Home For the Haunting: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (18 page)

“One of the older neighbors said something about a feud Sidney might have had with the neighbors across the street. She said the son was selling drugs?”

“Yeah, we checked that as well. Duct-Tape Dave, I guess you’re thinking of.”

I choked on my PBR. “Duct-Tape Dave?”

“That’s what he called himself—he made these homemade silencers out of duct tape. Kind of clever, actually. The kid was a big talker, not a real player on the street. Sold some weed, but strictly penny-ante stuff. He had the nickname, but he never shot anybody ’til years later. Doing time now in San Quentin.”

“So you don’t think he could have been the shooter?”

“Nah. We grilled him good, but truth was he started blubbering like a baby. His girlfriend gave him an alibi, for what it was worth. Mostly I just didn’t like him as the shooter. Just didn’t fit. He was no stone-cold killer, and this was a brutal crime.”

“Do you think Sidney Lawrence had something to do with the neighbor’s house burning down?”

“Again, there were allegations. Most likely, that house burned down because they were cooking drugs or even dinner in there while they were high as kites. Or just as likely, they burned it themselves to get the insurance money. We never found any evidence that they had harassed the Lawrence family after moving, though, only beforehand. They were still living in the city, so I suppose it was possible, but as Inspector Crawford here would tell you, an experienced cop goes by his gut. I really don’t think the kid did it. Like to think I’m not easily fooled.”

“What about Dave’s father?”

“He was a goner by then, sick as a dog. I just couldn’t see it.”

“Did you think Sidney Lawrence really did it?”

He held my eyes for a long moment, then glanced over at Annette. Finally he leaned back in his chair, let out a long breath, and shook his head.

“Nope.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him about ghosts. I was trying to figure out how to phrase it when Annette spoke.

“I know this is out of left field, but you ever feel anything weird in that house?” asked Annette in her typical direct fashion.

“Weird how?”

“I’m talking ghosts here.”

He smiled. “I suppose a place like that would be lousy with ghosts, wouldn’t it?”

“And did you . . . feel anything?” I asked again, half expecting him to burst into laughter. Instead, he was quiet for a while.

“You know what I like about animals?” the retired detective asked. “They don’t question what they see. They accept it. If something scares them, they hightail it out of there, no ifs, ands, or buts.”

“So . . . you
did
feel something,” I said.

“Not sure what I felt. The aftermath of a crime like that, it can throw you for a loop. Tell you this, though: I sure as hell don’t think ghosts killed those folks that night.”

“Then who do you think did kill the family?” Annette asked. “Any theories?”

“I was always under the impression it was a home invasion of some sort. A robbery gone wrong.”

“Was anything taken?”

“That was one of the frustrating things—we never knew for sure. All we had was a pair of traumatized kids who didn’t know what might have been valuable. A home safe was empty, but who knew if there was anything in there in the first place? There were no signs of forced entry, no forensic evidence to suggest there was anyone in the house who shouldn’t have been.” He shook his head and smoothed his mustache. I was starting to think the purpose of the hair was to give him something to do with his hands when he pondered. “Nope, the boss said it must have been the dad, because of the girl’s testimony. So when I couldn’t come up with forensic evidence, much less a suspect for a home invasion, the case was closed.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

He chuckled and squinted at me. “You probably watch those TV shows where cops have the resources and independence to go off and investigate crimes for as long as it takes to discover the truth, right?” He gestured toward Annette, who had finished her beer and was now playing with a few grains of salt on the tabletop. “D’you ever wonder why Annette’s here on her day off?”

“Because the ME ruled it a suicide or accidental overdose,” Annette volunteered. “But I don’t believe it.”

“A lot of times, you have to close a case even when you don’t feel good about it,” continued Sheldon as he rose from the table, gathered our cans, crushed them one by one with calloused hands, and put them in a big blue recycling bin. “That’s just the way it is. Unless you’re like Annette here, and you’re willing to go out on a limb, on your own time, and risking your own neck. Want my advice?”

He leaned against the counter and faced us. “Both of you? Stay out of it. The world has moved on. Some tragedies are meant to be endured, not understood.”

A
s Annette drove us home, my phone buzzed. It was Caleb calling, asking whether he could come over tonight for a haircut. He was so standoffish lately that it made my heart happy when he asked me for things. Not for the first time, I wondered how that worked, exactly. I was guessing it was some hormonal mechanism that helped ensure we didn’t eat our young.

“Sure, I’d be happy to. Want me to pick you up?”

“No, I’ll get a ride, thanks. See you later.”

I hung up and turned back to Annette. “So, you think Linda was murdered. Why?”

“I don’t trust we know the full story of what she was doing there.”

“You doubt her brother’s account?”

“I don’t think he killed her, if that’s what you’re asking. I find it hard to believe they were doing this exposure therapy, but then she stuck around and—what?—took a bunch of pills? And if so, why would she do it in the shed? It appears the body was moved, which would mean someone else was involved, and would explain the lack of forensic evidence. But I’ve had crime scene folks look through every part of that house, and they haven’t found anything, either.”

