Dead Bolt

by Juliet Blackwell

  She nodded. “One son dead; one who disappeared. Luvitica gave birth to a baby boy a few months later. That son, who they referred to as Junior, grew up in the house. As an adult, after his grandmother and mother passed on, Junior needed money and turned the home into a boardinghouse.”

  “When was that?”

  “In the twenties. He ran it for the next forty years, believe it or not. This area wasn’t as posh as it is now, and there was lots of labor needed in the early years of the city. Junior died in the sixties, shortly after selling the house to Hettie Banks, who continued to operate it as a boardinghouse, though she liked to call it a ‘bed-and-breakfast.’ ”

  “I take it you quibble with that term as applied to Cheshire House?”

  “There were beds, and I guess there was breakfast, but with all those cats . . . It doesn’t sound much like what one expects from a San Francisco bed-and-breakfast. But you know how men are—they’ll live anywhere and never notice the toilet needs cleaning.”

  I smiled and thought about my dad, who’d become a rather fussy housekeeper.

  “And Jim and Katenka bought it from Hettie Banks,” I said, and did the math. “So we’re looking at nearly a century of being used as a boardinghouse. That’s a lot of souls coming and going.”

  “But as far as we know, only one body,” said Brittany.

  “What are you saying? That Charles Carter is haunting Cheshire House?”

  Brittany leaned back in her chair and shrugged. “I don’t know, Mel. I just do research, remember? But it makes for a great story, doesn’t it?”

  I wondered if a rum-pickled ghost would look different from any other. I could imagine that. It would explain the bare feet, perhaps. What I couldn’t fathom was how or why it might wander around in the form of black smoke. But were the footprints connected to the black figure? They had seemed like two distinct entities, to the extent I could tell.

  As Brittany signaled the waiter for our check, I glanced around the restaurant. Brittany worked in Walnut Creek, on the other side of the dreaded Caldecott Tunnel, so we had split the difference and met in Oakland at the Den at the Fox, a new restaurant in one corner of the old Fox Theater building, an incredible Moroccan-themed single-screen venue that dated to the 1920s, the heyday of historic theaters. The restaurant was done up with holiday decorations Bay Area–style, which meant lots of red and green garlands, a few nods to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, but nothing explicitly about baby Jesus, as though Christmas were a sparkly winter holiday consisting primarily of lights and tinsel. I wondered if this was why Halloween was taking over as the locals’ favorite: There weren’t many folks who couldn’t get behind a costume- and candy-fueled good time.

  “I think what I need is a ghost buster. Do you have a recommendation?”

  Brittany gave me a peculiar look. “With your third eye, or ability to see, you’re the kind of expert other people bring in.”

  “I might be able to sense ghosts—sometimes—but I don’t have the first idea how to get rid of them.”

  “You did a pretty good job at the Vallejo Street house.”

  When the ghost of a man killed on the job site at a Beaux Arts mansion started following me around, I wound up tracking down his killer and digging up—literally—evidence of an old murder, as well. By the time all was said and done, I had laid to rest at least a couple of the old mansion’s ghosts.

  “That was mostly accidental,” I said. “Once I figured out what had happened, the ghosts left.”

  “It works that way sometimes. Oh, I should tell you, your fame is growing.”

  “I have fame?”

  “Somebody wrote up the story and named names.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said, holding her hands up in innocence. “You asked me to keep it quiet, and I did. But I kept hearing rumors, and recently I came across this article about you.”

  She pulled another photocopy from the folder, and I read it with dismay. The only sort of fame I was interested in was Turner Construction winning the American Institute of Architects’ award for historical renovation. I didn’t like people talking about me, much less seeking me out to answer questions about ghosts.

  The article wasn’t long, but gave the basic rundown of what had happened at the Vallejo Street house, a project Turner Construction was still finishing up:

  Melanie (Mel) Turner of Turner Construction was able to make contact with the ghost of the recently departed Kenneth Kostow, and with his help unearthed the truth about a long-ago murder, resulting in the riddance of two entities. As far as this reporter was able to investigate, it was a genuine spirit encounter, the first for Turner.

