by Becky Durfee
“How many bedrooms do you need?” the young woman asked, typing into her computer.
“I really only need one, but I can be flexible.”
After some more typing, she said, “I actually do have a one-bedroom that is currently open. We do offer month-to-month leases; just be aware those are more expensive per month than our annual leases.”
“That’s fine,” Jenny said with a relieved smile.
The young woman smiled at Jenny from behind thick glasses. “Would you like to take a look at it?”
Jenny brimmed with excitement. She knew it didn’t matter what the apartment looked like; it was going to be her new home for the next few months. “Absolutely.”
The desk worker disappeared into a small back room and came out with a key. She slipped on her jacket and grabbed her purse. “The building is quite a ways from here. Too far to walk,” she explained. “And it’s too cold to take the golf cart today. We’ll use my car, if that’s okay with you.”
“That’s fine,” Jenny agreed. She followed the woman, who introduced herself as Maggie, out the door into the parking lot. Maggie was parked close by, and soon the women were on their way.
Jenny looked out the window in awe at the numerous identical buildings, wondering which was the one she’d soon call home. A strange feeling washed over her knowing that this foreign place would soon be familiar to her. Before long she would know this maze like the back of her hand. The thought was gratifying.
Soon Maggie parked the car and said, “Here we are. Now are you planning to live here by yourself?”
“I sure am,” Jenny replied with a large smile.
“Well, I’m happy to report the apartment is on the third floor. I never feel right about women living alone on the ground floor. I feel like that’s inviting trouble.”
Jenny had never considered the prospect that she could potentially be unsafe living by herself. Although the thought had never crossed her mind before, she was indeed glad to hear she’d be on a higher floor.
The stairs to the apartment were in a covered breezeway between two halves of the same building. Her pulse raced as they reached the third floor and approached her door, which had a large 307 written at eye level. For a brief moment she considered the number 337 that she had seen in her vision. Could that have been an apartment number? She’d need to remember that possibility.
The door opened to reveal a small but clean apartment that faintly smelled of fresh paint. Jenny and Maggie initially stood in the small foyer which led directly into the open living area. “Go ahead,” Maggie said. “You can look around.”
Jenny smiled eagerly. “Thanks.” After several steps she was in the center of the living room, which connected to a tiny dining area and kitchen. She noted the three rooms together could have fit easily into the family room of the house she shared with Greg. Undeterred she ventured into the galley kitchen, spreading her arms, touching both opposite walls without having to fully extend. Curious, she peeked out the small window that overlooked the parking lot below before returning to Maggie in the foyer.
“And here’s the bedroom,” Maggie added, referring to a room located directly off the foyer. Jenny walked in and examined the closet before checking out the bathroom. She found it odd that the apartment’s only bathroom was located there; guests would need to walk through her bedroom to use it. Once back in the bedroom she peeked through the flimsy horizontal blinds to take another look at the parking lot below. She could see the dumpster.
“So what do you think?” Maggie asked.
Jenny came slowly back to the doorway. “It’s perfect,” she beamed.
“Great,” Maggie said. “We’ll just head back to the office and fill out some paperwork, and then you can call this place home.”
Jenny looked around the apartment with awe. “Home,” she whispered. “My new home.”
Jenny hummed as she pushed her cart toward the camping section of the discount department store. So far she had picked up enough dinnerware for two, some pots and pans, and a few glasses. She remembered the apartment had a built-in microwave, which would inevitably prove to be helpful. She’d also chosen a pillow from the home section. Now all she needed was furniture. She threw two folding chairs into her cart, followed by an air mattress, an air pump and a sleeping bag. “Perfect,” she said out loud as she left that department with satisfaction. A quick trip to the electronic section resulted in the selection of a small television. She inventoried her cart, trying to determine if she’d forgotten anything, but she couldn’t think of anything else she’d need. She checked out, headed back to her apartment, and set up her new home.
Once the chairs were unfolded, the bed blown up, and her paintings hung lovingly on the walls, she opened the box of items she had brought from her old house. First she took out a framed black-and-white picture of young Elanor, placing it on the bar that separated her kitchen from her living room. Next to that she placed Steve’s framed driver’s license, the only photograph she had of him. The remaining items were the painting supplies Elanor had bought for Jenny shortly before she died, and those remained in the box.
Feeling satisfied, Jenny sat down in one of the folding chairs, resting her head back and closing her eyes. This would be her home until she could find a nice townhouse to buy. There was no sense in furnishing this apartment nicely only to turn around and have to move everything. She would simply live as a minimalist for now, and then she would have her real furniture delivered straight to her new house.
In the meantime, she was living the way Elanor had lived when she had first told her father to go to hell and ventured out penniless on her own. Jenny smiled when she remembered Elanor had said she ate nothing but peanut butter sandwiches for a month straight. Compared to Elanor, Jenny was actually living the good life; at least she could afford food and clothes. But she also remembered Elanor saying that penniless phase was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth and a distorted perspective of what was important. Those months without material possessions taught her what happiness was truly about. While she no longer had nice things, she was out from under her father’s thumb, and she had the freedom to enjoy her own life and make her own decisions. Elanor learned that stuff was just stuff; true happiness came from the inside.