“The medical examiner determined Linda died of opiate overdose?”

“Yes.”

“The guy who found her says it looked like she was allergic to opioids.”

“How would he know?”

“I guess he’d seen a similar reaction in a frat brother once who was on pain pills.”

Annette was silent for a few moments while she got on the freeway. “Thing is, people don’t kill themselves by ingesting things they know they’re allergic to. It’s weird but true,” she finally said. “And I think Linda Lawrence knew her way around drugs enough to understand what she was doing.”

“That’s what I was thinking as well.”

“So let’s say she was murdered by someone who gave her the pills. Could be a relative stranger, but it was probably someone she trusted.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Ever try to give a pill to a dog or a cat? It’s not easy to make someone swallow something. There was no bruising around Linda’s face or mouth, so we can assume she took the pills more or less voluntarily. It could have just been a stupid mistake. Or maybe someone told her the pills were something else, or that they were a smaller dose than they really were.”

“Okay, but we still have no idea who that person might be, much less why they wanted an apparently harmless woman dead.”

“Let’s approach this logically. Most people are killed for stupid reasons: a nasty comment in a bar, an episode of road rage over a parking spot. But those kinds of murders, which by their nature are spur-of-the-moment, usually involve weapons readily at hand: guns, knives, or blunt objects. Not pills.”

“Fair enough.”

“That means Linda’s murder was planned. Let’s assume we’re not dealing with some kind of sociopath who kills at random to fill a sick need.”

“Sure we can assume that?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption. For one thing, serial killers are rare. And serial killers who use poison are rarer still. Since there are no other cases to suggest Linda’s death was part of a larger pattern, I’m going to back-burner the serial killer explanation.”

“Makes sense. Go on.”

“So that leaves only a certain number of motives: greed, jealousy, covering up a crime.”

“Did anyone profit from Linda’s death?” I asked.

“Her brother, Hugh, inherited her share of the house. But Linda was happy to let Hugh make all the decisions about the place, and since he didn’t want to sell it anyway, that doesn’t seem like much of a motive.”

“And it’s hard to imagine Linda inspiring a passionate sort of rage—she hasn’t been involved with anyone for years, right?”

“Not that we can tell.”

“So, if greed and jealousy weren’t the motive for her death, that leaves covering up a crime. And the only crime we know Linda was involved with was the family tragedy. Do you agree with Shel, that Sidney might not have been the killer?”

“I really don’t know. But Shel’s smart.”

“It would explain a lot. For instance, no matter who I talk to, the neighbors or business colleagues, Hugh—none of them had any sense that anything was wrong with Sidney. They describe him as a loving father.”

“Just to play devil’s advocate,” said Annette, “I’ll say that it’s not that strange. You must have seen all those scenes on TV, where some guy’s been stashing bodies in his crawl space for thirty years yet all the neighbors report he was ‘quiet’ and ‘seemed like a nice guy.’” She shook her head. “I don’t think there are necessarily any outward signs.”

“But the family would have seen his temper at least, wouldn’t they? At some point? Wouldn’t there be some evidence? Child abuse, spouse abuse . . . losing his cool with his coworkers, anything?”

“Usually you do see something, some sort of buildup; it’s true. But people are often unwilling to speak ill of the dead. They might have seen flare-ups, that sort of thing, but not mentioned them to investigators just as a matter of course.”

“Even after what he did?”

“In these sorts of cases, shock and horror set in. People don’t always want to speculate on what was going on in the mind of a seemingly sane man that would lead him to such a thing—personally, I wonder whether people are secretly afraid they might one day snap under the pressures of work and family themselves, do something crazy. Besides, Sidney was fighting with the neighbors, remember? And there were the embezzlement charges looming against him.”

Once again I considered what it must be like to be Annette and see the seamy underside of the world every day when you go to work. It made me ever more content to be dealing mostly with issues of molding choice. Even the really hard stuff, like the nitty-gritty of payroll and workman’s comp and health insurance, was taken care of by Stan.

“Do you really believe that Sidney killed his family?”

Annette let out a deep sigh. “No. And what if Linda, the single eyewitness, was the only one who knew who did?”

•   •   •

Caleb sat up on a high stool, shirtless, while I snipped at his hair. Normally I cut his hair outside on the patio, but it was too cold tonight, so we laid down newspapers in the front room. Unfortunately, this was where his video-game system was set up.

“So, kiddo, I was wondering if you would do me a huge favor. I was hoping you could talk to a girl; she’s a teenager, and she’s been hanging around the Neighbors Together house, and it’s possible she has some information, but she’s not wild about talking to adults.”

“What, like you want me to go up and ask this girl, like, if she wants to play?”

“Well . . . I wouldn’t use those exact words. . . . I just thought that you might be able to talk to her, teen to teen.” I cringed. Did that sound lame?

Yep, I was pretty sure it did.

Caleb stared straight ahead, mouth slightly ajar, intent on the video game in front of him. I was always amazed how my sometimes sensitive and apparently intelligent ex-stepson was turned into a grunting automaton whenever he spent time with his electronics.

