“You don’t have to hold an actual funeral. The point is that the police are finished with their part, and so you or Ji need to make arrangements for whatever comes next. You could have her cremated; it’s more cost-effective.”
Cremation seemed so . . . Sadie couldn’t even complete the thought. So, what? Impersonal? Removed? Morbid? She couldn’t help but think that someone had already tried to cremate Wendy’s body. Yuck. “I’ll talk to Ji about it tomorrow,” she said. They turned a corner, and Sadie realized she knew where they were—no small feat in this city that felt like a labyrinth with all its one-way streets and skyscrapers.
“You did a great job choosing this hotel,” Sadie said as the black awning came into view. There was a storefront a few doors down advertising a soup restaurant inside. Maybe she and Pete would eat there on another day. San Francisco, with its cooler temperatures and continual fog, seemed like a perfect place to enjoy a bowl of soup. She wasn’t hungry right now, though, and tuned back to the topic of the hotel Pete had found for them. “I’m glad you got rooms at a local hotel rather than a chain. It makes it more of an experience.”
“I’ve never stayed here before,” Pete said. Sadie wondered if what he was trying to tell her was that he and Pat had never stayed there before. “But it had good reviews online.”
They walked a few more steps in silence. Sadie pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket. She’d noticed that a lot of people on the street wore jackets embroidered with San Francisco. They must not have checked the weather like she had. The tourist shops likely paid their rent through sweatshirt and hoodie sales alone.
Pete pulled open the front door of the hotel for her, and she entered, grateful for the warm interior. Her nose tingled from the cold.
“Would you like to do anything else tonight?” Pete asked once they were in the elevator. It was still early enough for them to take an evening trip to the Wharf like she and Pete had talked about on the plane, but the mood didn’t feel light enough to go sightseeing tonight. Besides, the fact that he’d waited until they were on their way to their rooms seemed to imply that it was an afterthought—otherwise why not bring it up sooner?
“I think I’d just like to go through those file boxes,” Sadie said truthfully. “Did you want to do something else?” She suspected his request was only meant to be polite, so she was careful not to sound too hopeful. If, however, he did want to do something else, she was agreeable to that too.
He didn’t look at her as he considered her question. They reached the third floor, where Sadie’s room was located, and stepped out into the hallway once the elevator doors opened. “I was thinking about going to Golden Gate Park,” Pete said with an odd hesitation in his voice.
The way he said it communicated that he was familiar with Golden Gate Park, which meant it held memories for him. He’d also said “I was thinking about going,” not “I was thinking we could go.” Sadie took a breath and chose to be his friend again instead of the woman he was about to marry. It took a second to shove her jealousy into a far corner, but she did it and managed to keep her expression impassive. “You should go,” she said with a nod, leading the way to her room and looking for her key in her purse.
“You don’t want to come?”
There was no need to read into his tone of voice that time. Sadie had already made her decision. They reached the door of her room, and she turned to face him. “I think you should go,” she said with a kind smile. She dropped her voice to barely more than a whisper, which could be interpreted as intimate though that wasn’t her intent. “Thanks for making this trip happen.” She reached for his hand. He intertwined his fingers with hers, and she gave his hand a slight squeeze. “It’s good that I came, and I wouldn’t have done it without your encouragement. I promise to do my best not to get in the way of the hard things you’re having to face.”
“You’re not in the way,” Pete said, his eyebrows drawing closer together. “I don’t—”
Sadie leaned in and kissed him quickly on the lips. “If it were my house that sold first, I’d probably be panicking too. It’s a component of this that neither one of us has thought about, and we’re both going to have to face it. Go enjoy the park. Feel what you need to feel.” She unlocked the door to her room. They had already made a rule about entering each other’s bedrooms, so Pete stayed at the threshold. She pushed the door open a few inches and planted one foot to keep it from closing.
“Are you sure? I—”
She cut him off with another kiss, in part to keep him from arguing, but also to keep things light. She held his eyes and his face relaxed.
“I’ll text you when I get back.”
Sadie nodded. “That would be great.”
Chapter 13
If not for the files from Wendy’s office, Sadie might have obsessed over not being with Pete, but burrowing in to the remnants of Wendy’s life seemed to be exactly the distraction she needed.
After taking in the general organization of the files and looking through a few different folders, she began to be bothered by the fact that the police had been through everything already. If there was anything of importance here, they’d already found it and possibly talked to Pete about it, making Sadie the last person to arrive at the proverbial party. She tried to take confidence in the fact that she could still learn more about Wendy—but what did utilities bills and credit card agreements and coupons really tell her about her dead sister?
That the police had likely organized everything made it that much more impersonal. Wendy wouldn’t have created a file for “Junk mail” or “Grocery store receipts.” At least Sadie didn’t think she would, but there was no way to know now that someone else had decided how to categorize things.
