Dead Bolt

by Juliet Blackwell

  I had been in the attic before, several times. When I first took on the project, I looked through every nook and cranny of the house, and I had returned to the attic with the electrician, the structural engineer, and a city inspector. Each time I was up there I felt a strange, otherworldly sense of the weight of a gaze upon me, a tingle at the back of my neck. But for all the attention I paid to my peripheral vision, I had seen nothing, heard nothing I could pinpoint.

  At first I ascribed the feelings to the usual spookiness of attics and basements, those liminal areas between the everyday and the unusual. The parts of the house that were not regularly filled with human life and breath. But now . . .

  “I’ll go talk to Katenka,” I said. “I’ll try to get her to make a decision.”

  As I closed the attic door, something fell. I jumped out of the way as it clanked to the floor. I scooped it up. It was a rusty metal ring, holding half a dozen very old keys.

  “Where’d that come from?” Raul asked, looking overhead.

  “Must have been stuck in the recess, somehow. The door felt hard to pull open; maybe the keys were lodged in the frame.”

  Raul looked at them with interest. “Be nice if they’d open some of the old doors in this place, so we don’t have to take the locks apart. I like the look of them.”

  “Me, too. I’ll have to check them out, and then I’ll see if Katenka wants to keep them, along with the old locks. If not, I’ll split them with you.”

  Raul smiled. “You can keep ’em. I’ve got dozens.”

  “So do I.”

  I took the sheaf of spreadsheets from him, grabbed the book of color samples, and headed downstairs, hoping I could convince Katenka to either state her own color choices or go along with mine.

  We were at the point in the renovation where the Daleys needed to make a thousand and one aesthetic choices. Unfortunately for me, they refused to hire an interior designer. I couldn’t really blame them—personally, I disliked the sort of cold, overly designed look of so many professionally “done” homes that appeared as though they were laid out for an Architectural Digest photo shoot rather than ready to live in. In such places a bottle of dishwashing detergent left out on the pounded copper countertop looked like sacrilege.

  Still, interior designers had staffs and schedules and budgets, so they were simple for a general contractor like me to work with. Having to decide on every interior decision, from grout color to stain tone, made the average homeowner want to tear their hair out in a matter of days . . . or hours.

  Which reminded me—Katenka and I needed to make time to visit what was referred to as “the wailing wall of knobs” in the San Francisco Design Center.

  I was almost to the main floor when I heard something.

  A moaning sound?

  Relief washed over me when I realized it was accompanied by the crackle of a baby monitor. Katenka was in the dining room, the receiver clipped on to her belt. The “moaning” I thought I had heard was simply Quinn, lulling himself to sleep with a cooing sound. My imagination was running rampant.

  Katenka stood next to the horsehair settee, looking down at it.

  “Katenka?”

  As I approached her, she spoke without looking up. “Emile was going to reupholster this. Who will do it now?”

  “I’m sure we can find another upholsterer,” I said, wondering why she was focusing on this, of all things. “This place won’t be ready for nice furniture for a while yet.”

  She seemed to shake it off. “You are right.”

  “Hey, look what we just found up in the attic.” I held up the old key ring.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Is rusty.”

  “True.” It always amazed me when people didn’t get excited around such discoveries. This was the fun of old houses, the traces people left behind. In my time I’ve found everything from perfume bottles to personal papers to old celluloid collars. The homeowners rarely wanted to keep them, which was one reason my bedroom was beginning to look like a museum. Most of us in the historical renovation biz become rabid amateur historians . . . sometimes exhibiting a little hoarder mentality when it comes to old stuff.

  “We were going to try the keys in some of the old locks, see if they work,” I said. “Or, if you’d rather, we could just change out all the old locks for new, as we’d originally decided to do.”

  “New is better, I think.”

  “So you don’t want the keys?”

  “Why would I?”

  “As a memento?”

  She just stared at me. I was going to take that as a no. On to the next order of business.

  “I’d like to get a final decision from you on the paint colors so we can order supplies and be ready to go next week.”

  She held out her hand for the samples. Traditionally, houses of the Victorian era were covered in wallpaper from head to toe, in a riotous blend of patterns and designs that extended onto the ceilings. Modern sensibilities tended toward a simpler palette of colors. Still, because most Victorians feature high ceilings, ample windows, and often more than a foot of wood trim at base and crown, in addition to wainscoting, they can handle strong interior colors.

  Last week I had painted three-by-three-foot patches of different paint hues on the walls and evaluated how they looked under all kinds of conditions: mellow pink morning light, harsh afternoon sun, a gray foggy day, incandescent bulbs in the evening. I had narrowed the color palette down to creams for most of the painted woodwork, a saffron yellow or wine red for the dining room walls, a grayish violet for the front sitting room, and everything from sage green to buff caramel for the bedrooms. For Quinn’s room, I had chosen a mellow green-blue shade that would provide a nice backdrop for his shelves of books and toys. All Katenka had to do was agree.

  She flipped through the samples without enthusiasm, pausing on the ones marked with a sticky note.

  “Is fine,” she said, listless.

