Adverse Possession Read online

  Savannah Martin has always been a good girl, doing what was expected and fully expecting life to fall into place in its turn. But when her perfect husband turns out to be a lying, cheating slimeball - and bad in bed to boot - Savannah kicks the jerk to the curb and embarks on life on her own terms. With a new apartment, a new career, and a brand new outlook on life, she's all set to take the world by storm.

  If only the world would stop throwing her curveballs...

  Savannah Martin’s real estate career has been an uphill battle. As far as Savannah is concerned, her personal zenith was getting Aislynn Turner and Kylie Mitchell into their dream home, a Victorian cottage in the hip and happening historic district of East Nashville, last January.

  That was six months ago, and now the dream has turned sour. Someone is sending Aislynn and Kylie threatening letters, warning them to get out while they can. Aislynn is terrified and Kylie is ready to cut her losses.

  But finding a poison pen is only the beginning. When Kylie is attacked and the previous owner of the house is killed, the hunt is on for a murderer, and Savannah is determined to get to the bottom of what’s going on before Aislynn and Kylie have to give up their dream home, and maybe each other, in the process.

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  ADVERSE POSSESSION

  Savannah Martin Mystery #11

  Jenna Bennett

  ADVERSE POSSESSION

  Savannah Martin Mystery #11

  Copyright © 2015 Bente Gallagher

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  “I’m sorry, Savannah,” Kylie said. “Aislynn didn’t even want me to contact you, she’s so embarrassed. But you were so nice when we bought the place…”

  “It’s OK.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. It was the ‘didn’t even want me to contact you’ that had caused it. “I understand. People sometimes sell their houses.” Even houses they had just bought. Even houses they loved. And they didn’t always—didn’t usually—hire me to do it. Even if I had helped them buy the house in the first place. “It’s just… you’ve only owned it five or six months. And you seemed so excited when you bought it…”

  “We love the house,” Kylie said. “It isn’t the house.”

  I wrinkled my forehead and then immediately smoothed it out again. “The location?”

  The house they’d bought back in December, a lovely Victorian cottage, sat in the middle of historic East Nashville. It was a very nice neighborhood, full of old, renovated houses, hip people, popular restaurants, and health food stores catering to dogs and people. It was hard to imagine that they weren’t enjoying it, especially considering how excited they’d been just last winter.

  “We love the location,” Kylie said. “We couldn’t ask for a better place to live.”

  “Then…” I glanced over my shoulder and lowered my voice, “the price?”

  I was sitting in my office, a converted coat closet off the lobby at LB&A, a real estate company in the heart of historic East Nashville. The only person in sight was Brittany, the receptionist, and she had her nose buried in the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan. She couldn’t care less what I was saying. But it’s unladylike to inquire about someone’s finances, or lack thereof, so I kept my voice low anyway.

  Kylie sounded amused. “It isn’t the price.”

  I hadn’t thought so. Renovated Victorians in East Nashville come at a premium, but Kylie worked in banking and made good money. Unless she’d suddenly lost her job, she shouldn’t have a problem paying the mortgage.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “If you like the house and the location, and the money isn’t an issue…”

  Kylie sighed. “It’s the letters,” she told me.

  Letters? “Isn’t the postman delivering your mail?” That was a simple problem to fix. All I’d have to do was talk to the post office that serviced their address, and straighten things out.

  “He is. That’s the problem.”

  So they were getting mail they didn’t want. “You can opt out of getting junk mail, you know.”

  “It isn’t junk mail,” Kylie said. “Or it is, sort of. I think we should just ignore it. But Aislynn is afraid. And I don’t want Aislynn to be afraid.”

  I didn’t want Aislynn to be afraid, either. She was a sweet young woman, a waitress I had met last November, while trying to figure out what had happened to my late sister-in-law. Aislynn had fed Sheila her last meal, unbeknownst to either of them. Aislynn and her girlfriend Kylie had wanted to buy a house, and after the thing with Sheila was all over, had asked me to help them. They had invited me over to the house a couple of weeks after moving in, to eat dinner and see the place, and they had seemed thrilled to be where they were. It was disconcerting to learn, just a few months later, that something was wrong enough that they wanted to sell.

  “What is she afraid of?”

  “It’ll be easier if I show you,” Kylie said. “Are you free for dinner tonight?”

  For a change, I was. “Rafe is taking some of the rookies out for surveillance and shadowing.”

  My husband works for the TBI—the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation—training new recruits in undercover maneuvers, and once a month or so, they go out to sneak around after each other and the occasional unsuspecting civilian. It’s part of the training—how to follow someone, how to pick up on someone following you—but mostly I think they’re just out there having fun.