But I reminded myself how my father sounded when he started going off about “how things were when I was growing up.” Last thing I wanted was to start sounding like a middle-aged grump—like my dad—so I tried to clamp down on my impatience. Still, I couldn’t stop the wave of nostalgia that threatened to engulf me.

I remembered, back when Caleb was little, how I would cut his hair outside and we let his dark tresses fall onto the broken concrete patio and waft in the breeze. Afterward we would watch from the kitchen window while birds swooped down and gathered up the soft material to line their nests. I loved imagining the fragile eggs nestled securely in fluffy beds made of Caleb’s soft hair. I remembered how Caleb’s shoulder blades would poke out of his tan skin like the fragile buds of wings; his neck had been so slender I wondered how it held up his head. But now ropy muscles were forming, his shoulders broadening, his neck thickening. Along with the whiskers, these were irrefutable signs that he was no longer a child but becoming a man.

At times I missed that little boy so much, I wondered how a biological parent must feel, having birthed this baby from her loins. His becoming a man was also a sure sign that
I
was aging, too. One thing about having a kid around: You can’t deny the passage of time.

At long last Caleb put down his controllers and gave me his attention. Unfortunately, that attention wasn’t focused where I wanted it to be.

“Are you planning on making that Murder House into a bed-and-breakfast or something?”

“No, not at all. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone would want to stay in a house with such a history.”

“Wanna bet? You can make a lot of money on stuff like that,” said Caleb with a tone that suggested world-weariness. At seventeen. “The Goths and other freaks, they’re totally into it. But other people, too. They could totally open a bed-and-breakfast in that place, and people would pay to spend the night there with the recreations of the murder scenes.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, appalled.

“You ever heard of that Lizzie Borden chick?”

“Um . . .” I paused, wondering whether I should launch into a sermon about why we don’t go around talking about every woman as a chick. But then I overcame it. And joined in. “Right, the Lizzie Borden chick. What about her?”

“They totally made her house into an inn. People, like, stay there. And sit right on the couch where she chopped up her father.”

“Eh . . .”
Ghosts were one thing, murder quite another. I don’t care how long ago it took place; the Lizzie Borden story was still horrifying. I vacillated between appreciating that Caleb knew the story—it was part of basic U.S. history, after all—and worrying about how much violence he was exposed to through popular culture. “I thought it wasn’t clear that Lizzie Borden even did it. Wasn’t she found not guilty?”

He shrugged, his attention already veering back to the holding pattern on the screen in front of him. If I wanted to know the whole story about Lizzie Borden, I thought to myself, I could look it up. That was, after all, what the internet was for. I should use my time with Caleb for the important stuff, before I lost his attention completely.

“Okay, so you’re saying that people want to stay in houses where murders were committed? Would that be a real moneymaker?”

“I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised. That last bed-and-breakfast you were working on had ghosts in it, and that was sort of like the point, right?”

“Yes, but those ghosts weren’t murdered.”

“
Somebody
was murdered.” He twisted his head toward me and held my eyes for a moment. “A woman was killed while you were there. In fact, for someone so, like, weirded out by Lizzie Borden, it seems like you’re around murder a lot. Like maybe you should watch your back a little.”

Caleb never spoke like this. Could this be why he’d been acting so oddly toward me lately?

“Caleb, are you worried about me?”

He shrugged and turned back to his game.

“I’m not in any danger, you know,” I said, clipping a few stray hairs. And then I thought how inane my words sounded, considering the situations I’d found myself in. “I’ll be careful, kiddo, okay? I promise. I’m working with the police this time, so it’s really not like before. I’ve got backup.”

“Ungh,” he grunted.

“And about talking to the girl, Raven . . . I just thought maybe you could ask her if she’d seen anything, noticed anything odd in the house, anything like that. She’s coming to do some cleanup on Monty’s house tomorrow. Would you be willing to join us after school? I could pick you up.”

“’Kay,” he said.

And then he hit his controller, and something on-screen blew up in a burst of blood and fire.

•   •   •

I went upstairs to change out of my dirty clothes and take a quick shower.

When I started back down I could smell the homey scents of pot roast and caramelized onions, one of my dad’s signature dishes. There was the clatter of dishware, and friendly chatter, and laughter. It reminded me of how much I had: people who cared about me, a warm, safe house, a loyal dog, and plenty of food. I gave myself a little talking-to about my recent treatment of Cookie. She was family. This was nice.

But then I heard a man’s voice—not Dad, or Stan, or even Caleb.

Graham
. What was
he
doing here? All my warm and fuzzy thoughts fled, and I fought panic. My hair was wet, and though I was clean, I was, once again, not looking my best.

Graham was recounting a funny story about people who call themselves “tree dwellers” and live in the top of an unthinkably tall redwood tree. Caleb kept asking questions about how they handled the bathroom situation. Stan was cracking jokes, and Dad was joining in while he cooked. Cookie was being generally adorable, of course.

Since I was pretty sure that everyone liked Graham better than me, anyway, what if I just slipped out the front door?

“Mel.” I heard Graham’s voice. He came out of the kitchen and joined me in the living room, where I’d stood waffling.