  “I can’t believe this,” I muttered. “Who would have had this kind of information? Where is this from?”

  “Haunted House Quarterly,” Brittany said.

  “There’s a publication called Haunted House Quarterly ?”

  Brittany grinned. “Sure, gotta keep up with the latest news in the industry. Haunted houses are big business, as I keep telling you. And before you say something you’ll have to apologize for, you should know that I’m a regular contributor. Anyway, this issue just came out. I wouldn’t be surprised if you start hearing from people.”

  “Great.” That explained the phone calls Stan fielded yesterday.

  “Maybe the same thing’s happening with this house. Which is good news, right? All you have to do is figure out who the ghost is, find out what he wants or needs, and tell him to leave the house.”

  “It’s not that simple, Brittany.”

  “Hmm, I see what you mean. With a threatening black shadow figure you might need some bigger guns. I’m sorry to say, though, that I don’t know anyone. The folks I know are looking for ghosts, not trying to get rid of them.”

  “Why are they looking for them?”

  Brittany sighed. “You still don’t get it: A lot of us feel it’s a privilege to meet someone from another dimension. Many attempt to document the phenomenon, using special cameras and recording equipment and the like.”

  “But if you did want them to leave, how would you go about it? “

  “You might try a botanica, ask for a limpia.”

  I nodded. That had occurred to me as well. Botanicas are traditional Latino stores full of herbs, candles, teas . . . and all the sorts of items used in cleansing houses of spirits.

  “Or you could call the ghost society,” Brittany continued. “Or how about that ghost-tour guy?”

  “The French guy? Someone else mentioned him.”

  “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “If only that were true.”

  I paid for lunch, thanked Brittany for her time and information, and we parted ways. Leaning against my dusty car, I looked at a faded poster advertising hair extensions in the beauty shop across the street. Like my neighborhood, this was an area “in transition.” I looked up at the intricately tiled Moorish facade of the Fox Theater and thought a place like that must have a ghost or two roaming its bowels. I wondered if I could go to a show there without meeting up with one.

  Brittany was right: I didn’t find it particularly exciting to be able to sense ghosts. On the other hand, I was no longer freaked out by it. It was only recently, after my mother’s death, that I learned from my father she had possessed a similar ability, and in a way it linked me to her. After I saw my first ghost I was afraid I’d see dead people everywhere, like the boy from that movie a few years ago. I was enough of a misanthrope to worry about that—my long-term goal was to spend time alone, not to be saddled with the souls of all who had passed. But it hadn’t happened. True, when I entered historic buildings I sensed where things belonged, how they used to be. Given my line of work, that was an asset.

  But it seemed as though there were ghosts in Cheshire House, and whether I liked it or not, I was the logical person to respond to them. I wanted to wrest back control of this construction project, so I needed to talk to my ghosts, or find someone who could
. And then I had to find someone to help me get rid of them—these homeowners didn’t seem like the type to consider supernatural apparitions as “added value” for the property. Finally, I would have to convince Katenka the ghosts were gone so the renovation project was worth completing.

  But before I did any of that, I wanted to talk to the last living owner of the cursed house to learn what, if anything, she had experienced.

  I returned several work phone calls, then placed a few more: Raul assured me all was progressing well at Cheshire House; I spoke with the head of the painting crew finishing up the Vallejo Street project; checked on an order of reclaimed barn wood for the floor in a client’s den; and confirmed with Stan that everything was set for this Friday’s payroll.

  Finally, I headed back over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and across town to the neighborhood known as the Western Addition, to the address Brittany had written down for me. Next up was a quick chat with the cat lady.

  Chapter Eight

  Hettie Banks didn’t have many visitors.

  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, b
ut 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?”