Dead Bolt

by Juliet Blackwell

  “Do you remember a guy who lived there who moved out after seeing ghosts when you and he went up to the attic?”

  “Sure, I remember him. Dave Enrique. Creepy guy.”

  “How was he creepy?”

  “Inappropriate. I don’t know. Maybe I was imagining things. I felt unsafe in that house, and it’s possible I read too much into things. That’s what my therapist says, anyway.”

  “So you don’t remember seeing any ghosts yourself?”

  Having finished our loop, we were pulling up to the BART station.

  “Regulations state that you have to get off the bus once I’ve made a full rotation,” Janet said in a formal voice, though she smiled when I met her eyes. “I’m just kidding, you’re welcome to stay if you want. Cyrus stays on all day sometimes. Don’t you, Cyrus? But I thought you might be done with your questions, and unless you want to go another full circuit with me, this is your stop.”

  “Just one more question.” Actually, the same question one more time. “Your mom said you left the Cheshire Inn as a teen. Before you left, did you ever see anything odd in the house?”

  “Everything was odd in that house.” A thoughtful look came into her eyes, and she rubbed the scratches on her arm. “I didn’t know what normal was till I went to live with my dad. He was a piece of work himself, but at least he didn’t have any pets, or boarders.”

  “No ghosts?”

  “I don’t like ghosts,” said Cyrus.

  There was a long pause while the group of teenagers bounced off the bus.

  “I’m a grown-up,” Janet finally said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you?”

  “I think I do, yes.”

  She nodded and shrugged. “To each his own, I guess. Good luck with . . . whatever it is you’re doing. Why are you looking into this, again?”

  Like mother like daughter. Asking the really pertinent question.

  “I think it may be a problem that needs to be laid to rest,” I said, surprising myself. “I think something might have gone on in that house that needs to be addressed, and that it might have something to do with Emile Blunt’s death, somehow.”

  The BART train had arrived, disgorging its passengers. People began to climb onto the bus: two gray-haired women walking arm in arm, helping each other to board; a woman burdened with several plastic bags and a toddler; and yet another group of boisterous teenagers.

  As he passed by Cyrus, one of the teen boys muttered “retard” under his breath.

  Janet surged up out of her seat.

  “Hey! Off this bus, now!” She gestured him up to the front of the bus, then practically pushed him down the steps. “Learn some manners, you little brat!”

  Everyone on the bus, including me, fell silent, chastened. You could have heard a pin drop.

  “Well. Anyway,” Janet said as she settled back behind the wheel, “if ghosts decided it was time to take out Emile Blunt, I’d leave them well enough alone.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I don’t have to believe to know this isn’t something to fool with. I’m not stupid.”

  Excellent point. “Thank you for talking with me about this, Janet. I really appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Janet said. “Good luck, and all that.”

  As I climbed down off the bus, the steam from a hot dog stand drifted my way, mingling with the diesel of the bus. Urban smells that made me miss the fresh-cut wood smell of the job site. Probably what I should be doing was getting back to work I understood: building things.

  My mother used to say, Don’t borrow trouble. And was I? No, I thought, I didn’t have to borrow it. It was bothering me, in the form of ghostly hijinks on the job site. Plus, I couldn’t shake the notion that Emile’s death had something to do with the inhabitants—whether real or ephemeral—of Cheshire House. But how does one say such things to the police?

  Okay, new plan. While I was in the East Bay, I could make a stop to follow up with Dave Enrique. According to Hettie, the former boarder worked at Heartwood Lumber in San Leandro, which was down the freeway a few exits past Oakland. While I was there I could order some sheetrock we needed for the job site, and then see if Luz would let me bounce some ideas off her in exchange for lunch.

  Suddenly I was so hungry that the BART hot dogs were starting to smell good. Clearly things were at a desperate pass.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When entering an unfamiliar supply yard like Heartwood Lumber, I sometimes felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger at a quilting bee: My very presence set things abuzz.

