Chapter Twenty
“Your place?”
“That’s right. Emile left it to me in his will.
Don’t that beat all? Maybe I’ll hire you to fix it up for
me.”
“I’m . . . surprised,” I said,
recalling what Janet had said about Hettie and Emile. It was hard
to imagine them being amorous toward anyone, much less each other,
but as I kept reminding myself, I was no expert in the ways of
love.
Heck, I was no amateur in the ways of love,
either.
“Will you look around with me?” Hettie asked,
tucking a big black patent leather pocketbook securely under her
arm. The formality of the purse contrasted sharply with her
oversized T-shirt. This one was black with bold yellow lettering,
and advertised a local supermarket chain. “I’m afraid the ghosts
will figure out I’m here and come on over. Or do you think they’re
stuck in Cheshire House? But then, if they’re stuck there, how’d
they kill Emile?”
“I, uh, really don’t know.” I thought of last
summer’s apparition. He hadn’t been limited to one location, that’s
for sure.
I glanced around the shop. It felt strange to be
here, on the site of a murder.
Dozens of footprints and scuff marks, no doubt
belonging to emergency personnel, were visible in the thick film of
lint and dirt on the ugly linoleum. The crime scene itself had been
cleaned of blood. The seven-by-four-foot patch was the only clean
spot in the room.
I felt a pang of sadness. Curmudgeon or not, Emile
didn’t deserve to die like this.
“Hettie, the last time we talked you didn’t sound
very fond of Emile. And frankly, he didn’t exactly speak of you in
glowing terms, either. Why would he leave his place to you?”
“We go way back.”
I waited for more. Looked like I had a long
wait.
“I guess he could leave it to whoever he wanted
to,” Hettie finally said, peering into the cupboards along one
wall.
I noticed white hair on one side of the burgundy
moiré sofa. I remembered Emile telling me he didn’t keep cats
because of the risk of getting fur on the furniture. So where had
this hair come from?
“Were you here that night, Hettie?”
“What night?”
“The night Emile was killed? Did you stop by to see
him?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She
played with her dentures a minute. “Place is a dump anyway. Not
much of value here.” She pointed to the stuffed cat I’d noticed on
my previous visit to Emile’s shop. “Maybe I’ll take the cat, at
least, give it a proper burial. Never did like how he did that,
stuffed them. Why’d someone want to do that to a kitty?”
“I think he meant well by it,” I said
halfheartedly. Then I noticed that the cat’s rhinestone collar, the
one that held the charm, was no longer around his neck.
“Have you taken anything from here?”
She looked surprised. “No.”
“Because the shop’s not yours yet, you know. The
police have to release the crime scene, and then the actual
transfer of ownership will take a while.”
“I know that. Wasn’t born yesterday, you know. I
just wanted to see if it was worth anything, is all. Maybe I’ll do
what I did before, and donate it to the shelter. That way I don’t
have to mess with it. And I don’t want to deal with any more
ghosts, anyway.”
“Hettie, I wanted to ask you something. The other
day you mentioned one of your former boarders, Dave Enrique?
Remember?”
Hettie nodded.
“What was his relationship to Janet? Or Emile’s for
that matter? Janet mentioned that Emile took something from
her.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“No idea what went on that time up in the
attic?”
Hettie smoothed her T-shirt, and poked her dentures
with her tongue. “I expect it wasn’t anything good. Grown men and a
young girl. After that Janet seemed different, changed. I sent her
to live with her daddy after that. Better that way.”
When we left, the homeless man was still sitting
on the sidewalk, talking to himself.
“Got a dollar for the hobo?” Hettie asked.
“I’m not sure ‘hobo’ is the best
term. . . .” I said out of the side of my mouth as I
scrounged in my satchel for a dollar.
“Actually, I prefer ‘hobo,’ come to think of it,”
the man said with a lopsided smile. “Sounds more adventurous,
doesn’t it? I’m not lacking a home; I’m on a grand adventure.” He
pulled a fifth of some kind of liquor out of his coat pocket. “Bon
voyage to me!”