  “You sure? If you don’t like it once it’s up, we’ll have to repaint, which means a change order, which puts us over budget.” I’m always careful to warn clients of potential cost overruns. Usually they ignore me until they get the bill.

  “Is fine,” she repeated, signing her name to the paint schedule.

  “We also need to go to the Design Center for knobs and tiles, make a few decisions. Is there a good day this week?”

  Katenka sighed. “Friday?”

  I checked my schedule. “Great. Friday it is. Is late afternoon okay? That way I can send the men home with their paychecks, and you and I won’t have to rush back.”

  “Okay. I get my friend Ivana to take baby. Make it easier.” She gestured to the only personal picture I had seen in the house, pinned to the corkboard in the kitchen. It had a number and address scrawled underneath it in a loopy hand. Katenka gazed at the photo for a long moment, then sighed again. “She never answer the phone, so I walk over there. She lives in house with golden lions outside. You like lions?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think maybe we need lions here. As people walk up, on either side of door. Very elegant.”

  “I . . . um.” This was the hard part for me: letting people have their own taste. “Why don’t we finish up with all the painting details, and see what you think then?”

  She shrugged. “Friday, four o clock?”

  “Sounds good,” I said, then hesitated. “Katenka, are you all right?”

  She seemed particularly listless, but it was hard to tell with Katenka. She had such a serious, tragic way about her at the best of times. Perhaps if I ever saw her happy, I could better note the contrast.

  Just then there was a knocking sound directly above us. And a faint, eerie mewing in the walls. Dog came running down the stairs, barking. I grabbed him by the collar and shushed him.

  “I am so tired of this,” said Katenka.

  “Is that . . . a cat?”

  “I told you, I think there is a cat here, perhaps from before. Or is cat ghost.”

  “I’l
l check it out. There might be an access point along the foundation.”

  “Okay,” she said, moving toward the basement door. “I go take a nap before Quinn gets up.”

  After going over the final paint decisions with Raul and the painting crew, I checked my watch: noon.

  Time to see a lady about a ghost.

  Chapter Seven

  The first time I met Brittany Humm I disliked her on sight, and it still took me a moment to get over myself. Brittany was my high-school nightmare come to sparkling life: Vivacious and outgoing, she was also slender and blond, several years younger than I, and sported an ostentatious diamond engagement ring.

  But the truth was, she was a lovely person. Even if she did get a little too excited about ghosts.

  “This is great! I wondered when you’d have another experience!” she gushed as she dipped only the tips of her fork’s tines in the cup of Caesar salad dressing on the side, then nibbled on a leaf of romaine.

  “Problem is, this time it’s no one I could possibly have known.” I dug into my full-fat version of the salad, complete with anchovies. “I’m afraid my clients are on the verge of shutting down the project if I don’t find a way to stop the activity.”

  “Lingering spirits don’t like having their surroundings disturbed.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Brittany laughed. “Anyone ever tell you you’re hard to please? At first you hated the idea of seeing ghosts—”

  “I just want to be left alone. Is that so much to ask?”

  “And then you get impatient, waiting to see them again.”

  “It just seemed sort of . . . odd that I realized I could see ghosts, but then nothing came of it. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

  “And now that you’ve seen another apparition, you’re unhappy about that, as well.”

  “This one’s not like the last one. This one gives me the willies.”

  I wouldn’t say I liked seeing spirits, but once I got over the fear that I was losing my mind, there was a certain allure. Who among us hasn’t wondered whether there is, in fact, life after death? As a former anthropologist, I know there is no known culture without some concept of the beyond—and the belief that under the right circumstances, a spirit might return to earthly life for a day . . . or forever. Prior to my supernatural experience, though, I had rather enjoyed not thinking much about an afterlife; there was comfort in agnosticism. Thinking about the beyond made me wonder whether I was doing such a bang-up job with my current shot at life. I was pushing forty, and though I enjoyed my work, I had been in a bad mood since my marriage started circling the drain. I dreamt of running away to Paris to lick my wounds in some fourth-floor Left Bank garret for a year or ten . . . but I wondered what I was doing, in the big picture, to improve the world.

  New Year’s resolution: I was going to look into volunteering. Surely I could give something back, somehow.

  “Anyway, I’m not sure how sensitive I am in this case. The woman of the house, Katenka, saw the thing as well. She’s scared, and I can’t say I blame her. A black shadowy figure is . . . creepy. The ones I saw before looked like people. Like you and me, only . . .”

  “Dead.”

  “Right. So did you look into the listing? Was it said to be haunted?”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t in the Bay Area haunted house database.”

  “There’s a Bay Area haunted house database?”

  “Oh sure. A couple.”

  “I don’t know why this still surprises me.”

  “The Cheshire Inn wasn’t listed as haunted, but as you know, it was said to be a cat-hoarder house—pretty trashed, and therefore a tough sale. How bad was it?”

  “It had been emptied before we started the job. It was smelly, but no trash or anything left around. Even the garden had been dug up, which the landscapers will appreciate.”

  Though I usually enjoyed seeing houses in their inhabited state before starting a project, I had been glad this house had been cleaned out by the time Katenka and Jim hired us. Turner Construction did mostly high-end stuff now, but back when my dad was flipping houses with a crew of forced labor—me, my mom, and my two sisters—we had cleaned out plenty of buildings.

