’s, because Caleb had decorated the side of my toolbox when he was eight: MEL TURNER was written in crooked letters with multicolored magic markers. I got a few looks from some of the men, but it warmed my heart every time I saw it.

I left Graham to wander about on his own—the man knew his way around a construction site—and after speaking to Raul again, I checked in with the carpenters and the paint crew repairing the walls and ceilings. In earthquake country, old plaster had a tendency to crack. A lot. Lumpy, erratic lines showed previous repairs through the years, and often wallpaper was put up to mask this. The painters had stripped seven layers in the living room, ten in the kitchen. They had also stripped the carved wood fireplace mantels of several coats of paint, and the metal of paint and rust. Unfortunately, this made the fireplaces too “new-looking,” so after they had been restored and properly sealed, I would bring in faux finishers to place a little fake verdigris on the metal, and darken the recesses of the wood.

On my way upstairs, I gathered bits of the old wallpaper stripped from the walls. Along with progress photos, these mementos would eventually go into the scrapbooks I kept of each house Turner Construction renovated, carrying on my mother’s tradition.

Today I also wanted to investigate the old keys, trying them out systematically on all the doors and lockable cupboards in the house. And starting in the attic I would check for rodent activity—and/or cats—as well, just in case the strange noises I heard overhead yesterday were perfectly natural. All seemed quiet so far, but it was early yet.

From the third-floor hallway, I yanked open the access door to the attic and pulled down the ladder. Hesitating for a moment, I took a deep breath and climbed up into the dark space.

Even with the overhead light on, the attic was dim and shadowy. But there was nothing particularly frightening about it, I assured myself. I crouched down to peer at a crack in the wall near the baseboard.

Nothing but dust and cobwebs . . . and a man’s voice whispering behind me, low and urgent.

Whirling around, I tripped and fell on my butt. “Hello?”

I looked into the shadows and checked my peripheral vision for ghosts. No one was there.

Another whisper. This time it was a woman. Her voice was harsh and anxious, as though answering the man.

The voices were muffled, and seemed to come from behind a paneled wall.

Slowly, I approached, studying how the walls came together—yes, there could be a void there. I looked closer. The “door” was more like a panel cleverly concealed by molding, with no handle. But there was a very old dead bolt. Recessed, it was almost hidden by the molding, and had been covered in spackle.

My heart was pounding, but I refused to be intimidated by age-old whispers and errant shadows. Not so long ago, I helped figure out who had murdered the ghost who kept pestering me. Surely I could do that again. Or at the very least identify what it was these spirits wanted.

As soon as I started feeling around the door, the whispers stopped.

“I heard you,” I said loudly, trying my best to sound confident. “Is there something you want? I can see and hear you a little, but it’s unclear.”

No response.

“Are you talking to me?” said a decidedly human voice. Graham stood on the ladder, poking his head into the attic.

“Graham. You scared me!”

“Then I take it you weren’t talking to me,” he said, coming up the rest of the way. “Who are you talking to?”

“I . . . uh . . . I thought I heard something.”

“Something?”

I remained mute. I didn’t really want Graham knowing the extent of my visions.

He fixed me with a serious look, halfway between impatient and caring, the one that always made me think of a moment we’d shared in a warm car in the middle of a rainstorm. So many years ago. And which now made me resent Elena-the-party-planner, who otherwise seemed like a perfectly nice woman.

“Have you seen something in this house, Mel?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because you look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” he said with a slight smile.

“Maybe.”

I turned back to the paneled wall, and started to investigate.

Something had been scratched into the wooden header, then covered with paint. It was faint and hard to make out. I grabbed a carpenter’s pencil and a sheet of the paper we put down to protect the floors, and held the paper up to the wood. I rubbed the lead over the paper, as my mother taught me to do with crayons and old headstones at Oakland’s historic Mountain View Cemetery.

Words appeared: MEMENTO MORI.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You’re the Latin expert.”

“Spanish.”

“Close enough.”

“And I speak a little, but I’m no expert. Memento—as in souvenir? And in Spanish, morir means to die.”

“A souvenir of death?”

I stepped back and looked around, half expecting to see a ghostly presence in my peripheral vision. Was there something in this closet I didn’t want to discover? Or was it like the rest of the house, a possibly harmless little obsession with death . . . and therefore, life?

Surely this room couldn’t have been locked ever since Dominga lived here. With all the people coming and going in this house it must have been opened—and closed—repeatedly over the years. There wouldn’t be, say, an old rum barrel with a skeleton in it? That would be awfully . . . Pirates of the Caribbean.

“Mel, you okay?”

“Oh sure, just peachy.” Dead bolt or no, I was getting into that closet. I was scared. But I was also pissed off. Who were these spirits to be putting me through this, and to be pestering a young mother? “I’m going to go get my tools.”

I descended the attic ladder to the third-floor hallway and started down the stairs, noting a water stain near the ceiling. I really needed to take care of the roof sooner rather than lat—

I suddenly heard something overhead—a harsh scraping sound. I glanced up just as a toolbox fell from the upper floor.

Right toward my head.