  My attire probably didn’t help. Today had dawned chilly and overcast, so I wore black fingerless gloves, black leggings and matching sweater, a rather short gray skirt, a long, thin red scarf my sister had knitted, all topped by a full-length black leather jacket I bought in Spain a million years ago.

  Only my steel-toed work boots marked me as an insider.

  Heartwood Lumber was open to the public but was set up for contractors, not do-it-yourself homeowners. There were no friendly vest-clad employees eager to answer questions about which pneumatic drill bit worked best on concrete, or if a synthetic paintbrush could be used with oil as well as latex paint. Instead, behind the cluttered counter were several guys sitting at computer terminals, inputting orders of thousands of pounds of rebar or truckloads of lumber to be delivered to building sites.

  As was typical in these sorts of places, I was the only female.

  Construction is one occupation that has, by and large, ignored the women’s movement. There simply aren’t that many of us double-X chromosome carriers with the interest and the inclination—or the training and support—to compete successfully in the trades. Younger women often have to leave if they want to have families, because health and safety standards don’t allow for pregnancy on many job sites. And then there was the incessant sexual harassment. But a lot of it was simple tradition: Many construction workers went into this line of work because their fathers were in the trades. Dad was a carpenter, so they were raised to see that as an option, and probably spent many a weekend building things and learning to use tools. Dad was a journeyman plumber, so he helped his son get into the apprentice-training program. No doubt it would change in time, but progress was slow.

  In the meantime, I tried to hire and work with women whenever I could, but by and large I spent my days in a man’s world. On the upside, I was easily recognized at all of the lumberyards, cement and gravel companies, and hardware outlets I frequented in the Bay Area, not to mention the numerous specialty stores that carried architectural salvage goods and reproductions. Most of the men accepted me when they realized I didn’t dink around or play the “girl card” to avoid less savory aspects of the work.

  The hefty man behind the counter wore a name tag that read HARLAN LOFGREN, HEARTWOOD ASSISTANT MANAGER. Harlan’s watery blue eyes checked me out not in the way of a man appreciating a woman, but as though he was assessing my sanity. But within the first two minutes of our discussion I had thrown in enough information about my current renovation projects that he knew my boots weren’t just for show.

  I ordered a truckload of half-inch wallboard to be delivered to Cheshire House. Then I requested a catalog of reproduction windows, and a list of current lumber prices. Finally, I asked if I could speak with an employee named David Enrique.

  “Sure, go on back. He’s on a forklift in lumber. Mustache.”

  Out in the yard tall piles of different-sized gravel were on one side, stacks and stacks of lumber in metal frames in the covered building to the back. Cinderblocks and pressure-treated wood, rebar, and metal framing supplies were all in orderly sections. The yard smelled of freshly sawn wood, pine dust, and axle grease.

  There were several men working forklifts, but only one with a mustache.

  I flagged him down.

  “Dave Enrique?”

  “Ye-e-ah . . .” he said, as though unsure whether he should give away such vital information.

&
nbsp; He looked to be anywhere from midthirties to -forties, white T-shirt gone gray, jeans, stocky physique, with the kind of ropey muscles more common to building sites than twenty-four-hour fitness centers. His hair was salt-and-pepper, his heavy mustache more toward the pepper than the salt. It was midday and yet he had a five-o’clock shadow.

  “I was hoping to talk to you for just a minute.”

  He looked around, as though scouting out a supervisor.

  “Harlan sent me back here,” I said.

  Enrique shrugged and climbed down, deliberately stripping off tan leather work gloves, one after the other. A medallion hung around his neck: a symbol of protection. A guardian angel. There was another angel inked on one forearm, an intricate tattoo of a nine-millimeter automatic on the other.

  Then he brought out a box of cigarettes with an old-fashioned-looking foreign label. The cigarettes themselves were long and slim and as dark brown as a cigar.

