Murder on the House: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (Haunted Home Repair Mystery) (18 page)

“Caleb, the salad needs making,” he said before we’d even set our stuff down.

“Dad, he’s injured. Besides, why do you insist on a salad no one will eat?” I asked before I could stop myself. “At least let me buy some decent greens at the farmers’ market.”

“What?” he said, as though he didn’t understand. As though this weren’t a discussion we had several times a month. “Iceberg’s not good enough for you?”

I sighed and reminded myself that I was living in his home, and he was cooking for me and my stepson. I dropped my things at the foot of the stairs and came back into the kitchen to give him a kiss on his stubbly cheek.

“Smells good,” I said.

“Nothing fancy,” he said with a shrug. “Get yourself a drink and take a load off.”

We were both saying we were sorry. This was the way we worked it. Living together as adults wasn’t easy; in fact, living with him as a kid hadn’t exactly been a picnic, either. Nevertheless, he was a good dad. A great dad.

“Thanks, I think I’ll do just that,” I said, pouring myself a glass of cheap red wine.

Caleb, meanwhile, was using his good hand to pick the brown spots off the lettuce to make a salad none of us would eat. I thought about telling him he didn’t have to—his left arm was in a sling, after all—but he knew that. As long as I didn’t impose my expectations that they actually converse, Caleb and my dad got along fine, their interaction consisting primarily of watching sports and doing the occasional chore around the house together, and grunting. Must be a guy thing.

Stan and I met in the home office to go over paperwork, phone calls, and assorted supply issues that had arisen during the day. I also placed a call to Marty Propak, hoping he would tell me I could get back into the Bernini house to start putting together a project proposal. He told me he and Kim hadn’t yet had a chance to decide what to do, given the circumstances. I wondered whether they were finding their dream of a haunted Castro District B&B a little overwhelming, and might be contemplating moving back to Fort Wayne.

Half an hour later Dad called out,
“Dinner’s on!”
as though we were at the neighbor’s house rather than just down the hall.

I pushed Stan back to the kitchen. He was a pro at getting himself around in his chair, but I assumed it must be tiring. He never complained, but being in a chair brought with it a slew of related physical challenges, from back pain to circulation problems.

“Oh, I made some phone calls,” Dad said as we took our places around the kitchen table. “Old Tom Avery’s living on his boat down at Jack London Marina. Guess he pretty much stepped out of the day-to-day operations of the company.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.” I glanced at Dad, who was busying himself with putting the hot tray of ravioli on a trivet we’d used ever since I could remember. It had a painting of a woman in traditional Navajo dress, tending to a baby. Mom had told me they bought it in a secondhand shop in New Mexico on their honeymoon, and she considered it magical that it had survived, unbroken, through so many moves and dinners and children.

I missed her with a longing that went straight to my gut. But, as I looked at the thinning gray hair of my dad, I knew he missed my Mom—his Dorothy—in a way I could never fathom. He had always seemed so in charge, but when she passed, it was clear that she had been his compass, his touchstone. I wondered whether it was just wishful thinking on my part, but he seemed to be acting a little more like his old self lately, putting himself out to be more active in the world.

For instance, making a call to check up on Tom Avery on my behalf.

The ravioli were excellent, and the conversation lively. Caleb’s presence brought out the blustery best in my dad, and Stan adored my stepson as well. After dinner I brought out the bag of smashed equipment I had recovered from the Bernini house’s playroom.

“I don’t suppose any of you mechanically inclined guys would know how to recover any of the information from these devices?”

“I don’t think you can do anything about the recorder,” said Caleb. “But even if the camera was dropped, the memory card should be fine.”

“Memory card?” I wasn’t what you call high-tech.

Using his one good hand, he opened a tiny door on the camera and told me to pull out the little card.

“You’re saying this stuff shows proof of your ghosts?” Dad shook his head and made a beeline for the Barcalounger in front of his big-screen TV. “I’m watching the game.”

Stan, Caleb, and I went to the office and Caleb slid the memory card into a port on the computer. We crowded around the monitor and squinted at the confusing images.

