My attire probably didn’t help. Today had dawned chilly and overcast, so I wore black fingerless gloves, black leggings and matching sweater, a rather short gray skirt, a long, thin red scarf my sister had knitted, all topped by a full-length black leather jacket I bought in Spain a million years ago.

Only my steel-toed work boots marked me as an insider.

Heartwood Lumber was open to the public but was set up for contractors, not do-it-yourself homeowners. There were no friendly vest-clad employees eager to answer questions about which pneumatic drill bit worked best on concrete, or if a synthetic paintbrush could be used with oil as well as latex paint. Instead, behind the cluttered counter were several guys sitting at computer terminals, inputting orders of thousands of pounds of rebar or truckloads of lumber to be delivered to building sites.

As was typical in these sorts of places, I was the only female.

Construction is one occupation that has, by and large, ignored the women’s movement. There simply aren’t that many of us double-X chromosome carriers with the interest and the inclination—or the training and support—to compete successfully in the trades. Younger women often have to leave if they want to have families, because health and safety standards don’t allow for pregnancy on many job sites. And then there was the incessant sexual harassment. But a lot of it was simple tradition: Many construction workers went into this line of work because their fathers were in the trades. Dad was a carpenter, so they were raised to see that as an option, and probably spent many a weekend building things and learning to use tools. Dad was a journeyman plumber, so he helped his son get into the apprentice-training program. No doubt it would change in time, but progress was slow.

In the meantime, I tried to hire and work with women whenever I could, but by and large I spent my days in a man’s world. On the upside, I was easily recognized at all of the lumberyards, cement and gravel companies, and hardware outlets I frequented in the Bay Area, not to mention the numerous specialty stores that carried architectural salvage goods and reproductions. Most of the men accepted me when they realized I didn’t dink around or play the “girl card” to avoid less savory aspects of the work.

The hefty man behind the counter wore a name tag that read HARLAN LOFGREN, HEARTWOOD ASSISTANT MANAGER. Harlan’s watery blue eyes checked me out not in the way of a man appreciating a woman, but as though he was assessing my sanity. But within the first two minutes of our discussion I had thrown in enough information about my current renovation projects that he knew my boots weren’t just for show.

I ordered a truckload of half-inch wallboard to be delivered to Cheshire House. Then I requested a catalog of reproduction windows, and a list of current lumber prices. Finally, I asked if I could speak with an employee named David Enrique.

“Sure, go on back. He’s on a forklift in lumber. Mustache.”

Out in the yard tall piles of different-sized gravel were on one side, stacks and stacks of lumber in metal frames in the covered building to the back. Cinderblocks and pressure-treated wood, rebar, and metal framing supplies were all in orderly sections. The yard smelled of freshly sawn wood, pine dust, and axle grease.

There were several men working forklifts, but only one with a mustache.

I flagged him down.

“Dave Enrique?”

“Ye-e-ah . . .” he said, as though unsure whether he should give away such vital information.

He looked to be anywhere from midthirties to -forties, white T-shirt gone gray, jeans, stocky physique, with the kind of ropey muscles more common to building sites than twenty-four-hour fitness centers. His hair was salt-and-pepper, his heavy mustache more toward the pepper than the salt. It was midday and yet he had a five-o’clock shadow.

“I was hoping to talk to you for just a minute.”

He looked around, as though scouting out a supervisor.

“Harlan sent me back here,” I said.

Enrique shrugged and climbed down, deliberately stripping off tan leather work gloves, one after the other. A medallion hung around his neck: a symbol of protection. A guardian angel. There was another angel inked on one forearm, an intricate tattoo of a nine-millimeter automatic on the other.

Then he brought out a box of cigarettes with an old-fashioned-looking foreign label. The cigarettes themselves were long and slim and as dark brown as a cigar.

“Can you believe this? Expensive habit already, and I get hooked on the imports.”

He didn’t offer me one. Not that I would have accepted.

I didn’t approve of smoking, and was always bugging my dad to quit. But there was something about the habit that seemed so . . . French. Especially with exotic cigarettes like these. And I was a sucker for anything Parisian. They made me wish I was puffing and drinking espresso and becoming nervous and gorgeous and thin, which is how I’m sure things would be if I ever actually made it to Paris.

He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the forklift. “So are we talking, or what?”

“You used to live in the Cheshire Inn, on Union.”

The expression in his eyes morphed from cautious curiosity to cold impatience. It didn’t take supernatural skills to pick up on this fellow’s mood.

“A long time ago.”

“Can you tell me anything about living there?”

“I wasn’t there long.”

I nodded. “I spoke with Hettie Banks, the former owner. She said you moved out because you thought you saw something strange.”

