Home for the Haunting(22)

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 beautiful old buildings—I was hardly in the position to come down on them for having more than the rest of us. And heck, a few of them even did good things with their money, giving to charity and setting up foundations and the like. Maybe not on the level of Carnegie and Rockefeller, but every bit counted.

But could the ongoing economic sluggishness finally be coming home to roost at Turner Construction? I certainly hoped not, because besides supporting me and my dad and our friend Stan, we also employed a handful of full-time workers, as well as subcontracting in the trades. I liked to think of us as a small but important economic engine, but it couldn’t run without the oil provided by people with enough money to say, “Yes. What the heck? Why don’t we do it right and slap some real gold leaf on there?”

These were the thoughts I had while I lay sleepless in bed, waiting for it to be time to get up.

Finally I showered and pulled on a dress. I had a rather eccentric style, especially rare for those of us in the building trade. Stephen was a frustrated costume designer raised among showgirls in Vegas, and he kept me well supplied with somewhat low-cut dresses featuring spangles and fringe. I matched these with my steel-toed work boots and carried coveralls around in my car for crawling around in the muck and mire of jobsites.

Downstairs in the kitchen, I heard voices. Dad’s was no surprise; he was always up before me, whipping up a hearty and nourishing breakfast that I was sure to decline as politely as possible. But the second voice didn’t belong to Stan, that was for sure. It was a woman’s voice

That was odd. Other than me, there were no females in this house. Dad, Stan, my frequently visiting stepson, even the dog . . . nothing but boy energy, day in, day out.

I proceeded downstairs, through the living room, past Turner Construction’s home office off the hall, and rounded the corner to the kitchen.

“Mel!” a woman’s voice squealed, and my sister Charlotte flung her slender, sweet-smelling arms around my neck. I returned her hug, stunned.

“What are you doing here?”

“Oh! That’s a fine way to greet your elders! Does a girl need a reason to visit her daddy and favorite sister?” She flashed our father a smile worthy of a prime-time toothpaste commercial.

“I’m not your favorite sister,” I said.

“Oh, pshaw!” she replied with a giggle.

The usually grumpy “daddy” was bustling about the kitchen with a broad smile on his face, the one he habitually wore when Charlotte—his golden child, though he denied it—was around.

Stan met my eyes, chuckled, and shook his head, then sipped his coffee.

I like my sister. I do. I love her like, well, a sister. But we had nothing in common. Nothing but our parents and youngest sister, Daphne.

For instance, Charlotte went by the nickname “Cookie.” On purpose. She wasn’t even being ironic.

Right there, I thought. Right there was where our problems started. Cookie was perky, long-legged, and naturally slender yet curvy. And a blonde. Though we had grown up on a series of construction sites, she had not only managed not to learn her way around the business end of a hammer, but had done so without encountering our father’s wrath. Instead, Dad found Cookie’s ineptness “cute.” I assumed Cookie had mastered the fine art of flirtation about the same time she had graduated from diapers to pull-ups. Unlike me, my sister had been born with that rare, mystical feminine quality of getting pretty much any man in her vicinity to do pretty much anything she wanted.