As we left, we heard the man singing to
himself.
“Ever notice how now that regular folks walk around
with their phones in their ears, talking out loud ’bout this and
that, the crazies on the street don’t seem so crazy?” said Hettie.
“You gave that feller some clean clothes and . . .
maybe a chair to sit on instead of that piece of old cardboard, and
people’d assume he’s talkin’ to his stockbroker ’stead o’ being
nuts.”
“You might be right,” I mused. Seemed like a social
experiment worthy of one of Luz’s graduate students.
I walked Hettie to her car, a dented avocado-green
gas guzzler that must have dated back to the seventies.
“You think you could fix the place up for me, I
decide to keep it?” Hettie asked as she climbed in.
I paused. The truth was the building didn’t call to
me, and besides, I wasn’t sure how much time I wanted to spend with
Hettie the cat lady. And anyway, where would she get the money to
fix it up? In my business I had to make quick judgment calls about
clients’ ability to pay, and my ability to work with them. Hettie
failed on both counts.
“Why don’t we cross that bridge when we come to
it?” I said as I closed her door for her. “Give your cats a squeeze
from me.”
She laughed, a kind of hoarse chuckle. “Will do,
lady builder. That much, I can do.”
Hettie fired up the car’s engine and roared off,
her driving style as unrestrained as her personality. She flapped
one arm out the window, waving good-bye, and screeched around the
corner, narrowly missing a stop sign.
Time to go back to work.
But . . . Emile’s place was
wide-open. What could it hurt to have a more thorough look around?
I didn’t know what I was looking for, but maybe I would discover
something that would connect Emile’s murder with the ghostly
goings-on across the street. Inspector Crawford probably wouldn’t
approve but . . . I promised myself I’d be extra
careful not to interfere with any possible evidence, and headed
into the shop.
I didn’t see anything else out of the ordinary,
except for the hair on the sofa. That bothered me. I noticed a pad
on Emile’s desk. K. Daley, 2 pm was written in blue ink, but
there wasn’t anything suspicious about that. Katenka
mentioned to me that she was going to have him reupholster her
settee.
Had this really been a simple break-in that had
turned lethal? Could Emile’s spirit be hanging around, angry that
his life ended so horribly?
If so, perhaps I could communicate with him. Then I
wondered if I wanted to communicate with Emile. I hadn’t
liked him when he was alive. Why would I like him any better as a
mad-as-hell ghost? And if I did manage to reach him, could he even
tell me what had happened? Did I want to hear it?
Impatient with my own doubts, I forced myself to
stand on the clean spot, where Emile had died. I took a deep
breath, focused, and called to Emile with my mind. I waited.
Nothing. No tingle at the back of my neck, no
sensation of being watched. All I felt was depressed.
The shop was quiet as a tomb. I took in the mess,
the gloom, the gazes of forlorn creatures. Reason #348 why I
don’t want to be a taxidermist: The risk of spending my last
moments on earth like Emile, prone and injured, surrounded by dead
animals, their glass eyes unblinking, hungry . . .
vengeful.
I squeezed my eyes shut, cursing my overactive
imagination.
“You are so busted,” a voice said from the
vicinity of the door.
“Graham! You scared the daylights out
of me!” I clapped my hand over my heart in a dramatic gesture. “I
swear: you’re committed to giving me a heart attack.”
He remained in the doorway. “Maybe you’re jumpy
because you’re snooping around a crime scene where you have no
right to be. Come on out, before you get busted for breaking and
entering.”
“I have a right to be here,” I insisted, but I
joined him at the door. “Sort of.”
Graham just raised his eyebrows.
“Hettie Banks says she inherited this place, and
she might hire me to redo it.”
“Does she have that kind of money?”
“Not to my knowledge,” I admitted as we left the
shop and I closed the door behind us. “Anyway, the crime-scene
tape’s down.”
“She probably took it down herself. Doesn’t mean
you can go poking around someone else’s property.”
