Give Up the Ghost: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery

by Juliet Blackwell

  That was more true than Trish realized, I thought. “So what were her options?”

  “How about missionary work?” Trish opened the file and handed me some photocopies. “I thought about her being a schoolteacher, or a nurse, then realized I might find a clue in the archives.”

  “I thought you said the Summerton family didn’t leave many records?”

  “They didn’t—but family papers aren’t the only kinds of records. So I looked up Peregrine Summerton’s will. Turns out he was a big supporter of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. For years he sent an annual donation and left the organization a substantial bequest. Then I checked the records of the church the Summertons attended, and what do you know: Flora was a member of the church’s Missionary Sewing Circle, and helped to raise money for overseas missions. The ladies of the sewing circle were especially fond of supporting women missionaries. Nothing in the church records suggested Flora had gone on a mission, but there are large gaps in the records. So I dug a little deeper.”

  Trish paused and took a sip of her margarita, licking salt off the rim.

  “You’re amazing,” I said.

  “I’m a librarian.”

  “Well, then, librarians are amazing.”

  She smiled. “One of the databases the Historical Society subscribes to includes old newspapers devoted to covering overseas missions. I started reading the issues for the months after Flora’s disappearance and finally found a reference to her in an article about missionaries in Hawaii.”

  “Flora went to Hawaii?”

  “To Maui, to be precise.”

  “You’re getting a kick out of this,” I said, enjoying her enthusiasm.

  “Flora Summerton must have been a gutsy young woman. Just imagine what it took for her to leave her home and everything she knew, and sail off into the sunset to a foreign land. I went back to the Rutherford Family Papers and read some of their earlier correspondence. Apparently the neighbors were buzzing about how disappointed Peregrine Summerton was in his sons. He was fond of saying that his daughter Flora was ‘twice the man my boys should be.’”

  “Yikes. Sounds like a fun family dynamic.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Did you find anything about Peregrine Summerton being a photographer?”

  “Actually, yes!” She brought out a copy of a small handbill. “He had a show of photographs, right there in the ballroom. ‘One hundred faces of Flora,’ he called it. It was really much more about the wonders of photography than about Flora herself, but she was his favorite model. A young John Caruthers, heir to the copper-mining fortune, saw the show and fell in love with Flora. He asked for her hand in marriage right there and then, without even meeting her!”

  “So Flora escaped her father’s home and marriage to a man she didn’t love, and made a life for herself in Hawaii?”

  Trish nodded. “It turns out that she also became entitled to a small inheritance from her grandmother upon reaching her majority, which helps to explain why she waited until her birthday for her dramatic escape.”

  “Did Flora ever return home?”

  “Good question. I wondered that myself.” She handed me a photocopy of a pamphlet entitled California Women of Distinction. “This little gem was published in 1910 to support the fight for women’s suffrage in California. A library patron requested it, and I looked through it when she was done. It consists of a number of very short biographies, including several women missionaries. According to the pamphlet, Flora met a young American physician in Hawaii. They married, but she was widowed after only a year when he died of some sort of fever in the islands. Then she received a letter from Peregrine saying he was ill and wanted to see her, and take one more photo of her, before he died. He obviously knew where to find her, but had left her alone until he fell ill. Perhaps her dramatic exit led him to see the error of his ways.”

  “Or maybe he assumed a wife’s first loyalty was to her husband.”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “Anyway, she sailed back to San Francisco, but never made it to Crosswinds. She was struck and killed running across California Street to catch the cable car.”

  “That’s so sad. I mean, I know she’s been dead a long time, but—what a waste.”

  Trish nodded. “Life was tough back then. Fevers, accidents, so-called ‘childhood diseases’ that killed tens of thousands of young people every year. And don’t get me started on the dangers of childbirth.”

  “So Flora’s been trying to get home, all this time,” I mused.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing, never mind.” I noticed she had also brought some newspaper clippings from the 1940s. “What are these?”

  “Something else I thought you’d be interested in. That address your friend Luz was looking up? There was lots more to that story. As Luz discovered, a woman named Suzanne White lived at that address and was known locally as the ‘Pie Lady.’”

  “That might explain why I smell pie there.”

  “Better than sulfur,” grumbled Luz, who was now standing in the office doorway. “I heard my name. You found out more about Suzanne White?”

  Trish nodded. “During WWII, while her husband was serving in the military overseas, Suzanne turned her love of baking into a part-time business, making pies, cupcakes, strudel, what have you. Kept her busy and supplemented the family income, I imagine. When her husband was badly wounded in battle, and came home in a wheelchair, the money the Pie Lady made was even more important.”

  “She must have been quite anxious about their future.”

  “Very likely. There weren’t a lot of options for women who needed to support their families at this time; men were assumed to be the breadwinners and if a man was unwilling or unable to take on that role, then a family could be in serious trouble. Anyway, when Suzanne’s husband passed away about a year after he came home, everyone assumed it was due to complications from his war injury.”

  “You think it may have been from something else?”

  “I think it’s possible. Not long after Suzanne’s husband died, the neighbor across the street fell ill after eating one of the Pie Lady’s pies. She died, too.”

