Keeper of the Castle: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery

by Juliet Blackwell

  “Apparently, people have a hard time letting Ellis Elrich down.”

  “But you don’t think he wanted to keep the secret enough to kill over it?”

  “He could have. . . . I really don’t know.”

  Could he have dispatched someone to get rid of Larry McCall when the building inspector found out about the stones from Golden Gate Park? I couldn’t be sure, but I was finally getting smart. It wasn’t wise to make possibly career-ending accusations at someone when they were armed and in an isolated warehouse. Even if Libole’s weapon was only a toy, and Zach and I had real weapons . . . I wasn’t prepared to start shooting people, either.

  This was a job for the police. So when I dropped Zach back at his car in the Safeway parking lot, I called Detective Bernardino. We had a very uncomfortable chat, during which he informed me that the police had their person of interest in Pete Nolan, thank you very much, and Ellis Elrich would surely deal with any fraud perpetrated by Florian Libole if and when he was ready. Bernardino also told me to stop insinuating to the McCall family that someone besides Pete Nolan might have killed their loved one and to ask the SFPD to stay out of his case and off his back. And, finally, he said not to call him again at this hour of the night.

  I would never again complain about Annette Crawford.

  * * *

  I limped back to Ellis Elrich’s house, exhausted. I was happy to see that the protesters had dispersed for the day; I wasn’t up for running the gauntlet at the main gates. This had been one hell of a day . . . and I still hadn’t figured things out.

  All I wanted to do was go to my room, take a very hot shower for a very long time, and put on some clean clothes. I crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t run into the sour Vernon Dunn, or even Alicia. Maybe I could grab something in the snack bar and slip into my room without being spotted, flick on the fire in the fireplace and . . .

  But Ellis was in the foyer when I walked in.

  “Mel, how are you? I was sorry you slipped out at the Pelican Inn—I was going to offer to spare you the drive back. One of the men could have driven your car.”

  “Thanks. That’s thoughtful of you. But I was fine, just needed to pull myself together. Do you have a few minutes to talk? In private?”

  “Of course.” He led the way down to the Discovery Room.

  “I don’t quite know how to say this,” I said as we settled ourselves under the watchful eyes of Madame Curie. “And I’m tired, so I might fumble it a little. But . . . I think Florian Libole may have imported the wrong monastery.”

  * * *

  Ellis took the news pretty well, considering he had spent a fortune on—and garnered a great deal of press over—a mistaken monastery.

  I showed him pictures of the original Wakefield in Scotland, with its half-tumbled tower, then compared them to the ruins on the Isle of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth. The pictures helped to illustrate my point, but even to my own ears the story sounded far-fetched. Ellis listened attentively, thanked me for the information, and then went out to the terrace.

  Last I saw, he was picking up smooth river stones and building his little cairns by the silvery light of a nearly full moon. If only everyone could deal with frustration so calmly.

  I felt like I was tattling on Libole, but I wasn’t brave enough to accuse him in person. The funny thing was that despite everything—the fraud, the pomposity—I sort of liked Florian. He was a font of knowledge about obscure architectural history. And the plan he had invented for the monastery we were rebuilding was genius, mixing and matching his resources to create a historic building from several sources, just like Julia Morgan at Hearst Castle. Too bad he hadn’t figured out a way to embrace the situation with full disclosure.

  After my shower, I crawled into bed and finished Keeper of the Castle, which had a very satisfying ending. I missed Dog’s company but was lulled to sleep by the odd, lilting notes of Donnchadh’s flute.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I woke up half expecting to find some proclamation from Ellis about the Wakefield project being halted. But since there was nothing untoward on today’s schedule slipped under my door, I grabbed some coffee and headed down to the jobsite, to continue on with the job.

  At lunchtime I headed to the hospital. Dr. Petralis had declared Graham to be out of imminent danger, and he had been moved to a regular room. If Graham continued to improve this quickly, the nurse said, he would be able to go home tomorrow or the next day.

  I did my best to make him laugh, but my best wasn’t good enough, and even with a head injury, Graham was too perceptive not to pick up on my questionable mental state. I insisted I was fine, but he didn’t believe me.

  I left after an hour, telling him to hurry up reknitting his skull, because I needed him back on the job.

  “Whatever you say, boss lady,” he said quietly, his eyes already closed, as I slipped out.

  This experience had brought one thing home with full force: I was an idiot. Graham had been offering me his heart for some time, and I had been hesitating, too caught up in my own trust issues to recognize what was right in front of me. But no more dinking around. If Graham still wanted me when his head was unscrambled, I would act like a grown-up and dive into this relationship, once and for all.

  Now that I had come so close to losing him, I realized just how much Graham meant to me.

  Happy with my decision, I strode down the hospital corridor, where I ran into Jeanine McCall, carrying a cellophane-wrapped paper plate full of cookies.

  “Jeanine,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I just . . . When I’m unhappy, I bake.” She shrugged. “I’ve been baking a lot lately. And then I thought about your poor friend in the hospital, so I thought I’d drop these by and wish him well.”