“I just . . .” As we crossed the
street toward Cheshire House, I wondered whether I should tell him
the truth, that I was trying to conjure Emile’s ghost. That sounded
crazy, though, didn’t it? “I was wondering if Emile’s death might
be linked to the strange things going on at the Daleys’.”
“Linked how?”
“I have no idea. But I . . . I seem
to have some sort of connection to these . . .
entities. Spirits. Whatever.”
“So you did see a ghost.”
“Maybe.”
Graham leaned back against his truck and crossed
his arms over his chest. I could see his jaw clench, but he said
nothing.
“What,” I pushed, “are you going to pretend you
didn’t feel something up in that attic?”
“I felt something—that’s for sure.” His gaze
flickered over the length of me, then returned to mine. When he
spoke again, his voice was very quiet. “I felt like kissing you.
And a whole lot more.”
“I . . . I think maybe the ghosts
sensed something between us and piggybacked on our emotions,
ratcheted things up.”
“Or maybe it was just high time I kissed
you.”
I swallowed, hard, and tried to keep my mind on the
supernatural, rather than the very real chemistry I felt whenever I
was anywhere in the vicinity of this man. “I think it had more to
do with ghosts than with . . . with you and me. It
was like they took control of our conversation, remember?”
“Okay,” he said. “For the sake of argument let’s
put aside everything science has taught us for the past century and
pretend you can talk to the dearly departed. What makes you think
you’re qualified to deal with them?”
“Who else is there?”
“Surely there’s someone who knows more than you
about this sort of thing.”
“I’m working on it. I met a guy last night who
might be able to help. He leads ghost tours out of the Eastlake
Hotel. If Katenka agrees to hire him, he’ll come take a look at the
house.”
Graham let out an exasperated breath and pinched
the bridge of his nose as though fighting off a sudden
headache.
“Olivier something? French guy?”
“You know him?”
“He came to Matt’s house once, shadowed the film
crew. He’s an actor, Mel, out to fleece the tourists. Get
serious.”
“If you have any other suggestions, I’m all ears.
I’m skeptical of Olivier, too, but what are my options? There’s
something strange—and maybe dangerous—going on with this house. I
don’t know if I’m supposed to find a priest to conduct an exorcism,
or contact a Mexican limpiadora, or what. But I need help,
and it’s not like there’s a section for ‘ghost busting’ in the
Yellow Pages.”
“Have you looked?” Graham smiled. “This is the Bay
Area, you know.”
Actually, I hadn’t. I ignored this. “I’ve seen
things, Graham. I can’t pretend I haven’t.”
“That’s what worries me. If this is
true . . . Has it occurred to you that you stir them
up? Maybe if they couldn’t sense that you can see them, they’d go
away.”
“And how do you propose I do that? Spray myself
down with a can of Ghost-B-Gone?”
Graham didn’t answer for a moment. I avoided his
eyes, but I could feel him studying me.
“I’ve never thought of you as a woo-woo Berkeley
type,” he said at last.
“I’m not.” I shrugged. “But ever since what
happened at Matt’s place, and even before that, with my
mother . . . let’s just say that I have a whole lot
of questions and not many answers. At the very least I keep my mind
open.”
He nodded. “Listen, I hate to change the subject,
but Elena’s inside talking to Katenka about the party. I saw you
going into the crime scene when I pulled up, and figured you might
want a say in the matter.”
“Graham, seriously, can’t you use your masculine
wiles to put a stop to this stupid party?”
“Sorry. Must’ve left my wiles in my other
truck.”
We found Elena and Katenka in the kitchen laughing
like old friends as they pored over Elena’s portfolio and a stack
of design magazines. Smiling and talking, wearing a floaty yellow
dress, Katenka looked like a girl, perfectly at ease. She never
acted like that around me, I noted sourly. Katenka wasn’t my
favorite person, either, but at times like this it struck me that
being able to make a perfect miter cut didn’t make up for all the
things I was bad at.
“Mel!” said Jim, the baby in his Snugli kicking his
legs. “Glad you’re here. Graham and I wanted to include you in our
discussion about some of the green techniques we’d like to
incorporate into the house.”