Enrique’s dark eyes swept the yard. There were forklifts transferring items onto delivery trucks, gloved and booted men carrying planks on their shoulders. Metal clanged, engines churned, men shouted. The reassuring hustle and bustle of the construction industry.

“Why are you asking?”

“A new couple bought the place, and I’m the general on the renovation. There have been some . . . strange things happening.”

He nodded. “That’s a bad place.”

“What’s bad about it?”

He shrugged. “I was sort of kidding around with the girl who lived there once. She was kind of a weird kid, not that I blamed her. Unusual upbringing. Anyway, she used to play up in the attic. We . . . saw something once.”

“What was it?”

He hesitated, taking a long drag on his cigarette, and I feared he was going to stop speaking. I had no way to compel him to tell me anything, after all.

“It wasn’t exactly clear,” he finally said. “First there were voices, then what sounded like a woman crying. But the worst of it was, I felt this . . . rage building up inside me. It wasn’t directed at the kid, gracias a Dios. It made me want to go after Emile.”

“Emile?”

“Yeah, Emile Blunt. This other guy who lived there. Had the room next to mine. Owned an upholstery shop across the way.” One hand reached up to finger his medallion.

I felt the urge to mirror him and stroke the wedding ring on the ribbon around my neck. Great. At this rate I would become one of those people who had to tap the plane three times before boarding to ward off bad luck.

“So we were just there, checking out the attic, and it happened. We all three saw it—whatever it was. But the weirdest part was the feelings. Emile had them, too—we talked about it after. And the girl, Janet. It was almost like . . . almost like they were trying to get us to do something.”

“What did you mean when you said the girl was ‘kind of weird’?”

“I found something, up in the attic. No big deal, just this little piece of metal, with an engraving on it. I gave it to her, but she managed to lose it, and then she totally flipped out about it. Accused Emile of stealing it from her. Strange.”

“What did the engraving look like?”

“I think it must’ve been part of the house; it sort of matched a design that was in other parts of the place. These stylized leaves, and a face that looked sort of like a grim reaper. I’m telling you, that’s a bad place.”

“I hear Hettie kept a lot of cats.”

He shrugged and took another drag on his cigarette. “They were okay. I like animals. I didn’t like ’em on the kitchen table, but I never ate there anyway, just grabbed a doughnut and coffee on the way to work.”

“Did it seem like she neglected them?”

“Are you kidding? Treated those things like family.”

“Can I ask how well you knew Emile Blunt?”

He shrugged and threw his cigarette onto the ground, twisting his boot over the butt. “As well as I cared to. I only knew him as a fellow boarder; we passed in the hall occasionally. Besides that time in the attic, alls I know about him is he spoke Russian, and the jerk borrowed some money from me once, but never paid me back. Why?”

“He passed away.”

“That so?”

“Murdered. He was found yesterday.”

Enrique made the sign of the cross.

“When was the last time you saw any of these folks?”

“It’s been years. And I’d like to keep it that way.”

“What about the money Emile owed you?”

“It wasn’t that kind of money. I was just as happy to let it go, so long as I never have to deal with any of those people again. Now,” he said as he pulled on his leather gloves, “break time’s over.”

He climbed back up on the forklift and started the engine.

I walked back toward the building, my boots crunching on the loose gravel and broken concrete of the yard.

My stomach growled. I couldn’t think about all this on an empty stomach. I checked in with my foremen by cell phone, then bought tacos from my favorite parking lot truck and brought them to Luz’s place. Wednesdays were her day off from teaching, and she’d been working like mad on her new condo in a 1920s building, out in the Avenues near Portola.

I had sent over Jeremy, one of my carpenters, to help her out today, so I knew she’d be home. Luz would make any excuse to hang out with Jeremy.

The place was tiny, but we were transforming it into a jewel box. The inspiration came from a castle I had seen while traveling through the Dordogne Valley with Daniel, years ago. We came upon it by chance, and learned that it had once belonged to Josephine Baker. The glamorous American dancer had transformed a section of the castle into a 1920s art deco dream, including a bathroom tiled in black and gold, designed by Givenchy. Gorgeous.

The idea was to gold- and silver-leaf the walls and ceiling, and to upholster with plush velvet and silks, so that it would seem like one was walking into an actual jewel box.

Luz answered the door covered in splotches of red-brown paint. Though I spent a good deal of my life covered in paint and dust and plaster, this was a big deal for a woman who usually balked at getting her hair mussed.

“You look like you’ve been in a knife fight,” I said.

“More like a fight with this can of paint, and the paint won,” she replied as she led the way into the main room.

“Have you eaten yet? I brought lunch.”

“I had a little something, but if those are tacos I smell, I’ll eat again. Just let me get washed up. Oh wait, do I have to wash out this brush? It’ll take forever to get the red out.”