  Anyway, Rafe wouldn’t be home until nine or ten tonight.

  “We got the wedding invitation,” Kylie said. “Sorry we couldn’t make it.”

  “It’s OK. I know it was last minute.” Rafe and I had intended to get married at the courthouse the first weekend in June, with just a handful of people in attendance. Instead, we’d ended up tying the knot a week later, at my childhood home in Sweetwater, Tennessee—the Martin Mansion—with almost everyone we knew in attendance, including half of our old hometown. But it had been short notice, so there were a few people who received Mother’s nicely calligraphied invitation who had been unable to make it.

  “Can you stop by the house around five-thirty tonight?” Kylie asked. “I should be home by then. Aislynn is doing the cooking.”

  I told her that would be fine, and I’d see them both. Then I hung up, and leaned back in my chair to gnaw the lipstick off my bottom lip.

  I’d had my real estate license for a little over a year. In that time, I had sold a few houses to a few people. Not as many as I should have. I kept getting sidetracked by dead bodies, and by people gunning for Rafe. But Aislynn and Kylie were one of my few success-stories, and I wanted them to be happy. If there was anything at all I could do
to help figure out whatever was wrong, I’d do it.

  I stayed in the office until five twenty-five, when Brittany and everyone else had left, and then I got in the Volvo, the only relic from my disastrous first marriage to Bradley Ferguson, and drove over to Aislynn and Kylie’s house.

  It’s just few minutes, along tree-lined streets with picket fences and renovated cottages, low-slung bungalows, and prissy Victorians. It wasn’t long before I pulled up at the curb outside the house and cut the engine.

  Aislynn met me at the door. Kylie had just gotten home and was upstairs changing out of her business suit and into something more comfortable. “She’ll be right down,” Aislynn told me. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Sweet tea?”

  “Green OK?”

  Not exactly what I had in mind—Southern sweet tea isn’t green; it’s brown—but then she added, “Better for the baby.”

  I nodded. I was going on five months pregnant, and my diet revolved around what was best for the baby. I had cut out coffee and Diet Coke, and wine of course… Instead, I was drinking more milk and juice, and packing on the pounds. I wasn’t surprised that Aislynn had taken one look at me and diagnosed my condition.

  The green tea wasn’t really a surprise, either. The café where Aislynn worked, Sara Beth’s in Brentwood, was a healthy sort of place, with lots of different lettuces on the menu, and quinoa salads with tofu and the like.

  So I followed her out into the kitchen, and received a tall glass of green tea over ice. While Aislynn turned to the stove to stir a pot of something that smelled like it might turn out to taste good, if spicy, I took an experimental sip.

  Not bad, although it wasn’t proper Southern iced tea. Still, if it was better for the baby…

  I hiked my butt up on a chair at the island and put the glass in front of me. “Kylie said you’re having a problem with the mail. What’s going on?”

  “Someone’s sending us letters,” Aislynn said, as she scooped rice onto three plates she had lined up on the counter. Upstairs, I could hear footsteps as Kylie came down the hallway toward the staircase.

  “What kind of letters?”

  “Creepy ones,” Aislynn said, putting the pot of rice back on the stove and picking up a plate. She ladled some sort of yellowish stew over the rice and put the plate back down. Then she repeated the process with the second plate, and the third.

  She put one in front of me. “Let’s go to the dining room.”

  “Sure.” I slid off the chair and took the plate in one hand and the glass of tea in the other. Aislynn led the way with her own and Kylie’s food, and then she went back to the kitchen to fetch their drinks and eventually, a basket of something I discovered was naan.

  Meanwhile, Kylie came down the stairs and into the dining room.

  Once upon a time, someone had cut the brake cables on her car, a darker blue Volvo than mine, thinking she was me. Poor Kylie ended up in the hospital.

  There’s a resemblance. Not so much that anyone who knows either of us would be fooled, but enough that I had been able to tell the nurses at the hospital that she was my sister. Aislynn is a few years younger, and sports Goth-girl makeup and dreadlocks halfway down her back, but Kylie is my age or a little older, and has shoulder-length blond hair a few shades lighter and a few inches shorter than mine, and neither tattoos nor piercings. Or if she has them, they’re in a place you can’t see unless you know her really, really well.

  She gave me a tired smile. “Savannah. Thanks for coming.”

  “I’m always happy to see you,” I said, since it was the truth.

  She gestured to the stomach. “That’s new.”

  “It’s actually about five months old, but it’s only in the past few weeks I’ve started to look pregnant.”

