Still I didn’t want to mess things up. The last thing I needed was to prove that it was a homicide and then learn that I’d also destroyed any potential evidence by my own carelessness. So I stayed outside looking in. Detective Green was right about one thing. There was no sign of a ladder here, but perhaps the rickety fire escape would work for entrance. If you were planning on killing yourself, would you worry about falling off the fire escape and hurting yourself? I wondered.
I had about turned the corner to move to the far side of the home when I heard a voice shout, “Hey!”
I turned around and saw a larger man walking towards me. He was about six feet tall with a beer gut that hung over the front of his pants. He looked angry and I just stood waiting for him to come over.
“You’re trespassing,” he spat out as he approached me.
“Is this your property?” I asked mildly. I had a plan that would only be upset if the property owner showed up.
“No, I live next door, and you’re not the neighbor.” He stood with his arms folded over his chest so that they rested on his belly. He had narrowed his eyes to slits, but I could see enough of them to know that he was angry.
“I’m interested in buying the place. The realtor said that I could stop by and look around. We have a formal review of the property with an inspector next week.”
My words stopped him. He didn’t have a response for that, but he didn’t move. He continued to stand there with his arms crossed over his chest. I just ignored the attitude. “So do you know anything about this place? Its history?”
“It’s not a good house. It’s dangerous. People die here.” His tone was calm and level, but the words freaked me out a little. They were the words of a child who was superstitious, not an adult.
“Do you live next door?” I asked, ignoring the warnings like the hero of a horror film.
He uncrossed his arms long enough to point to the Adamson house. “Right there.”
“So we’d be neighbors. My name is Givens, Griffin Givens.” I watched him carefully as I extended my hand. His face had no reaction, so he either had not heard of the Givens family or he was a damned good actor. It was hard to tell which at this point.
“Jack Adamson,” he said finally and shook my hand. “I’m not wild about you being here without an escort. I would think that the realtor would want to be here with you too.”
“I’m only in town for a few hours today, and she had a closing. It was either let me look at it by myself or lose the sale completely. I think she chose wisely.” Now that I had him hooked, I continued to walk along the back side of the house that didn’t face the street. He followed along, presumably to keep an eye on me as I looked.
I checked meters and other things that I knew about the home, but honestly I had no idea what I was really supposed to be doing. I looked up to look at the roof. “Do you know how old the roof is?” I asked.
“No clue. I don’t think it’s been replaced since I’ve lived here.” He looked up at the roof as if it might give him some answers, but nothing was forthcoming.
I turned to face him. “This sounds like a really odd question, but I have to ask. My girlfriend has this weird superstition. She doesn’t want a house where someone has died. The realtor had no idea, but just wanted me to tell her ‘no.’ Can you help out here? It would be great to be able to reassure her.”
I had planned this question on the drive over. I had needed a way to broach the subject without making it seem like I already knew what had happened. This route seemed the safest to me – slightly odd, but safest.
He didn’t speak for a minute. His face looked whiter than it had when he approached me. He finally stammered, “Yeah, someone did die in here.”
“Shit,” I said. “That’s not what she’s going to want to hear, and I really liked this house. At least tell me it was a long time ago. That might make things better.”
He shook his head but didn’t say a word.
“Recently? So much for this one. Do you know how hard it is to find a house where no one has ever died? Especially if it’s an older house. They all have someone who passed away from old age or something.” I didn’t like pouring it on so thick, but I needed to get him talking. While I felt bad about it, I also remembered that the Adamsons had been separated at the time of her death, which made it less likely that he was as torn up about it.
Finally he spoke. “Yeah, it was this month. My ex-wife committed suicide here.”
I tried to feign surprise. I wasn’t sure how well I did, because I’d never really excelled at acting, but he seemed to be convinced. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have asked,” I stumbled over the words, which seemed appropriate in the situation.
He shrugged. “We were getting a divorce, so I’m not miserable, but it’s a tough thing to think about.”
“I understand. It’s especially hard on the kids,” I added.
“No kids. Just a cat, but I got custody of that,” he said with a smirk. He definitely did not seem broken up by the events.
“Why here? I mean, why not at home?”
He shrugged again. “She always liked this house, but I have no idea why she’d want to do it here. She actually went in through the back of the house and then hung herself from a pipe in the basement. Pretty nasty stuff. They called me to identify the body, so I know that I’ll never do that. What was that saying about leaving a pretty corpse? Not from hanging.”
“So you were living elsewhere? Was it near here? Is there anything for sale around there?” I asked, hoping to learn more about the situation. He had opened up, and I didn’t want him to close down before I had some information. The bad thing about not being a cop was that you were at the mercy of their time and mood. Either could have them shoo you off.
“I lived about five blocks over from here, but I traveled all the time. I was actually in Lima the night it happened. They called my hotel there and let me know.” He mentioned a hotel that I hadn’t heard of, but I filed it away for future investigation.