“Use the old painters’ trick: Wrap it in plastic.” I wrapped it tightly in the plastic taco bags. “As long as it’s airtight, the paint won’t dry out for a long time. If you want to leave it overnight, stick it in the freezer.”

“Like a paint Popsicle?”

I smiled, remembering my mother finding my brushes loaded with any number of colors in the freezer. Problem was, I would forget about them, and even wrapped and frozen, they only lasted so long. Good painters’ brushes were not only essential to a good paint job, they were expensive. They had to be treated right.

While Luz was washing her hands, the hammering from the next room came to a halt, and Jeremy walked in. We chatted about the status of the job, and then I offered him lunch.

“Thanks, but I’m meeting a friend to take a run. I’ll get a protein smoothie after. I’m on a cleansing diet, detoxing all month. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“Oh, that sounds so much better than tacos,” I said. “Have fun.”

“He’s so freaking gorgeous,” Luz muttered, watching Jeremy’s fine form as he slipped out the front door.

She and I scooched down to sit on the floor on drop cloths, backs up against the wall. It had turned into a sunny winter’s day, and cool, fresh air wafted in through the cracked windows. We could hear the sound of someone strumming on a guitar, and children playing in the schoolyard down the street.

“You do know he’s gay, right?”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t look, does it?”

“I guess not, as long as he doesn’t mind. Sexual harassment runs both ways, you know.”

Luz sighed and laid her head back against the wall. “There should be a law against a man that good-looking being gay.”

“Maybe you find him that attractive precisely because he is gay. Ever think of that?”

She frowned. “I reject that theory.”

“On what basis?”

“That I don’t like it.”

“Very scholarly of you.”

“Scholarliness is overrated.”

“So says the academic. Besides,” I said, handing Luz a taco, “if he weren’t gay and you started seeing each other, you’d have to go jogging and talk about protein shakes instead of indulging in tacos with me.”

“Excellent point.” She took a huge bite of her favorite, carnitas. Talk about your unnatural occurrences: I would never understand how Luz kept so slender given her voracious appetite.

“What can you tell me about animal hoarders?” I asked as I unwrapped my pollo asado taco.

“Like crazy cat ladies?”

“Yes, crazy cat ladies, or deranged dog gentlemen, or whatever else there might be. Women can’t be the only ones who own lots of cats, can they?”

“Not at all.” Luz chuckled. “In fact, one of my students did a research paper last year on animal hoarding, and its many permutations—it’s seen in both genders, all walks of life. But did you know there’s actually a group on the Web known as Crazy Cat Ladies? They’re trying to reappropriate the term. Like hussy.”

“We’re reappropriating ‘hussy’?” Even when I was young I was always out of touch with the latest trends, and this tendency seemed to be getting worse with age.

“If we’re not, we should. It’s a good word.” She elbowed me. “For instance, if you ever had sex again in your life, you could come in here and I could say, ‘You hussy, you.’”

“I’ll keep you posted,” I said. “So how’s the Crazy Cat Ladies Society doing?”

“No idea,” she said with a shrug, taking another big bite. “I just thought it was interesting. Anyway, animal hoarding is an actual psychological condition. It’s related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, marked by delusions and the inability to judge reality. Animal hoarders tend to believe they can provide proper care for their pets, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

“I visited a former hoarder yesterday. She still has a couple of cats, but they seem well-treated.”

“That’s good. They’re usually true animal lovers, you know. The problem is that they can be a bit like alcoholics ; it’s hard for them to stop at anything like a reasonable number. They get overwhelmed, and then they’re afraid to ask for help, even if they do recognize they’re in over their heads. Hey, how come you got green chile?”

I handed over my foil-wrapped taco. “Here.”

“No, that’s okay. You should eat it.”

“I already had chicken. And I’m saving room for a protein shake.”

She took the taco.

“You think I should turn her in?” I asked. “I believe her probation stipulated she stay away from all animals, particularly felines.”

“That’s a hard call,” Luz said, sitting back with a sigh. “It’s not like it’s a snap to find a good home for another unwanted pet. I’m guessing she doesn’t have a lot else in her life?”

“One daughter.”

“Are they close?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hmmm . . . I presume this is related to the house you’re redoing? I thought the cat lady was long gone.”

“She is. But there’s . . . something from the past, sort of, that’s come up with the house.”

“From the past?” Luz had polished off the green chile and was munching on chips, eyeing the extra bag of tacos I had brought for Jeremy. She was a phenomenon.

“There have been some odd events, not quite . . . natural, if you get my drift.”

“As in . . .” Luz trailed off and fixed me with the kind of look only a close friend could muster, the kind that registered concern, annoyance, accusation, and humor all at once. “Wait, don’t tell me: The ghosts are back.”