Sadie thought back to her experiences with archeology when she was working undercover on a case. The company she worked for had emphasized the importance of finding things in situ, which meant finding an artifact exactly as it had been left or discarded. You could get a sense of what caused someone to leave a place by whether or not a pot had been hidden, wrapped in cloth, tipped on its side, or any other number of factors. The “situation” created context. The perspective was totally different once that situation was removed; ownership and context were immediately lost.
These files felt like that. Had the utility bills been found this way: organized in chronological order and paper-clipped together? Had the coupons been found sorted alphabetically by brand name or had they been scattered all over the apartment, stuck in books and shoved in pockets of old coats? If all these papers had been in this hyper-organized state when the police found them, it would say something very different about Wendy than if they had been scattered and piled and ignored.
As her frustrations mounted, Sadie discarded her idea to start reading at the beginning of the files; instead, she looked through the file topics for something that seemed interesting. She pulled out the file for “Bank Statements” and found them in chronological order for the past twenty-two months, though last January’s statement was missing. She shuffled through to last month’s statement, June, which showed an automatic payment to Netflix and a larger payment to what Sadie assumed was a health insurance company as the only debits that month.
There was a single deposit for $7,000, made on the fifth. She looked through the other statements and confirmed that the same amount was deposited on the same day each month. When the fifth was on a Saturday or Sunday, the amount was deposited the prior Friday. An automatic payment, Sadie suspected. But for what? Once again, there was no context.
Detective Lopez had told her that the last charges to Wendy’s account—other than the automatic payments—had been made on May 22. There were two charges, actually. One to the grocery service Pete had told her about, and the other to a business called Wild Plum.
Sadie looked up Wild Plum on her laptop computer and found out it was an online boutique based in Chicago. She wondered what Wendy had bought for $123.33 and went back to the box of
files. In a file labeled “Wild Plum,” she found four different receipts, one of them dated May 24; the boutique must not have processed her order immediately. Reviewing the line items, Sadie saw that Wendy had purchased a set of bamboo pajamas.
Back at her computer, she looked up the item and studied the finer details of the pajamas—royal blue with tiny white polka dots and red piping at the cuffs. Not the worst pajamas ever made, but certainly not worth $123.33, in Sadie’s opinion. Where were those pajamas now? At the police station? It was such a silly thing, those pajamas, and yet it gave Sadie a better sense of her sister than most things in the box had.
She went back to the bank statements and scanned a few months’ worth. She wondered again where the $7,000 came from each month and what Wendy bought with her weekly grocery store orders. She also noticed that up through September of last year, Wendy blew through her income every month. There were numerous transactions to stores and restaurants, QVC and Amazon.com.
Starting in October, however, there were fewer and fewer charges and her monthly bills, like her power and phone, were no longer consistent. Sadie cross-checked the statements with specific utility files and found that all of them had correspondence about missing payments, shut-off notices, and threats of discontinued service if balances were not paid in full. In each case, a payment was made before the eleventh hour, but the pattern was chaotic and unorganized, whereas in the months prior, Wendy’s bills were generally paid on time and never skipped altogether. Only her rent was consistent, always paid during the last week of the month.
Sadie went to the bank statements from the year before and noticed a similar pattern in regard to less-frequent spending and more missed bills during the winter months. It wasn’t as severe as the more recent season, but it did seem to denote a pattern. Sadie thought back to something she’d read about bipolar disorder—or manic depressive disorder, as Sadie had first learned to call it years earlier.
The disorder was often characterized by alternating cycles of depression and mania that could be seen in a patterned history of the patient. Phases of mania could include shopping sprees and heightened socialization, while the depression cycle could result in isolation, paranoia, and inconsistency. Is that what Sadie was seeing here? Had Wendy entered a depressive episode last fall that was more severe than the others? Or, at least, more severe than the one she’d had the year before? Was her depression tied to the seasons? She looked at the boxed files and thought of all they weren’t telling her about her sister.
Sadie turned her attention to Wendy’s phone bill—the proof that she did have people she communicated with. Out of the last two years’ worth of bills—which seemed to be as far back as any of the utilities went—January, March, and April of this year were missing. Where Wendy’s spending went down in the months before her death, her phone calls seemed to pick up, and several numbers were called multiple times in a month. It was easy to identify the calls to the laundry service and the grocery store because they were called early in the week, every week.
There was another number, however, that stood out, not because of its pattern, but because of its lack of one. Wendy had called the same number once in October, three times in November, seven times in December, fourteen in February, and nineteen in May. After May 22 there were no more calls made from Wendy’s phone at all. A quick check of the calendar on Sadie’s phone confirmed that the calls had only been made during the week and during regular business hours.
Sadie typed the mystery phone number into the search field on Google’s homepage. She clicked on the first credible-looking link and furrowed her brow as a stylish website for a modeling agency loaded onto her screen. Next Faces was the name of the company. Sadie didn’t imagine Wendy, at sixty-three years old, was working as an actual model, yet half of the phone calls she’d made in the month of February were to this number.