  “That’s so thoughtful of you. Unfortunately, he just fell asleep. Also, he’s not eating yet—in fact, I imagine the nurses would appreciate the cookies more than he would at the moment.”

  “Oh, that’s a good idea. I’ll leave them at the nurses’ station.”

  “Could I ask you something? Your husband went to Golden Gate Park not long before he was . . . attacked. Do you know what he found there?”

  “He brought home a copy of a schema, a map of old stones that belonged to William Randolph Hearst. They were once part of a castle on the coast of Spain.”

  “Is that so?”

  “He thought I would be interested because my family’s from Spain, though my people come from a small town at the foot of the Pyrenees. Still, it’s all so interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it certainly is.”

  “I can’t remember the name of the castle, but it was on the coast of Valencia. The sad part is that a woman was held prisoner there, kept in a tower, and during a siege meant to secure her rescue, the poor thing starved to death.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  She nodded. “There’s so much sadness in the world, isn’t there?”

  I had to agree with that. “Still, the men in the permit office mentioned your daughter is getting married. That’s exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, it is. She wanted to delay the celebration, but her father wouldn’t have wanted that. Life goes on, as they say. Here. Have a cookie.”

  I took one, and she left the rest with a grateful nursing staff.

  On my way out of the hospital, I stopped by the ICU, where I was happy to find Nurse Ratched on duty.

  “I wanted to thank you—and everyone—for taking such good care of my friend while he was here,” I said, pulling Keeper of the Castle from my bag. “I brought this for you.”

  She avoided my eyes. “Oh, I couldn’t . . .”

  “I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s very entertaining. With a tough job like yours, I’m sure you could use an occasional distraction.”

  We shared a smile.

  * * *

  This junior ghost buster was confused. So I took the little I knew to Olivier and begged for his counsel. I told him what I h
ad learned about Donnchadh and the Lady in Red and their origins. But I still didn’t know what they were after.

  “It’s possible the Lady in Red is searching for her room.”

  “The one in the tower, where she was trapped and died?”

  “The very one.”

  “What if it isn’t built yet?”

  “Build it, and she will come.”

  “But I don’t understand. If she was being held there as a hostage, a prisoner, why would she be searching for it?”

  “Because she is very confused right now. She is looking for something familiar, and as strange as it seems, that room was her environment for the last months of her life. It sounds to me as though she’s searching for some semblance of normal amid her decidedly abnormal current existence.”

  “So we build her tower, and then what? Find some way to put her to rest?”

  “As you know, none of this is hard science. But yes. I believe that would be a good place to start. You might also want to leave food out for her, as an offering.”

  “Do ghosts eat?”

  He gave me a smile and a Gallic shrug. “Donnchadh seems to think so. It couldn’t hurt. Leave food out—whether she eats it or not, she should find it soothing to know it’s there. And your warrior ghost could protect her.”

  I tried to imagine what Alicia would say if I asked her for food for a ghost. Vegan? Gluten-free? Any religious concerns?

  “But the spirits appear to have made the tower fall twice now. It imploded, with no known cause. Why would they do that, if she’s searching for her room?”

  “You are not building it right.”

  I blew out a breath. I was willing to bet that Larry McCall had had a copy of the original schema on his Clipboard of Doom and that the murderer had absconded with it.

  I should follow up with my old pal Cur at the Parks Department. Perhaps they had processed my paperwork, and I could get a copy of that original plan for the tower stones.

  But I might have a way around that. Caleb had told me last night that he and Dad and Stan had been working with the photos of the mural, piecing it together. If we could reconstruct the painting, we would have a leg up on understanding how the stone blocks fit together.

  “One more thing,” added Olivier. “The strength of her appearance makes me think her remains might be present somewhere. It would be helpful to gather them, too, of course, and perhaps place them in her tower.”

  “I don’t know where they could be. I’ve searched these stones high and low. There are few chambers or openings, nothing like a spot where remains might have been stashed. We found a couple of tombstones, but that was it.”

  Unless hers were among the bones in the warehouse. But if so, why would her ghost be haunting the ruins? Wouldn’t she be wandering around the warehouse, more confused than ever? Besides, those “decorative” bones had come from Eastern Europe, according to Libole, and the origin stamps on the crates seemed to back him up.

  But thinking about Florian Libole’s macabre collection of bones made me wonder. . . .

  * * *

  Yuri had arrived at Elrich’s house this morning. He had set up and was working in the entryway under Alicia’s excited, watchful eyes.

  After Elrich signed off on the drawings for a mural that featured life on a hacienda in the eighteenth century—heavy on bright flowers, colorful produce, and beautiful women; light on livestock and sweat—the artist had worked out the dimensions and composition on paper before transferring the outlines onto the wall. This “cartoon” would guide his painting.

  “You mentioned the other day that plaster was sometimes made of ground bones?” I said, watching as a few flicks of Yuri’s skilled hand created the illusion of a horse’s leg in motion.

  “That’s true. Usually they were burned first, in very hot fires. Calcination of the bones occurs at a little less than one thousand degrees Celsius.”

  “When you say ‘bones,’ whose bones are we talking about?”