  Emptying out a lifetime of accumulated junk isn’t pretty. Besides ruining one’s appetite, it can be depressing as heck. Seeing other people’s detritus always motivated me to clean out my own room, for fear I’d be hit by a truck on my way home and some poor slob would have to go through my things, making judgments about me based on the sketchy items in the drawers of my bedside table, or the many months of accumulated dust and hair behind the claw-foot tub.

  “Okay, here’s what I’ve dug up on the house so far.” Brittany took a sip of her unsweetened iced tea and opened a folder with a number of computer printouts. “It was built in 1891 by Dominga Carter after the death of her wealthy husband. She moved into the city from the ‘country,’ which in those days meant down near Palo Alto.”

  “Palo Alto was ‘country’?”

  “Back then they referred to Stanford University as ‘the Farm.’”

  These days the cities of the Bay Area reached out and touched their neighbors, the transition from one to the next marked only by a faded road sign. Hard to imagine the days before automobiles and bridges, when setting out for another point on the Bay was an excursion involving boats and/or changes of horses.

  “Dominga Carter had two sons, Charles and Andre. Charles married a young woman named Luvitica, and all four moved into Cheshire House together.”

  “Dominga and Luvitica? Where were these people from?”

  “From here,” Brittany said, daintily picking the croutons out of her salad with a spoon. She had gone “wheat-free,” she’d explained to me as we ordered, to lose those pesky extra five pounds. I needed to lose an extra-pesky twenty pounds or so, but I wasn’t ready to give up bread. Not here, in the land of sourdough. “It was a long time ago, when people had names like ‘Grizelda’ and ‘Abernathy.’ Anyway, Dominga and Luvitica were known to be at odds with one another.”

  “They didn’t get along?”

  “Not one bit. The strife centered around Charles. In the vernacular of the era, he was described as a ‘mama’s boy’ and ‘henpecked,’ poor guy.”

  “You found this in the public record?”

  “There was a little gossipy article on the family that was cited in one of the real estate transactions. But I don’t suppose it was much of a secret. San Francisco was a pretty small town back then.”

  “Hey, how did you find all this out? I tried to do some research down at the California Historical Society and found nothing on the place—not a single newspaper reference.”

  “Hmm.” Brittany tilted her head. “Well, I looked up the real estate listing, and then I did a simple Google search. Took me all of, oh, four seconds. You should give it a try—I know you prefer old-school methods, and it’s true that there’s a lot of ephemera that can only be found in musty libraries. But you never know what Google will dig up for you.”

  I used the Internet for all sorts of things, from tracking down vintage items on Craigslist to comparing lumber prices. But when it came to investigating the area’s historic homes, I was steadfastly old-school in my approach: I went straight to the California Historical Society. It had never occurred to me I could get much useful information online.

  “Here’s what I downloaded.” She handed me a short stack of papers. “The Carters sound like a charming family: The two women were at each other’s throats so much, Charles must have decided he needed a break. He boarded a ship bound for South America without his wife.”

  “Where was he headed?”

  “Chile. His brother, Andre, had invested in a sugar plantation there.”

  “Chile? That seems unusual.”

  “Actually, a lot of early immigrants to San Francisco were Chilean. The shipping routes ran up and down the western coasts of the Americas, connecting the two. Ghirardelli came from ther
e.”

  “As in Ghirardelli chocolate? I thought he was Italian.”

  “He was, by way of Chile . . . or maybe it was Peru. Somewhere down there. Chocolate wasn’t a sweet food, traditionally. But he figured out how to extract the cocoa butter to make chocolate candy.”

  “Good man.”

  Like most locals, I avoided the famous tourist triangle of Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, and Pier 39 like the plague. Still, some of my happiest memories were visiting the area as a child with out-of-town relatives. We inevitably stopped by the Ghirardelli chocolate factory tasting room, and I would always double back to the end of the line to get more free samples. Speaking of chocolate . . . dessert was sounding good about now. I wondered if Brittany would consider splitting a piece of the flourless chocolate cake à la mode. After all, it was wheat-free.

  “So,” I said as I wrested my thoughts from dessert I didn’t need, “Charles Carter abandoned Leviticus?”

  “Luvitica.”

  “Oh, right. Wonder what they called her for short.”

  “Right? Anyway, this article said that Charles died of kidney failure during the sea voyage. And get this—the sailors put his body into a keg of rum.”

  I choked on my iced tea. “Why would they do that?”

  “It wasn’t unheard of at that time. It was hot on those ships; the alcohol preserves the body. They threw the ‘unimportant’ people into the sea if they had the misfortune to die aboard, but Charles was a wealthy man, so I guess they needed to send him home.”

  “Seems like a waste of good rum.”

  “Yeah, really. Anyway, the keg was returned to the family at some point.”

  “Wow. So the women and Andre continued living in the house?”

  She shook her head. “Andre disappeared sometime after Charles left, and was never heard from again.”

  “So Dominga lost both her sons? And continued living with the daughter-in-law she despised?”