And why did I always get stuck talking with the
men? How come the men never huddled in the kitchen talking about
party favors while the women were designing the solar heating
system? But then I might as well ask why I was one of only a
handful of female general contractors in the Bay Area, arguably one
of the least sexist places on earth.
“How’s the design coming?” I asked the men.
“Jim and I have come up with a plan. I’d like to go
over it with you in detail, when you have a chance,” Graham said.
Was it my imagination, or did his eyes rest on me just a little too
long?
“Sure,” I said. The idea of “going over designs”
with Graham, just the two of us, was very distracting.
“Mel, what you think?” Katenka asked.
“About what again? Sorry, I lost track of the
conversation.”
“For the party, we’d like to have things more or
less like they are now,” Elena answered. “Would it be a problem to
work on another part of the house for a while and leave this area
pretty much as is?”
I felt the words bubble up, tried to suppress them,
and failed.
“Want me to take out everything we’ve spent the
past three months on, make it look like it used to?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?” Elena
said.
Katenka might not be fluent in English, but she
sure spoke body language.
“Is joke,” Katenka said to Elena, her tone
conciliatory.
“Besides,” Elena continued, “that would be
prohibitively expensive, don’t you think? There’s no call for such
a thing for a baby’s birthday. Unless, of course, you’d like to,
Katenka.”
I felt Graham’s hand on my shoulder, giving it a
squeeze.
Elena continued, oblivious. “Or do you think you
could have the place done for the party? I know! If you can finish
up within the week, we could go the other way, have a lovely
Victorian-themed tea party with lace tablecloths and cucumber
sandwiches—”
“We’re three months into a six-month rehab, Elena,”
I said through gritted teeth. “We can’t ‘finish up’ in a
week.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, gathering together her
portfolio. “That’s fine, just fine. I’ll figure something
out.”
Katenka was avoiding my eyes. I thought of how
happy and easygoing the two women had seemed before I arrived on
the scene. Make an effort, Mel, or you’ll become as churlish as
Emile Blunt, the pooper of every party.
“I’m sorry, Elena. Why don’t you and I go into the
front room and you can explain what you have in mind. I’m sure I
can find a way to work with whatever Katenka wants.”
Jim and Graham beamed at me approvingly, and I had
to stifle the desire to do something with a nearby rotary sander
that would violate numerous safety regulations.
“One problem is the kitchen,” Elena said as we went
into the front parlor. “The caterer simply can’t cook in the
kitchen the way it is.”
“We could expedite delivery of the new stove and
install it, if necessary. But it doesn’t make sense to change out
the counters yet, as the new cabinets aren’t finished. What will
you be cooking?”
“Katenka tells me the Tree party traditional meal
is an apple-stuffed goose, sausages, mayo-based salads, salted
fish, cheese, caviar.”
“Seriously? This is a birthday party for a
one-year-old child, right?” I glanced over at Katenka, thinking she
should be in on the menu planning. But she, Jim, and Graham were
discussing something, heads together as though in a huddle.
“Parties for children this age are more for the
adults than for the children,” Elena said.
“Okay . . . but what are the
children going to eat?”
“Mel, I appreciate the concern, but why don’t you
concentrate on what you do, and I’ll take care of the party
planning. I’ve found a wonderful caterer who specializes in the
traditional salads, which include dill, peas, carrots, and
potatoes. Lots of mayo, I’m sorry to say. And kalach sweet
bread, and sbiten, which is a hot honey drink with
herbs.”
Once again I looked over to Katenka, hoping to
catch her eye. What were the three of them talking about so
intently?
“Babies aren’t supposed to eat honey,” I said.
“Because of the allergies. Or something.”
“Do you have children, Mel?”
“A son.”
“Caleb? I thought he was your stepson.”
“He is, yes.”
“And you were with him since he was a baby?”
“No, but I can read. And babies aren’t supposed to
eat honey.”
Jim’s angry voice floated over to us.
“Get your hands off her.”