Free Home For the Haunting: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery by juliet blackwell Page B

society.”
    “Rivalry?”
    “He and Rockefeller went after each other, each trying to outdo the other with the extent of their philanthropy, just as they’d tried to do in business.”
    “I’m guessing the competitive drive was strong in them both. But at least this way they gave away a lot of money, right?”
    “Right.”
    As I put the book back on the shelf, I wondered how Monty accessed the volumes on the upper shelves. Then it occurred to me that someone with his physical challenges could benefit from recent technological advances. Stan loved using his e-book reader, since it was so lightweight and easy to slip in the pocket hanging from his chair. He never had to reach for a book.
    “Monty, have you ever tried electronic books?”
    “Nah. I’m old-school. I like to see them on my shelves,” he answered. “Sitting there like old friends. I only keep the ones I love, give the rest away to Friends of the Library.”
    For some reason, Monty’s love of books—a passion which I shared—made me feel even worse for entertaining, even momentarily, the horrid thought that he might have been hiding bodies in his crawl space. I really did have to stop watching TV with my dad. I had plenty of murder and mayhem to keep my imagination stoked in real life; no need to add in the greater culture’s obsession with crime.
    “I’m really sorry about the work delay, Monty. I know the officer in charge; I’ll call tomorrow and try to get a definite date we can come back and at least finish up the ramp.”
    “Don’t sweat it. What I’d really love is the rest of the interior painting and if we could finish putting up those extra bookshelves.”
    “I’m sure we can manage that much, at least. I don’t think there would be any harm if I come by for a couple of evenings and finish up the interior stuff—I’ll make a phone call, okay?”
    “That would be great.”
    I escaped to my car, where Dog whapped his tail maniacally and crooned at me as if to let me know he thought I’d
never
come back. He did his best to crawl into my lap, which is something I usually discourage—Dog is not a lap-sized canine. But today, I wrapped my arms around the wiggling, hairy brown dog, reveling in one of the simple, normal pleasures in life.
    But I couldn’t stop wondering . . . what the heck just happened in that shed?

Chapter Seven
     
    I lay in bed the next morning, hardly believing it was Monday.
    After such an eventful weekend, it was hard to get back to work. The thing about construction is it’s a juggling act: finishing up one job, starting a new one, writing contracts and pulling paperwork and job permits for the next project, and meeting with prospective clients and selling yourself for yet another. As long as all of these processes rolled along nicely, you kept your employees working and getting paid. When things backed up, though, it was easy to fall off track. And I feared we might be jumping the rails.
    At the moment, Turner Construction was working steadily on a haunted bed-and-breakfast over in the Castro neighborhood, where we had partnered with another construction company, and it was coming along well. Also, we were finishing up
(oh please, oh please let us be finally finishing up)
on my friend Matt’s place, which was the first building in which I’d knowingly seen a ghost.
    But we needed other jobs in the pipeline, and though we had a few in the paperwork stage, I was starting to get nervous that we hadn’t had much new work coming in. In large part, the high-end construction business is recession-proof: Our clients are generally well-off, and though I’m no economist, I’d noticed that no matter what, there were some damned wealthy people in this country. Moreover, they didn’t seem to lose their money with the vagaries of the market, much less by losing their jobs. These people were the one percent. And since they were my bread and butter—especially those who had the resources and inclination to save