  “You think Suzanne was poisoning people?”

  Trish nodded. “Nothing was ever proved, but the neighbors were convinced of it. Check out these articles.”

  Luz came into the office and took a seat at Stan’s desk, and Trish handed us photocopies of newspaper articles.

  Mine looked like it came from a tabloid paper, the kind with large print and lots of exclamation points. Surrounding the story about Suzanne White were tales of out-of-wedlock celebrity sex and visitors from outer space.

  “A tabloid? And you, a librarian . . .”

  “Hey, if you want idle gossip and conjecture, the New York Times won’t help,” Trish said with a shrug. “It’s not enough to prove anything, of course, and in principle I can’t support this kind of yellow journalism. But if you want to take the pulse of a community, read the tabloid newspapers.”

  According to the article, the neighbors suspected Suzanne White of having an affair with her across-the-courtyard neighbor while her husband was away fighting for his country. When he returned she continued with her pie business and quickly grew tired of taking care of her disabled husband. She fed him a poisoned pie—the article went on at length as to whether it was apple or strawberry-rhubarb—wore widow’s weeds until his modest life insurance check cleared, then resumed her affair with the neighbor. A few months later the neighbor decided he wanted to break it off. Suzanne invited his wife over for coffee and pie. The wife became violently ill shortly thereafter, and died later than night.

  She used to make the children cupcakes, but no one will take them now, the article quoted one neighbor as saying. Still, she bakes. Every day.

  “But nothing was ever proved against
her?” Luz asked.

  Trish shook her head. “A couple of the neighbors contacted the police—including the husband of the woman who died—but they didn’t find anything. Forensic techniques were pretty crude at the time. I couldn’t find any notice of official charges.”

  “What happened to her in the end?”

  She handed me another newspaper article.

  Suzanne White, age 33, was found dead in her home at the Mermaid Cove Court apartment complex. Known to one and all in the neighborhood as the Pie Lady, she was widely believed to have been a murderess! Mrs. White’s husband, a proud American G.I., survived terrible wounds sustained defending his country in the recent war only to be felled by the treachery of his wife, a greedy adulteress! Not content with burying her brave husband for the insurance money, Mrs. White is believed to have poisoned the wife of the man with whom she carried on the adulterous affair when he, realizing the depths of her wanton depravity, inevitably spurned her love. Soon even the neighborhood children refused to partake of her baked goods though she spent hours in her kitchen no doubt to distract herself from her evil deeds. The Pie Lady’s dreadful corpse was discovered yesterday in her kitchen, a rolling pin by her side. This reporter was able to learn that she had died some days previous, and the natural course of decomposition rendered the identification more difficult. According to eyewitnesses, the police found an apple pie on the kitchen table, with but a single slice missing, and one dessert plate and fork in the dish drainer. Another pie still in the oven had burnt to a crisp! The neighbors at Mermaid Cove are breathing a sigh of relief that the deeds of a murderess most foul will no longer haunt their comfortable abodes.

  “Quite a story, isn’t it?” Trish asked.

  “She killed herself, after killing her husband and her lover’s wife?” Luz asked.

  “Who knows? That’s certainly what the neighbors thought. Gossip is often wrong—but a lot of the time it’s right on the money.”

  “So you’re saying the apartment is being haunted by the ghost of the Pie Lady, who used to poison people?” asked Eddie.

  I looked up to see Eddie, Sinsi, and Carmen lurking in the doorway, listening in. Dog pushed his way past the bottleneck, but upon noting we weren’t eating anything, he went back out to scout the kitchen.

  “Um, yeah. It looks that way,” I said.

  “I’m sorry . . . ?” said Trish. “Did you say ‘haunted’?”

  I realized I wasn’t fully out to Trish. Time to come clean.

  “You know how I’m forever looking up the histories of the houses I’m working on? It’s partly for the sake of architecture, and partly because I have a little side business wherein I put ghosts to rest.”

  Trish looked at me appraisingly, as though to assess whether or not I was kidding. Then her gaze flickered over to Luz, and the others.

  “Cool,” she said finally.

  Dad, who was now looking over the students’ shoulders to see what the commotion was all about, snorted.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  After we had all eaten our fill of tamales—and rice and beans, of course, and guacamole and chips and margaritas and lemonade—we sat around the dining room table, digesting.

  “I was thinking . . .” I began.

  “Serious trouble,” grumbled Dad.

  “Maybe we should go and try to talk to the Pie Lady. Maybe kick some ghost butt. What do you think?”

  “I think that’s the margarita talking,” said Luz.

  The students exchanged glances. “We were kind of thinking of watching a movie.”

  “Hey, it’s okay by me if you all want to sleep on Dad’s floor forever, but somebody asked me to get rid of a ghost, so that’s what I intend to do. Besides, if this ghost is the type to kill off her husband and neighbors with poisoned pie, I have very little sympathy for her. Time to send that nasty piece of work on, let her get started cleaning the big kitchen in the sky.”

  “Fine,” said Dad. “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s?”

  “We’re not gonna let you run around chasing down homicidal ghosts all by yourself. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “But it’s okay if I do it in the middle of the day?”