  “Can you believe this? Expensive habit already, and I get hooked on the imports.”

  He didn’t offer me one. Not that I would have accepted.

  I didn’t approve of smoking, and was always bugging my dad to quit. But there was something about the habit that seemed so . . . French. Especially with exotic cigarettes like these. And I was a sucker for anything Parisian. They made me wish I was puffing and drinking espresso and becoming nervous and gorgeous and thin, which is how I’m sure things would be if I ever actually made it to Paris.

  He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the forklift. “So are we talking, or what?”

  “You used to live in the Cheshire Inn, on Union.”

  The expression in his eyes morphed from cautious curiosity to cold impatience. It didn’t take supernatural skills to pick up on this fellow’s mood.

  “A long time ago.”

  “Can you tell me anything about living there?”

  “I wasn’t there long.”

  I nodded. “I spoke with Hettie Banks, the former owner. She said you moved out because you thought you saw something strange.”

  Enrique’s dark eyes swept the yard. There were forklifts transferring items onto delivery trucks, gloved and booted men carrying planks on their shoulders. Metal clanged, engines churned, men shouted. The reassuring hustle and bustle of the construction industry.

  “Why are you asking?”

  “A new couple bought the place, and I’m the general on the renovation. There have been some . . . strange things happening.”

  He nodded. “That’s a bad place.”

  “What’s bad about it?”

  He shrugged. “I was sort of kidding around with the girl who lived there once. She was kind of a weird kid, not that I blamed her. Unusual upbringing. Anyway, she used to play up in the attic. We . . . saw something once.”

  “What was it?”

  He hesitated, taking a long drag on his cigarette, and I feared he was going to stop speaking. I had no way to compel him to tell me anything, after all.

  “It wasn’t exactly clear,” he finally said. “First there were voices, then what sounded like a woman crying. But the worst of it was, I felt this . . . rage building up inside me. It wasn’t directed at the kid, gracias a Dios. It made me want to go after Emile.”

  “Emile?”

  “Yeah, Emile Blunt. This other guy who lived there. Had the room next to mine. Owned an upholstery shop across the way.” One hand reached up to finger his medallion.

  I felt the urge to mirror him and stroke the wedding ring on the ribbon around my neck. Great. At this rate I would become one of those people who had to tap the plane three times before boarding to ward off bad luck.

  “So we were just there, checking out the attic, and it happened. We all three saw it—whatever it was. But the weirdest part was the feelings. Emile had them, too—we talked about it after. And the girl, Janet. It was almost like . . . almost like they were trying to get us to do something.”

  “What did you mean when you said the girl was ‘kind of weird’?”

  “I found something, up in the attic. No big deal, just this little piece of metal, with an engraving on it. I gave it to her, but she managed to lose it, and then she totally flipped out about it. Accused Emile of stealing it from her. Strange.”

  “What did the engraving look like?”

  “I think it must’ve been part of the house; it sort of matched a design that was in other parts of the place. These stylized leaves, and a face that looked sort of like a grim reaper. I’m telling you, that’s a bad place.”

  “I hear Hettie kept a lot of cats.”

  He shrugged and took another drag on his cigarette. “They were okay. I like animals. I didn’t like ’em on the kitchen table, but I never ate there anyway, just grabbed a doughnut and coffee on the way to work.”

  “Did it seem like she neglected them?”

  “Are you kidding? Treated those things like family.”

  “Can I ask how well you knew Emile Blunt?”

  He shrugged and threw his cigarette onto the ground, twisting his boot over the butt. “As well as I cared to. I only knew him as a fellow boarder; we passed in the hall occasionally. Besides that time in the attic, alls I know about him is he spoke Russian, and the jerk borrowed some money from me once, but never paid me back. Why?”

  “He passed away.”

  “That so?”

  “Murdered. He was found yesterday.”

  Enrique made the sign of the cross.

  “When was the last time you saw any of these folks?”

  “It’s been years. And I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “What about the money Emile owed you?”