I nodded. “I think James Dean said that about the pretty corpse.” I hoped I was right, but I was more interested in keeping the conversation going. “So you got the house now? And you’re living here?”
He gave me half a smile. “Yeah, the only up side to this is that by killing herself now, I got everything. The house, the money, the cat, everything.”
“That is a positive,” I agreed. I wondered about couples who lost the spark that had caused them to marry in the first place. It was certainly too soon for me to be speculating about a future with Detective Green. However, I wondered what had driven my parents to stay together after Susan left. They hadn’t been happy together, and my father had drunk more than he should. Had they just stayed together out of habit, or did they truly love each other?
Given that Mr. Adamson was busy telling me that he’d inherited everything, I suspected that he’d given up on the relationship for a while. My first guess was that he’d been cheating on Mrs. Adamson like in many cases with couples who had been married for a while. No matter what they claimed to be the reason for their split, it ended up being about another person in the relationship.
So now I had two motives for Mrs. Adamson to be a victim of murder rather than a suicide. While I couldn’t discount entirely that this might be exactly what it looked like, somebody definitely gained from her death.
I thanked Mr. Adamson for his help, went back to my car, and drove home.
Chapter 4
My answering machine light was blinking when I returned. I had finally given in and bought a smart phone, but I stayed old school enough that I kept a landline and an answering machine for my business.
I played the message. Mrs. Givens’ voice came over the machine. She asked me to call her immediately. She had something she wanted to ask their dog, Nelly. I returned her call and got back in the car again. This was not going to be a nice stay-at-home day. I was so busy visiting other people’s pets that I couldn’t spend
time with my own.
I got out of my car at the Givens house. Nelly was there in a heartbeat, wagging her tail. Drool sprayed from her mouth as she tried to get me to play with her. I looked around for Mrs. Givens, but I didn’t see her. Nelly and I walked to the door together. While the dog could go in without warning, I stayed at the door and knocked several times.
Mrs. Givens came out of the kitchen, drying her hands. “I’m so glad that you came. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I needed to talk to someone.” Her face was pale and gaunt. The smiles from earlier had disappeared, and frown lines now showed around her mouth. I wasn’t sure what had happened to her, but it was severe.
“No problem. You wanted to ask Nelly something?” I wanted to hear what this was. So often in the guise of asking me to ask a pet something, people revealed all sorts of dark secrets. I had a hunch that this would be another of those instances.
She sighed. There was a gym bag in the corner of the living room that hadn’t been there before on my previous visit. Its presence was obvious since there was so little furniture in the room. I thought of the boat, and I wondered if that had been sold. If so, why weren’t there more possessions here at the house?
She walked to the gym bag and brought it to me. She slowly unzipped it and showed it to me. The bag was full of packets of $100 bills. Good old Ben Franklin smiled all over the place. My guess was that it was at least $100,000 in the bag. If my math was right, ten packs of $100s would total that much. I let out a low whistle. “Where did you find this?”
“It was in the crawlspace above the garage. I smelled something out in the garage, so I went looking. I looked up there and found this bag that I didn’t recognize. After you’re married as long as we were, you know the possessions of the other person. I had never seen this bag, so I pulled it down, thinking I could throw it away. When I opened it up, I found all of this money. This had to belong to Andy, but I don’t know where he could have gotten it.”
“And how does Nelly tie into this?” I asked, not sure of why I’d been called in. I had an inkling that Mrs. Givens had always gone to her husband with a crisis of any kind, and now that he was gone, she was reaching out to another man to take his place – for decisions at least. She had to be twice my age.
“I want you to ask Nelly if she knows where the money came from. I didn’t think it would take much time, since it’s a yes or no question. I doubt she’d be able to tell you much beyond that. It’s not like she knows banking and finance.”
I looked at the bag, thinking that showing a person a bag full of cash was not the time to try to get a discount on a pet discussion. I thought of how that money would come in handy to fix up my own home. I stopped for a second, wondering where the thought had come from to repair my home. It was likely the work of Detective Green, who was subtly pushing me to become more mainstream.
“Sure,” I agreed. “I can talk to Nelly about the cash if you’d like.”
She nodded. “Thank you. I don’t know what else to do here.”
I sat down in the living room in the same chair I’d occupied during my last visit. I asked Nelly to come to me, and she did. She put her chin on my knee again, and I looked her in the eye. “Nelly, do you know anything about the green paper that Mrs. Givens just showed me?”
Nelly had the good graces to sneeze at that moment, which startled Mrs. Givens. I leaned closer and put my ear almost up to the dog’s drool. I nodded several times and then looked up. “She says that Mr. Givens put it there. She doesn’t know much more. He came home one day and went out to the garage with the bag and came back without it. She was upset because she was hoping that it had contained balls so they could play fetch.”