“No offense, Mel, but you suck at photography,” said Caleb.

The photos were full of gleaming lights—four, to be precise. And something that looked like mist. And a big white mound . . . what
was
that?

“Looks like a bed, maybe?” said Stan.

I squinted some more, cocked my head, and used my imagination. “I think you might be right. Maybe the playroom used to be a bedroom?”

“Does that tell you anything?” Stan asked.

“Not really.”

The only thing it told me was something I already knew: It was high time for me to spend a few hours at the California Historical Society. I needed to see what I could dig up on the history of the house, and try to figure out how the family had died. It was clear they had unfinished business and were causing disturbances in their old home. Unfortunately, due to recent budget cutbacks the society wasn’t open tomorrow; I opened my schedule and blocked out some time to visit the archives the following day.

Stan and Caleb eventually got bored cracking jokes about the orbs in my photos and returned to the kitchen to wash the dishes, but I lingered and used the Internet to look up the song that Anabelle kept singing. I didn’t know its name, but I put the lyrics I could remember into the search engine and it brought back this info: It was written by Philip Emery in 1949. I found an old recording of the song and listened all the way through:

With garlands of roses, and whispers of pearls . . . a garden of posies for all little girls. So come see the fairies, and dance with the sprites, we’ll all play together from morning till night.

The lyrics themselves provided no explanation. It was just a sweet, straightforward little ditty.

What was odd was that Anabelle had died decades before the song was written. I looked up the history of radio broadcasting and learned that while radio devices existed in the early 1900s, public broadcasts didn’t begin in earnest until the 1920s.

Well after the unfortunate demise of the Bowles family.

Chapter Sixteen

T
he next morning I was up
and out bright and early. I was not, after all, getting paid for my ghost-busting services, and I still had Turner Construction to run. Our subcontractors and full-time staff depended on me to keep the company in the black, and to make payroll every month, despite whatever ghosts I might have seen or murders I might be trying to figure out.

After going over some final drawings with carpenters at Matt’s place in Pacific Heights, I headed to Cheshire House to make sure all the subcontractors were on schedule to be out before the floor refinishers started their job, which would render the house uninhabitable for more than a week.

By the time I finished up there, it was almost one in the afternoon. My stomach was growling as I drove down Market to the giant rainbow flag that marked the entrance to the Castro. This area was once home to so many working-class northern European immigrants that it was called Little Scandinavia. Later, Irish families moved in. There were still traces of each, but by the 1970s Harvey Milk, who would become the most famous resident of the neighborhood, opened a camera store and became politically active in the quest for gay civil rights, contributing to the notion of the Castro as a gay-friendly destination. I was very young at the time, but I still remembered the horrifying assassinations of City Supervisor Milk and Mayor Moscone in 1978.

I found a rare two-hour parking spot, and stopped in at Sylven’s Pizza. As before, the place was half-f of men eating slices. Other than a young woman taking phone orders, I was the only female in sight.

“Oh my Lord! You poor, poor thing.” J.D. came out from behind the register and gave me a hug as though I were a long-lost friend. “
George!
George, look who’s here, the poor doll from the other night. You know I had
no idea
how serious it was when you came in that night—I was trying not to listen in as you talked on the phone, so I just assumed the poor doll had been knocked down and broke her hip, or there was a break-in or something. I had
no idea
.”

George came over, wiping his hands on his apron. “How are you? I’ll bet you’re traumatized. You poor thing.”

“I’m Mel Turner, by the way.” I handed them my business card, feeling overwhelmed but gratified by their reactions. “Mrs. Bernini and the Propaks invited me to spend the night on Saturday. I’m one of the general contractors vying for the job to transform the place into a bed-and-breakfast.”

“You know, we heard something about that, just the other day,” said J.D. “We were a little surprised—Mrs. Bernini hadn’t mentioned anything. And usually we know everything that’s going on around here, don’t we, George?”

“Just about everything.” George nodded.

