Keeper of the Castle: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery by Juliet Blackwell Page A

I scare you?”
    “Just a tad.”
    “Don’t tell me you’ve been listening to the ghost stories.”
    “I may have listened to one or two, yes.”
    “Surely you don’t believe in such things?”
    “I take it
you
don’t?”
    “I’m a realist, my dear, not a fantasist. A building this old, well, it’s seen its share of history. War, love, famine, birth, disease, the drama of human life. I will grant you that such goings-on can give a historic building a certain je ne sais quoi, a sense of something
other
, another place and time, the way a new building never can. But ghosts?
Tsk-tsk
.”
    His eyes flickered over the food.
    “Is that an . . . offering?”
    “Sure looks like it.”
    “This is ridiculous. The men have been taken in by that ghost story as well.
Doritos
.” Libole
tsk
ed again.
    “Doritos do seem like an odd choice, but ranch flavor . . .”
    “It’s idle heresy.” And with that he stepped into the room and dashed the food and candles to the floor. Then he stormed out.
    I remained in place, shocked. The odd altar and food offerings, the mess Libole created on the spot where McCall’s body had lain just two days ago—the whole scene felt bizarre, unseemly.
    As I hesitated, I noticed Dog’s panting started to cause clouds in the air. A wave of cold air, then a bone-deep chill, enveloped me.
    “Let’s . . . get out of here,” I whispered to Dog. Dragging him by the collar, I could have sworn I felt something behind me. Something more than cold, something . . .
    Don’t turn around.
    My hair was in its usual ponytail, leaving my neck vulnerable to ghostly exhalations. . . .
    And then I felt something much worse. That same sensation of hunger: deep, aching hunger pangs so strong that for a moment I almost doubled over. And on top of that, a gut-wrenching sadness.
    Don’t turn around.
    Dog yelped.
    Then we ran.
    *   *   *
     
    Outside, the sun shone, the sky was filled with puffy white clouds, and a peaceful Pacific Ocean sparkled in the distance. A small army of men bustled around the jobsite. My ears were assaulted by a cacophony of stone being cut, compressor motors pounding, a pneumatic drill whining, the noises blending into a comfortingsymphony of organized chaos that reminded me of being a kid, working with my dad. The smells of the jobsite were soothing to me, too: sawdust, axle grease, and fresh concrete. Here at Wakefield those scents combined with eucalyptus and the briny ocean air.
    I leaned over, hands on my knees, and took a few minutes to soak it all in, trying to get my bearings. Dog, quicker to rally than I, trotted over to lift his leg on a tuft of grass.
    Libole was nowhere in sight. I saw Tony, the foreman, studying blueprints at a makeshift table made of planks laid over sawhorses.
    “Tony, talk to me about food going missing.”
    “Not much to tell,” he said with a shrug. “Just that: Guys are losing things from their lunches.”
    “Their whole lunch pails, or . . . ?”
    He shook his head. “Just stuff out of them. Like an apple or a cookie, like that. You know, the kind of thing that happens in grade school? But it’s rare on a jobsite, right?”
    I nodded. “Could this be a practical joke of some sort?”
    “I doubt it. No one’s sitting back and laughing—if that were the case the guys’d be finding their sandwiches behind the walls; you know the drill. Guy opens up a wall, finds a shrunken head.”
    On my debut job for Turner Construction, the guys had placed a full skeleton behind a wall I was about to open up. That was how I knew they liked me.
    “It’s got to the point where guys are keeping their stuff locked up in their trucks,” Tony continued with another shake of his head. “Not only is that inconvenient, but it’s a damn shame when you can’t trust a member of a crew; you know what I’m saying? Hey, speaking of that, have you heard anything more about Nolan?”
    “No, sorry.”
    “I still can’t believe it. I