Keeper of the Castle: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

say the least, to find a dead body. Especially of someone I had been speaking to only moments before. Such a tragic and violent loss of life. But if I were to be brutally honest, the overwhelming sadness I had felt in that moment, the profound grief,also had something to do with the weeping figure in the red dress.
    Who was she?
    Her gown was far too antiquated to have been from the United States. She must have been attached to the imported stones somehow; it was the only explanation. I knew from experience that ghosts hated renovation projects: The disturbance to their surroundings could be profoundly upsetting for them. So what would happen if a ghost’s home was dismantled, stone by stone, shipped overseas, and rebuilt in a new land?
    Talk about confusing. And that wasn’t all; Pete Nolan had said workers had been chased out of the cloisters by a man with a broadsword. So maybe there was even more paranormal fun to be had at the Wakefield Retreat Center.
    Graham had called last night to tell me that, indeed, the police were holding Pete Nolan as a “person of interest” in McCall’s slaying because the evidence pointed to his guilt. Graham also mentioned he was going to take advantage of the work stoppage to follow up on some new wind-energy technology being developed by a small firm in LA, so he was flying down for a couple of days and would return on Thursday.
    After dealing with the stubborn building inspector at the bed-and-breakfast conversion, the next item on my to-do list was to check in with the B and B’s ghosts—the family that had built the house a century ago and who had wanted to remain. Fortunately, the B and B’s owners were happy to have them; they delighted in showing me a recent article about their haunted bed-and-breakfast that had come out in
Haunted Home Quarterly
. My name was mentioned prominently as the builder—and ghost buster—on the job.
    I made a mental note to warn my office manager, Stan, who had been fielding an increasing number of query calls more interested in ghosts than in renovation. It was a worrying trend.
    Once I settled things in the Castro, I met with Raul at an Art Nouveau house in Bernal Heights. Raul was by far my best foreman, and though I dreaded the day he would move on, I knew it was only a matter of time before he started up his own company. There had been spirits in this house once, too, but after an intervention, they appeared to have departed.
    Raul and I went over the double-paned glass we were installing to increase the old home’s energy efficiency. This was tricky. If the existing sashes weren’t thick enough, or the window structure itself wasn’t sturdy, we could end up replacing the original glass as well as remilling the sashes and sills; by the time we were done, there might be nothing left of the original. I understood the energy-saving reasons behind it, but it hurt my heart to dump the wavy old window glass. Historic renovation demanded creativity and compromise.
    Even while hashing out these details with Raul, my mind kept wandering back to Pete Nolan. True, I didn’t know him, and he had been upset with Larry McCall, but it was hard to believe that a quick fit of temper could result in such a tragedy. Still, as SFPD inspector Annette Crawford so often reminded me, most murders were the result of exactly this sort of scenario: some stupid disagreement that got out of hand.
    Way
out of hand.
    Thinking about my last couple of big jobs, I realized that both the Castro B and B and the Bernal Heights house had contained entire spirit families that were trying to tell me something about crimes in the present. Atleast in the case of the Wakefield project, I didn’t think the spectral Lady in Red was connected to the building inspector’s death. There was too much separation of time and space; if the spirit had come here with those ancient stones, what possible connection could she have to Larry McCall?
    Once I wrapped up my day, I headed to Pacific