“Mel, you just sit right there and we will serve you the most delicious pizza you’ve ever had.”

“I tried it the other night,” I said as I took the proffered stool at the counter. “With Mrs. Bernini, in fact. It was her favorite.”

“Oh, of course. Poor old doll. You know there wasn’t a
thing
she didn’t like on her pizza, except for anchovies, was there, George?”

“Not a thing but anchovies,” George confirmed. He was already back at the ovens, making more pizzas. The phone rang almost constantly, the young woman writing up tags and suspending them on an overhead metal contraption.

“We used to make her up something special, a little different each and every time. Last time we put pea pods and shrimp on a white sauce, didn’t we, George? And on the other, what was it?”

“Prosciutto and melon, and pepperoni. She liked pepperoni.”

“That’s right. . . . Oh, but you must know all this, don’t you, since you were with her that evening?” J.D. looked off into space for a moment, clicked his tongue, and shook his head. “That poor old doll. I’m glad, at the very least, that she had a scrumptious last meal. Is that wrong of me to say?”

I shook my head and smiled. “I think she was very happy to have you all in her life—she loved the pizza and spoke of you as her friends. She was worried about Raj’s mother, for instance. Clearly she was interested in you all.”

“Oh, yes, Raj went over there frequently. He’s a good boy, our steadiest worker. Or at least he used to be. . . .”

“Remember before she got her walker,” said George, “how she used to walk down here every day?”

“She called it her morning constitutional,” said one of the young men sitting at a table by the door.

“And long before that,” J.D. said, “she used to take in all those kids. . . . She was a little . . . well, good at getting her way, but let’s not speak ill of the dead.”

“You guys seem to know a lot about the neighborhood. Do you know anything about the family that used to live in Mrs. Bernini’s house? I’m curious about its history.”

“Well, I know the
legend
. I have no idea if it’s true or not.”

“Legend?”

J.D. grabbed a spray bottle and a rag and started cleaning the already gleaming counter as he talked. “It was ages ago, the family that originally built the house. They say the father, Franklin Bowles, who ran a maternity hospital in that place, had been fighting with a neighbor over water rights. And one morning the servants walked in to find the
entire
family dead.”

“How were they killed?”

“No one knows. The servant who found them said they were all in one bed, and that they looked ‘healthy and pink.’ That was why Evil Campbell was never convicted of anything. But some say he dabbled in magic from the islands. He used to live . . . George? Where did Evil Campbell used to live before he came to San Francisco?”

“One of the islands,” George answered. “Haiti, maybe?”

“Maybe that’s where he got the voodoo?”

“Seriously? Voodoo?”

J.D. waved his rag in the air. “I don’t think anyone actually said
voodoo
. But it seemed like some kind of evil magic. Otherwise, how would the family have died like that? Afterwards, the house was empty for some time, since everyone thought it was cursed. I guess that’s how the Berninis could afford such a big place, since no one else wanted to live there.”

“Huh. And everyone around here knows that story?”

“Sure. Sometimes the local kids—and by kids, I mean adults, too—dress up as Evil Campbell for Halloween.”

While we talked, George continued making one pizza after another, taking steaming cooked pies out of the ovens and replacing them with the freshly made raw ones in a continuous cycle. It was mesmerizing to watch.

“Have you heard anything more about what happened with Mrs. Bernini?” J.D. asked, putting away his rag and washing his hands.

“No. They’re not exactly keeping me informed.”

“I heard she was killed in the garden before . . . well, before she was thrown . . . well, you know,” added a young man standing in line for pizza. “They say maybe the killer was interrupted and panicked. . . .”

His eyes grew huge and he fixed me with a look, his mouth making a perfect O.

“Hey, it was probably you people who scared him off!
Man.
What does it feel like to have been that close to
a killer
?” His voice dropped on the last couple of words, so he was whispering.

Frankly, I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. I had realized we were nearby when the horrific event occurred, but the thought that we scared the person off . . . that was especially frightening. And once again I felt a wave of sadness and guilt that our presence hadn’t averted her death.