Sadie retrieved a highlighter from her purse and marked the numbers in every statement in the folder. Sometimes the number hadn’t been called at all, and even through last winter, it had only been called once or twice, but in the six months before Wendy’s death the frequency picked up.
To be fair, Sadie flagged every other repeated number as well and looked them up online too—to confirm that they did, in fact, belong to the laundry and grocery services Wendy had been using. She wondered what Pete would make of these phone calls. Would he think she was on to something, or would he think it a waste of her energy to be so focused on such an inconsequential detail? The police had already seen this, after all, and as far as Sadie knew, they hadn’t mentioned it to Pete.
Sadie glanced at the clock. It was after 9:00, and Pete hadn’t texted her yet to tell her he was back at the hotel. Rather than let herself dwell on that, she turned back to the Next Faces website and read up on the mission statement and what services they offered—portfolios, classes, representation, and networking. They had a listing of all the actors they represented. Sadie looked for Wendy among the smiling faces but didn’t find her. Did Wendy have a friend who worked there, perhaps? Why would she call the business and not a personal number?
Sadie clicked on the “About Us” page and her eyes were immediately drawn to the name Rodger Penrose. Could he be Wendy’s fourth ex-husband? After the initial surprise of seeing his name, Sadie read through the information about the company’s founder and president, then looked at his picture. Assuming it was recent, he looked to be in his fifties—younger than Wendy and quite attractive, with a confident, jovial air about him. Was Wendy calling him several times a month?
Sadie tried to remember what else Pete and Ji had said about Rodger earlier today. Hadn’t Pete said that Rodger claimed he and Wendy had remained on good terms? Had he explained about the calls in his statement to the police? Surely they had asked about it.
A surge of frustration bubbled up again at being the one on the outside of the information, and she questioned her decision to let Pete be the one creating relationships with the police. She looked at the box of homogenized files, pre-evaluated and considered. It isn’t enough, she thought. It didn’t help her know Wendy any better because there were still so many holes in her sister’s story.
Sadie hated feeling like she knew less about her sister than anyone else involved in this case, hated the idea that she’d spent the last two hours pondering on things that had probably already been figured out. There could even be things the police had kept in their official file that Sadie would know nothing about. She didn’t know enough about anything to know if something were missing.
Though Sadie had considered doing a background report on Wendy before coming out here, she had preferred the idea of getting to know her sister through her life instead of from her public record. But the discoveries she’d made tonight shifted her motivation. Sadie needed to learn about her sister through any and all information available to her, and she wanted to know her at least as well as the police already did.
Because of her prior experience with background checks she’d done on suspects in other cases and for clients who’d hired her when she was running her official investigation firm, Sadie knew right where to go to get access to the public aspects of Wendy’s history. She logged onto her favorite records site and began entering information into the search fields, choosing county, state, and federal records for the database search and easily regurgitating information like date of birth, place of birth, parents, associates, and known counties of habitation.
While Sadie waited for the results, which she knew could take several minutes, she opened a word processing document and began writing notes of all that had happened that day. There was a lot to record, and she kept having to scroll up and down in the document as she remembered details; she wanted to keep things in chronological order.
Once the results began coming in from the preliminary database search, Sadie opened up other Internet tabs and cross-checked details, drilling down for more information on certain aspects and losing herself in the search. This was her element
—this impersonal look through records and listings. It gave a kind of ironic anonymity to the person she was learning about and, although this case was different from anything else she’d ever worked on, gathering this information was not.
More than two hours later, Sadie rubbed her eyes, which burned after such a long day and too much time in front of the computer. She leaned back and stretched her arms over her head. What she had found didn’t surprise her, but there was limited satisfaction in it. Wendy had been arrested half a dozen times for check fraud, though that had been several years ago. More recently, she had some public intoxication charges and one embezzlement charge from a former employer who accused her of stealing more than ten thousand dollars. She’d been married twice since 1985, which was as far back at the site went without accessing the archives. Both marriages ended in divorce; the last marriage had been to Rodger Penrose.
Wendy had never gone to college, despite Sadie’s parents sending her money for tuition, and her job history was spotty at best—a secretary, a cashier, and, for a time in the late 80s, a model at Next Faces. That was probably how she and Rodger met.
Her life had definitely improved after she married Rodger. There were no more arrests and her only work was through Next Faces. There weren’t a lot of photos of the two of them together, but Sadie found enough to confirm that Wendy had played the role of trophy wife quite well. She’d been blonde, busty, confident, and expertly dressed—a far cry from the car-living, single mom she’d been when Ji was young.
Wendy and Rodger divorced after eight years, and Wendy had never held a job again. Sadie suspected more than ever that the $7,000 worth of income Wendy received each month was alimony from Rodger, who by all accounts was still doing quite well for himself. It seemed like a generous settlement when compared to the kind of money she’d made at her dead-end jobs, and Sadie wondered what had led to the end of their marriage.
Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) Page 11