If the feeling Jenny was experiencing at that moment was any indication, Elanor’s conclusion was one hundred percent correct.
After a relaxing sigh, Jenny felt that familiar tug that signaled she was supposed to go somewhere. Without fully venturing into consciousness, Jenny grabbed her purse and her jacket and headed out the door.
Chapter 12
“Hello,” Zack said when he picked up his phone.
“Hey,” Jenny replied. “I’m calling from the street behind Jeremy Stotler’s house.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I got led here.” Jenny looked beyond the house in front of her, focusing on the back of the Stotler’s home, making sure she wasn’t missing anything important. “I’m not sure why. Care to join me?”
“Sure,” Zack said. “I can come out. What’s the name of the street you’re on?”
“I have no idea. You’ll have to look at a map.”
“Okay. I think I can handle that.”
“Hey…can you bring some food with you? I haven’t eaten and I’m starving.”
“Sure thing, boss.” After about a half an hour Zack’s car pulled up behind Jenny’s. He climbed in her passenger seat with a fast food bag in hand. “I hope a burger and fries is okay.”
“Right now I’d eat my own foot if it was dipped in ketchup,” Jenny confessed, eagerly taking the bag.
“So has anything exciting happened?”
Jenny shook her head as she took a bite of her burger. After she swallowed, she added, “Not a thing. I’ve been watching the house carefully, but so far nothing noteworthy has happened.” She gestured toward the Stotlers’ house. “There’s still a lot
of activity going on in front of the house, but I don’t know why I was drawn back here.”
The sun was starting to set, adding a layer of gray to the surroundings. Jenny wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to see anything at all.
As Jenny held out the cup of fries for Zack to share, she noted, “I got an apartment today.”
“What? Get out! Where?”
“The Grove.”
“Holy shit. That’s awesome. Have you talked to Greg yet?”
Jenny’s face reflected her shame. “No. I wanted to have a place set up first so that I have somewhere to go after it all hits the fan.”
“You could always lay low at my place. You know that, right?”
Jenny shook her head. “No offense or anything, but I don’t want to go from Greg’s place to your place. I want to do this myself. I have to do this myself. Besides, I don’t want Greg thinking that you’re the reason I’m leaving him. I want him to know that he’s the reason I’m leaving him.”
“I get that,” Zack said. “But why the Grove? It’s not exactly the nicest place. I imagine you could afford better than that.”
“I could. But the Grove had immediate occupancy. Besides, I don’t need fancy living accommodations. I’m not Greg.”
At that moment something caught Jenny’s eye. She nudged Zack with her elbow, pointing over his shoulder out the passenger window. A woman was hurrying out the back door of the Stotlers’ house, run-walking through the yard between them, and she eventually got in her car which was parked a very short distance from Jenny’s.
As this woman started her car, Jenny did the same. Zack buckled his seat belt while Jenny handed him the rest of her food. “Don’t eat that. I’m still hungry,” she commanded.
“No guarantees. It’s food,” Zack stated simply.
Jenny followed the woman’s car for a couple of miles through residential neighborhoods to a split-level home, where the woman pulled into the driveway. Jenny stopped her car in front of the house, getting out quickly to be sure to catch the woman before she got into her house.
“Excuse me,” Jenny called.
The woman, who appeared to be in her forties, turned to look quizzically at Jenny.
“Are you friends with Mrs. Stotler?” Jenny continued.
The curiosity on the woman’s face turned quickly to anger. “You people are ruthless, you know that? The Stotlers have no comment at this time, thank you very much.” She sped up her pace toward the house.
“Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait! I’m not with the press!” Jenny shouted all at once. Knowing she only had a few seconds until this woman disappeared into the house, she added, “I know who killed Morgan Caldwell.”
With that the woman froze. After a moment she turned to Jenny, wordlessly inviting her to continue.
“And it wasn’t Jeremy,” Jenny added softly.
“Who was it?” the woman asked with shock.
Jenny let out a sigh. “If I tell you his name it would mean nothing to you. It was random. But if you give me a moment of your time, I can show you that there are similar unsolved cases in Connecticut, and the prime suspect in those cases now lives here.”
“Why are you telling me this? Why aren’t you going to the police?”
“I did go to the police,” Jenny confessed, “and they wouldn’t listen.” Jenny took a few steps closer to the woman, hoping to appear friendlier. “Ideally I’d like to be able to talk with Mrs. Stotler. I am hoping we can piece some things together that will help clear Jeremy’s name. Not only that, but there are some people down here that shouldn’t be trusted. I need to let her know who those people are so she can be careful.”
Jenny could see the wheels turning in this woman’s head.
“But as you know,” Jenny continued, “the Stotler house is a circus right now. I can’t exactly go and ring her doorbell. But since you seem to be her friend, I’m wondering if you could help me get in contact with her.”
