Free Murder on the House: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (Haunted Home Repair Mystery) by juliet blackwell Page B

house to me. She couldn’t have sold it to anyone!”
    “Come on, lady, back it up,” said the uniformed officer. “Right now we’re investigating a crime.”
    “He’s right, honey,” said her companion, though he flashed a challenging glare at the cop. “Let’s go home and we’ll figure this all out later.”
    A murmur arose from the crowd, and onlookers started voicing their opinions. I heard people grumbling loudly: “It was her house; she could do anything she wanted with it.”
    “She was nuts.”
    “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”
    Inspector Crawford straightened, fixed the crowd with her take-no-prisoners gaze, and then lowered—rather than raised—her voice. It had the effect of gaining everyone’s attention.
    “Right now , if you don’t mind, I’d like to figure out who would have thrown a little old lady down a well. Let’s keep our focus, people.”
    Chastened, everyone hushed.
    She turned back to me, muttering, “In all my born days . . .” under her breath. Shaking her head, she led me to the front door, where we were clear of the crowd overhearing. “And you spent the night here, why?”
    “The Propaks had planned to remodel the house to be a bed-and-breakfast. They were trying to decide which of two contractors to hire, Turner Construction or Avery Builders. So they asked me and Josh Avery to spend the night at the house.”
    She quirked her head. “Is that normal behavior in the process of submitting a construction bid?”
    “Normal, in terms of . . . ?”
    “Is it typical? Have you ever done so before?”
    “No, not exactly.”
    “I’d rather not play twenty questions with you, Ms. Turner. Tell me what you were doing here.”
    I took a deep breath and dove in. “The Propaks—and Mrs. Bernini, for that matter—believed this house was haunted. Kim Propak mentioned that other contractors had fled the building, scared, and she proposed that we try making it through a night here. If we failed, we would lose the bid.”
    “It’s all coming flooding back to me now. You were the one working on the old Cheshire Inn on Union, and you thought it was haunted.”
    “I believe what I told you at the time was that the owner thought it was haunted.”
    The inspector raised one eyebrow and looked down her nose at me, in an incredulous, “you’re a nutcase and/or a liar” move that reminded me of my friend Luz’s natural suspicion. “You’re saying that you’ve been involved in two allegedly haunted houses now, by coincidence?”
    “There are people who think I have certain . . . abilities. When it comes to ghosts.”
    “And do you? I mean, is this part of your whole shtick?” She made a circular gesture with her hand. “I hire you to put in a new window and you drive my ghosts out of the attic at the same time? For a small fee, of course.”
    I felt a surge of anger, and my cheeks burned. “I don’t have a shtick , no. And I’ve never accepted money for . . . for this sort of ‘ghost’ thing. But the fact is . . . well, I do seem to have some ability with the beyond. That is, sometimes I, well, hear things. And see things.”
    Clearly I was going to have to work on my patter if I was going to stand up, open and proud, and embrace my ghost-talking abilities. But it still felt new to me. After the first incident several months ago, I had come clean to certain important people in my life: my dad; our housemate, Stan; my stepson, Caleb; Luz; even my maybe-sort-of boyfriend, Graham. And of course, now that it was splashed all over Haunted House Quarterly , which had been picked up by any number of Internet sites, my name was circulating in cyberspace. But all of that was nothing compared with fessing up to this no-nonsense woman, a woman who dealt with dead bodies—and the folks who made them dead—all the time.
    Inspector Crawford was studying me with a cold stare that made me feel not only jumpy but unaccountably guilty. I got the feeling she was one of