  “It wasn’t that kind of money. I was just as happy to let it go, so long as I never have to deal with any of those people again. Now,” he said as he pulled on his leather gloves, “break time’s over.”

  He climbed back up on the forklift and started the engine.

  I walked back toward the building, my boots crunching on the loose gravel and broken concrete of the yard.

  Funny how neither Hettie nor Emile had mentioned to me that he used to live in the house.

  My stomach growled. I couldn’t think about all this on an empty stomach. I checked in with my foremen by cell phone, then bought tacos from my favorite parking lot truck and brought them to Luz’s place. Wednesdays were her day off from teaching, and she’d been working like mad on her new condo in a 1920s building, out in the Avenues near Portola.

  I had sent over Jeremy, one of my carpenters, to help her out today, so I knew she’d be home. Luz would make any excuse to hang out with Jeremy.

  The place was tiny, but we were transforming it into a jewel box. The inspiration came from a castle I had seen while traveling through the Dordogne Valley with Daniel, years ago. We came upon it by chance, and learned that it had once belonged to Josephine Baker. The glamorous American dancer had transformed a section of the castle into a 1920s art deco dream, including a bathroom tiled in black and gold, designed by Givenchy. Gorgeous.

  The idea was to gold- and silver-leaf the walls and ceiling, and to upholster with plush velvet and silks, so that it would seem like one was walking into an actual jewel box.

  Luz answered the door covered in splotches of red-brown paint. Though I spent a good deal of my life covered in paint and dust and plaster, this was a big deal for a woman who usually balked at getting her hair mussed.

  “You look like you’ve been in a knife fight,” I said.

  “More like a fight with this can of paint, and the paint won,” she replied as she led the way into the main room.

  “Have you eaten yet? I brought lunch.”

  “I had a little something, but if those are tacos I smell, I’ll eat again. Just let me get washed up. Oh wait, do I have to wash out this brush? It’ll take forever to get the red out.”

  “Use the old painters’ trick: Wrap it in plastic.” I wrapped it tightly in the plastic taco bags. “As long as it’s airtigh
t, the paint won’t dry out for a long time. If you want to leave it overnight, stick it in the freezer.”

  “Like a paint Popsicle?”

  I smiled, remembering my mother finding my brushes loaded with any number of colors in the freezer. Problem was, I would forget about them, and even wrapped and frozen, they only lasted so long. Good painters’ brushes were not only essential to a good paint job, they were expensive. They had to be treated right.

  While Luz was washing her hands, the hammering from the next room came to a halt, and Jeremy walked in. We chatted about the status of the job, and then I offered him lunch.

  “Thanks, but I’m meeting a friend to take a run. I’ll get a protein smoothie after. I’m on a cleansing diet, detoxing all month. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  “Oh, that sounds so much better than tacos,” I said. “Have fun.”

  “He’s so freaking gorgeous,” Luz muttered, watching Jeremy’s fine form as he slipped out the front door.

  She and I scooched down to sit on the floor on drop cloths, backs up against the wall. It had turned into a sunny winter’s day, and cool, fresh air wafted in through the cracked windows. We could hear the sound of someone strumming on a guitar, and children playing in the schoolyard down the street.

  “You do know he’s gay, right?”

  “That doesn’t mean I can’t look, does it?”

  “I guess not, as long as he doesn’t mind. Sexual harassment runs both ways, you know.”

  Luz sighed and laid her head back against the wall. “There should be a law against a man that good-looking being gay.”

  “Maybe you find him that attractive precisely because he is gay. Ever think of that?”

  She frowned. “I reject that theory.”

  “On what basis?”

  “That I don’t like it.”

  “Very scholarly of you.”

  “Scholarliness is overrated.”

  “So says the academic. Besides,” I said, handing Luz a taco, “if he weren’t gay and you started seeing each other, you’d have to go jogging and talk about protein shakes instead of indulging in tacos with me.”