Mrs. Givens laughed. The stress lines on her face eased for a moment. “Nelly does love her fetch. She goes crazy if she even sees a ball. Normally, I have to spell it or she goes nuts.”
I had seen a stack of tennis balls on top of the dining room china cabinet, so I had suspected as much. I was glad to see that my observation skills had served me well again.
“So what will you do now?” I asked. I knew one detective who would be very interested in this development.
“I’m putting it in the safe now, and then I’ll figure out what to do tomorrow,” she replied.
Despite my best efforts, she did not want to notify the police of the development. I had a hunch that part of her wanted to keep the money and use it to fix up the house.
On the drive home, I began to come up with another point of commonality between the two cases. Both of them had a profit motive involved. The Givens case had the mysterious bag of cash while the Adamson family had the more typical motive that a widower makes more than a divorcee.
I wondered about the Marksberry case. I was going to have to read a bit more on that murder, which was actually being treated as a murder, to see if it too had a monetary motive behind it. My work would have to be more circumspect, because the police were investigating and had a rather bleak view of amateurs looking around.
I got home and found a message from my mother. She needed me to bring her fresh tomatoes, which were quickly going out of season. She was making some recipe and wanted them. My mother had retreated into herself after my sister’s death and very rarely left the house. She made those people who didn’t leave their houses and bought everything from the Internet look like social beings. She bought virtually everything from websites and the rest I had to bring her. Since I was her only relative in the area, most of that burden fell on my shoulders.
I’d been purposely avoiding her since I’d read the police report and learned that my sister had supposedly walked to meet a date while leaving her phone and keys at home. The new information explained the police’s suspicions of the family and the doubts about being abducted against her will. In the few weeks since then, I’d come to the conclusion that someone from the family had killed her at the house, someone from the family had killed her elsewhere and brought back the phone and keys, or she’d left with her money and no intention of coming back ever.
Of those three options, I preferred the third one, but given that no one had seen or heard of her in over a decade, that seemed unlikely. There’s nothing like a suspicion of murder to put even more distance between you and your family. All of the family narratives I’d been told were wrong, dead wrong. I had spent more than a few sleepless nights over the past few weeks thinking about what could have happened to her. Some of my dreams from a decade ago began again. While Sheila Green had not meant to cause this heartache, she had just the same.
That knowledge had made me begin to question the coping skills I’d developed over the years. I’d hid from attention by looking like I didn’t care about me or my appearance, in hopes that others would feel the same. Now I had to wonder if those had helped at all, since Susan had either left or been killed by a family member. In the heat of my anger at this discovery, I’d buzz-cut my own hair and begun mowing the grass on a regular basis. Not huge steps, but steps nonetheless.
I listened to the message again, wondering what my mother really knew. When she’d heard that I had a copy of the police report, she’d thrown a fit, insisting that I turn it over to her immediately. I had, but I’d made a copy before I did so. Did she think that the family stories were safe now? She certainly didn’t seem any different, but it was hard to tell over the phone.
I decided for an element of surprise. I picked up the tomatoes and stopped by her house to drop them off. She still lived in the same house where we’d lived when Susan disappeared. I knocked on the door, not having to worry if she’d be home or not. She was always home. She’d open the door to family, what little of it there was, and to delivery people.
She came to the door and looked at me. Her jaw dropped as I realized that she hadn’t seen me since I’d shaved my head. It was a very drastically different look. “What happened to you?” she asked finally.
I shrugged. “Didn’t see a reason to keep it, so I shaved it myself. It’s much easier to
take care of.”
“You look more like your father this way,” she said without judgment. However, given that he’d drunk himself into a stupor after Susan’s disappearance and stayed there until he died, I didn’t think that this was truly a compliment from her. She rarely mentioned him, so I was surprised to hear him mentioned so casually in conversation.
I handed over the tomatoes, and she invited me in. As I stood in the doorway, I realized that what I really wanted out of today’s meeting was to see Susan’s room again. I hadn’t been in there in years, and I had obviously missed the keys and phone in all the times that I’d seen it since her disappearance. I wondered if I could notice more as an adult than I had as a child.
“I have to finish this recipe,” she said without looking back at me.
“Hey, do you mind if I get something out of my room? I’m hoping it’s still there.” I was halfway up the staircase before I heard her agree. I didn’t want to give her a chance to say no to my request or ask me a bunch of questions about what I could suddenly want after all these years out on my own.
I went into my old room. It was amazing to me that my mother kept this part of the house unchanged, nearly a shrine to the children. My twin-sized bed was still neatly made with a duvet on it that had allowed my mother to change the paint color more often for me. My student desk was pushed against the wall, and the dictionary and thesaurus were still standing, held in place by plastic cups that I’d picked up at high school football games. The entire thing was covered by a thin layer of dust, telling me that no one had been in here in ages. I wondered when the last time my mother dusted. I would have suspected she’d be cleaner given that she never left the house.
Losing Patients (Animal Instincts Book 4) Page 4
