Free Dead Bolt by juliet blackwell

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