  “Not ‘whose’ bones—at least I should hope not. I meant animal bones, probably deer and, I don’t know, other large animals with bones big enough to make it count.”

  “And that’s not . . . unusual?”

  “You know, back then they used everything they had. Think about it: no plastics or synthetic glues or binders.”

  “True. I’ve stripped a lot of wallpaper put up with dried milk or oatmeal—that stuff stays stuck for generations.”

  “It’s the enzymes in milk. Don’t know what it is about oatmeal, but it’s powerful stuff.”

  “So, back to bones: Were human remains ever used?”

  There was a long pause. Yuri started shading large areas of the mural with hatch marks.

  “Or am I being creepy?” I asked when he still didn’t answer.

  “Did you find hydroxyapatite?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “In the plaster. The results from the diffraction spectrometer should tell you. Hydroxyapatite comes from bones. There was evidence of ground bone plaster all over Europe in the Middle Ages. The bone was used as black and white pigment, as well as to strengthen the walls.”

  “So it is possible they used human bones?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Those people used everything they had, back in the day.”

  * * *

  I went back to work with the crew for the rest of the afternoon.

  When the men started to pack up and leave at the end of the day, I decided I would try talking to Donnchadh once more. At the very least, I could inform him of my plan. And if the Lady in Red happened by, perhaps I could speak a little Spanish to her, see if she and I could communicate somehow. I wondered how far my construction-site Spanish would take me. I was betting she didn’t particularly care that a circular saw was called a sierra circular.

  If the broken fresco on the tower blocks truly contained the ashes of bones of the Lady in Red, then perhaps she would feel more restful when I gathered things together properly and reconstructed her tower. She would be able to inhabit her familiar room, with her remains close at hand.

  There was no way I could move those stones by myself, even with heavy equipment. And I shouldn’t rush into it, in any case. I would wait to see whether Caleb, Dad, and Stan could work out the order for the reassembled painting, and I would get a copy of the original schema from Cur or Libole. If Florian Libole was still employed by Elrich and deigned to work with me, I would enlist his help in coming up with a working set of drawings to rebuild the Lady in Red’s tower and to meld it gracefully with the rest of the monastery.

  It was worth a shot.

  When all the workers had left the site, I took time to center myself before entering the chapel, running through my mental body scan, reminding myself that I was attached to the earth and drawing up compassion not only for the eternally vigilant Donnchadh, but also for the poor, tortured soul who had been imprisoned and starved to death. She scared the hell out of me, but the ferocity of her feelings was no doubt a reaction to the brutality of her existence.

  I stepped through the chapel, into the sacristy, through the series of low chambers, to the vestibule outside of what used to be the round room but was now nothing but felled stones and bags of mortar that had broken open in the collapse, spewing their dusty gray contents everywhere.

  No sign of Donnchadh.

  No food, either. And no sensation of hunger. I wondered where all the ghosties were. . . .

  But then I glanced out the side entrance and spotted someone in the fenced garth outside.

  Alicia.

  She was on the ground, her hands tied behind her back. Alicia was breathing like she was about to hyperventilate, her eyes huge with terror, duct tape covering her mouth. A man held a gun to her head.

  “Kieran?” I said quietly. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m going to watch you from here,” he said. He was breathing hard, as well. That made three of us. “Go on in and get that chalice. Bring it back to me, and I’ll let her
go.”

  My mind raced. My cell phone didn’t work within the walls of the cloister. I could run out the other side and try to call for help, but from his vantage point in the garth, Kieran would see me escape, and there was no telling how he would react.

  “Go on, now,” Kieran continued. “That thing told you where it was, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said with a shake of my head. “But I’m really disappointed. Somehow I thought . . . I don’t know. Scottish people just seem so civilized. Do you even know how to use that weapon? Do they have guns in Scotland?”

  He wasn’t holding it the way an experienced marksman would. But at this range, lack of skill didn’t make a gun any less lethal.

  “Have you forgotten about the fierceness of the Highland warrior?” Kieran said, perking up. “They scared the pants off the rest of Europe.”

  “Is that why they wore kilts?” I asked, hoping a little levity would put Kieran at ease and reassure Alicia. “So you see yourself as a Highland warrior, do you? I’m not sure it was a warrior move to seduce the boss’s daughter into letting you onto the property.”

  “This ghost . . . It was always bad, but once McCall had his accident, I couldn’t go back into the cloister.”

  “McCall’s death was an accident?”

  “Of course it was. I didn’t mean to kill him. I was hiding on that stack of mortar bags, and I thought I’d just push one over on top of him. Warn him off. I didn’t think it would kill him.”

  “Those are sixty-pound bags,” I pointed out. “What did you think it would do?”

  He shrugged. Alicia whimpered, and I thought about what she’d been through with her violent ex-husband. I wondered if she was reliving the panic and fear of that time in her life.

  I tried to convey with a look that she would be all right, but I wasn’t sure my meaning was getting through.

  “You said you can’t go back in the cloister. Why not?”

  “I just told you. The ghost, or whatever she is. She seems to know me now, after what happened with McCall. She’s horrifying. She makes me feel . . . terrible.”