The woman reached into her purse. “I’ll give her a call and see what she says,” she conceded. “If she does agree to meet you you’d have to go there, though. She won’t leave her house. If she even steps out to get her mail those damn reporters swarm her like bees. They have no mercy. It’s horrible.” She pulled out her phone, pressed a button and put the phone to her ear. “Hi Abby. Sorry to bother you again, but there’s a woman here who believes she may know who Morgan’s real killer is and she’d like to talk to you…I don’t know, she must have followed me from your house…Yeah, she seems okay…All right, I’ll tell her. Thanks Abby.”
Jenny held her breath until the woman replied, “She said it’s okay for you to come over. You’d just need to use the back door.”
Jenny smiled at the woman. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
The woman’s voice became shaky. “Just get Jeremy out of jail, will you? That boy doesn’t belong there. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Jenny stepped into the Stotlers’ house, immediately feeling the tension within. The lighting was dim, and thick blankets covered the windows, making the house seem even more somber. Abby Stotler, who greeted them at the door, looked as if she hadn’t slept or eaten in days. She almost looked dead herself.
“Hi,” Jenny said softly. “Thank you for seeing me. My name is Jenny Watkins, and this is my friend Zack Larrabee.”
Abby nodded slightly. A man approached from the back of the room. “Evan Stotler,” he said as he extended his hand, first to Zack and then to Jenny. “Please, have a seat,” he said.
Zack and Jenny sat down on the couch as Abby immediately posed, “So who do you think did this?”
Jenny was reluctant to divulge her full suspicions right away. “A man from Connecticut. We just got back from there, actually. We were looking into two unsolved murders of young women up there whose circumstances are very similar to Morgan’s case. The man we believe committed those murders now lives down here in Braddock.”
Abby and Evan looked at each other before they turned back to Jenny. “Are you with the police?” Evan asked.
“Not exactly,” Jenny confessed, still trying to avoid the word psychic. “We just investigate crimes as sort of our hobby.”
“Have you told the police about this guy?” Evan asked.
Jenny shook her head. “I’m going to tell you something that cannot leave this room.”
Evan and Abby hung on her every word.
“The man we believe to be responsible for this is a Braddock police officer.” Jenny reached into her purse, pulling out one of her pictures. “This man, in fact.” She handed the picture over to the Stotlers, who looked at each other in disbelief.
“This was one of the men who came to arrest Jeremy!” Abby exclaimed.
“So you can see why this is a delicate situation,” Jenny added.
Evan, who remained less emotional than his wife, posed, “What makes you think he did this?”
Jenny decided to stick with just the facts for the moment. “Like I said, there are two similar cases in Ivory Heights, Connecticut, where he used to be a police officer before he moved here. The first girl in Connecticut was walking to a convenience store in the middle of the night to get her single mother some medicine, and the second victim had a flat tire at three a.m. It’s reasonable to think that if a police officer pulls up in either of those situations, the girls would readily get into his car.”
“Especially the second girl,” Zack added. “From what we can gather, she was pretty street-smart. She was twenty-one and completely sober, on her way home from work. You’d think that she’d be very reluctant to accept a ride from anyone considering the first murder from three months earlier hadn’t been solved. She was probably quite relieved when a policeman showed up, not realizing he was the very man she should have been fearing.”
Jenny continued. “Our theory in this particular case is that Morgan snuck out in the middle of the night to meet up with Jeremy. On her way back to her house, the officer offered her a ride home. It was prob
ably chilly out, and she accepted. That was her fatal mistake.”
Abby looked at Evan, addressing her comment to him. “That lines up perfectly with what Jeremy says happened.”
“Yeah,” Evan admitted with a tilt of his head. “It sure does.”
“So what is the police’s theory?” Zack asked. “What evidence do they have against Jeremy?”
Abby sighed, her eyes filling up with tears. She placed her hand over her mouth and looked away. With a pat on Abby’s leg, Evan told the story. “Well, when the police first questioned Jeremy, there were a few things he didn’t know. He didn’t know Morgan was missing, and he didn’t know they had cell phone records of texts between the two of them in the middle of the night. All he knew was that policemen had shown up at his school to ask if he’d been with Morgan the night before. He thought her parents had found out and were planning to charge him with statutory rape, so he denied even seeing her. He claimed he was sleeping all night.” Evan shook his head. “He’s a kid for God’s sake. He was afraid to get in trouble. I think if he had known that Morgan was missing he’d have done everything he could to help find her. His lies, though, were viewed as evidence of his guilt.
“They also found his DNA on her stomach and his skin under her fingernails. As you know, those things can result from consensual sex. However, there were signs of forcible rape on Morgan’s body when she was found, and no other DNA was found besides Jeremy’s. The police concluded that the sex between Morgan and Jeremy wasn’t consensual.”
“The killer wore a condom and she wore gloves,” Jenny found herself saying before she had the inclination to stop herself.
Abby seemed confused. “What?”
Realizing she’d just revealed herself, Jenny hung her head. “Morgan. She was wearing gloves during her attack. And the killer used a condom.”
“How do you know that?” Evan asked.
Jenny sighed and braced herself for ridicule. “I get visions,” she replied.