  “There are limits.”

  “Wait,” said Venus. “A friend of mine gave me a sage bundle. You should take it, just in case.”

  “What’s that for?” asked Diego.

  “You ‘smudge’ the room with it. Supposed to get all the bad juju out of the corners,” Sinsi explained. “They do it on the ghost shows on TV.”

  “Well then,” I said. “It’s good enough for me. Hand it over.”

  In the end Dad, Stan, Caleb, the students, and Luz joined me. Only Trish bowed out, saying that while she could accept the idea of my ghost-hunting ways, she didn’t particularly want any part of it. Which I understood.

  Also, we left Dog at home; I didn’t need his special sense to prove there was a ghost at the Mermaid apartments. At least this time I was pretty sure I knew whom—and what—I was dealing with.

  On the way over, on a hunch, I stopped at Safeway and picked up an apple pie.

  Our convoy arrived at the apartment complex. I had nine folks backing me up, like a ghost-hunting posse. Trouble was, I barely knew what I was doing; I certainly didn’t know what to do with all my helpers.

  “Okay, why don’t you guys wait out here for the time being?” I suggested. “Let me see if I can talk to her. Now that I know her name and some of her story, maybe she’ll be willing to have a chat.”

  “She’s a murderess, don’t forget,” said Dad. His insistence on using the old-fashioned –ess on the end of the word cracked me up. But I appreciated his concern.

  “Alleged murderess,” I said. “And anyway, ghosts can’t hurt people.”

  I was almost sure about that. They could certainly scare a person, and every once in a while there might be dangers posed, but the more I was around ghosts the more I realized: We are the ones who freak ourselves out. The ghosts are just being themselves, carrying on with their lives—or afterlives—the only way they know how. Often they aren’t even aware of the effect they’re having on the live people around them.

  “Anyway,” I said. “Hang out here and I’ll shout if I need you.”

  I stroked the ring at my neck and took a few deep breaths to ground myself. Then I walked into the apartment, pie held high in one hand, my toolbox—including the sage bundle—in the other.

  “Helloooo? Mrs. White? I brought pie.”

  The apartment was silent and seemed vaguely sinister in the dark shadows. I crossed through the living room and flicked on the lights in the kitchen.

  As I had expected, the silverware drawer had been replaced, all the cutlery picked up. The kitchen was spotless.

  I set the pink cardboard box on the little breakfast table, then rummaged through a few cupboards and found a pile of mismatched dishes, took out a chipped ceramic plate with a picture of a rooster, and placed the pie on it.

  Then I found a knife and cut two slices of pie. I put them on small dessert plates.

  “Anyone hungry?” I asked. “It’s store-bought, which is a shame. Nothing like homemade, am I right?”

  The aroma of a fresh apple pie began to waft through the kitchen. Now we were getting somewhere.

  I was stuffed from the tamale feast, and truth to tell the grocery store pie didn’t look all that appetizing. But I was here with a purpose. A ghost buster doesn’t shirk her duty.

  Sitting at the table, I took a bite of pie. No reaction.

  I was hyperaware of the folks waiting for me right outside the front door, and of the fact that I really didn’t know what to say to Suzanne White. If what the neighbors had said was true, then she was probably unhinged. Maybe she always had been; maybe the stress of taking care of an injured husband with very limited resources had sim
ply become too much, and she had snapped. Or maybe the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding.

  I was halfway through the pie when I heard dishes clattering inside the cupboard above the refrigerator. It was too high to reach, so I looked around for a step stool. I checked the little gap by the refrigerator, and then a small utility closet right outside the kitchen.

  As I reentered the kitchen, the remaining apple pie sailed through the air, landing with a splat against a cabinet.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “I hope you know you’re going to have to clean that up.”

  Lame, Mel. Of course she would. That’s what she did with her time. Which, apparently, was all of eternity.

  “Anyway, that was just rude. Mrs. White? I want to talk with you. Please, could you tell me why you’re here?”

  The refrigerator door banged open and a plate with some dubious-looking leftovers sailed past my right shoulder and shattered against the sink. At least she had a bad pitching arm. “Mel, are you all right in there?” Dad shouted from the doorway.

  “Yes, Dad, I’m fine. Please shut the door and stay outside unless I call you.”

  Eggs started flying out of the carton, one after the other. I was so busy ducking that I slipped in some apple pie that had slid down a cabinet and onto the floor.

  I fell on the linoleum with a thud. Now I was mad.

  “Hey! Knock it off! You don’t belong here anymore. Do you understand me? You are not alive. Your body has passed. You DO NOT BELONG HERE.”

  There was a pause. Maybe I was getting to her.

  An egg smashed onto my head. “Ow!”

  I was prostrate on the floor, flour raining down upon me, then milk, then whatever else the supernatural scamp could find in the refrigerator. It was a phantom food fight and I was on the losing end.

  I still hadn’t seen a vision of Mrs. White. For some reason it seemed important that she appear to me. Ignoring the deluge of food as best I could, I rubbed my grandmother’s ring, centered myself, and reconfirmed my resolve.