  She nodded, as she pulled out the chair across the table. “Aislynn and I have talked about having a baby. Although so far all we’ve managed to do is argue about who gets to be the carrier.”

  “You could always adopt and avoid the problem.”

  She smiled. “I guess. Assuming we’re both capable of carrying a child, it would be nice to create our own, though.”

  I guess it would. Rafe and I had certainly enjoyed the process.

  Not that Kylie and Aislynn would have the opportunity to create a baby in the same way that Rafe and I had. Their process would be a lot more clinical. But I understood the desire to carry the baby of the man—or in this case woman—you love. So I just smiled and told her I understood completely. And then I added, just as Aislynn came through the door from the kitchen carrying the basket of naan, “Aislynn told me you’ve been getting weird and creepy letters.”

  Kylie nodded. “Why don’t we tell you about it while we eat? I’m starving. And then, when you’re done, you can take a look. It’s quite a collection.”

  “That’ll be great.” These days, I was always happy to prioritize food. Being pregnant was making me eat like a horse. And while I worried about the weight I was gaining and the need to lose it again once the baby was born, it was also quite freeing to eat what I wanted when I wanted to. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t worried that my stomach was too big. The bigger it got, the more excited everyone was.

  The food was some sort of Indian stew; tasty, but spicy. I knew I’d pay for it later, so I did my best to cut the spice with the naan, iced tea, and rice. I’d just take a few extra Tums before bed. The conversation was too fascinating to leave for another glass of water.

  “The first letter came in early April,” Aislynn said between bites of stew. While Kylie and I were taking frequent sips of liquid, she was shoveling in spicy chicken and chickpeas like her life depended on it. I have no idea how she managed to keep that girlish figure the way she ate. High metabolism, I guess. And the spice didn’t seem to bother her at all. “We figured it was a late April Fool’s joke, and we almost didn’t keep it. But it was just so weird that it didn’t seem right to throw it away. So we stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it.”

  “For a couple of weeks,” Kylie picked up the story. “Until another letter came. And then another.”

  “How many in all?”

  They looked at one another. “Five or six?” Aislynn said.

  Kylie nodded. “Less frequent at first. Three or four weeks between. Then two weeks. Then one week. Last week we got two.”

  So whoever was sending the letters, was escalating. A fancy term I had picked up from Rafe, relating to certain types of criminals. Serial killers, serial rapists, and the like. And, I guess, poison pens.

  Assuming the letters were poisonous, and it sounded like they were. “What do the letters say?”

  “You can read them when we’ve finished eating,” Kylie said. “They’re not really appropriate for the table.”

  “Threatening?”

  They glanced at one another. “Not so much directly threatening,” Kylie said, “as implied.”

  “They’re scary,” Aislynn added, with a little quiver in her voice.

  I took a bite of stew and chewed. And chased the burning sensation in my mouth with a sip of tea before I picked up the conversation. “Do you have any idea who’s sending them?”

  They exchanged another glance, and looked away.

  “No,” Kylie said.

  “Not really,” Aislynn added.

  “Not even a wild guess?”

  Aislynn shook her head. Kylie shrugged. Neither of them looked at me for more than a second. It sounded to me like they were both a lot less sure than they were trying to make it seem.

  As soon as we’d finished eating, Kylie pushed her chair back. “Come on, Savannah. I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

  I rose, too. Aislynn remained seated. “I’ll stay here,” she said. “The letters give me the creeps. I don’t want to see them again.”

  Kylie nodded. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” Kylie told her. “I wish they didn’t both
er you. But since they do, I’m not going to make you look at them. Savannah and I’ll take care of it.”

  “I’ll clean up.” Aislynn pushed back from the table. “And get dessert.” She smiled at me, although I could still see shadows in her eyes. “Kheer.”

  Rice pudding. Lots of dairy for the baby. Yum. “Sounds great.”

  “You’ll need it,” Aislynn said, “after what you’re about to read.”

  She didn’t wait for me to answer, just stacked the three plates one on top of the other and headed for the kitchen. Kylie waved me in the other direction, toward what had been the priest’s parlor when the house was built—the room with the door to the outside, at the front of the house next to the foyer—and which was now used as an office.

  “Nice,” I told her, looking around at the pale blue walls, the dark furniture, and the upholstered wingback chairs in front of the desk.

  “Thanks.” Kylie was in the process of opening the desk drawer. “We love it here. It makes me sick that this is happening.”

  She straightened, with a stack of envelopes in her hand. “Have a seat.”

  She waved me into the desk chair and put the envelopes on the desk in front of me.

  I reached for the top one. “Are they in order?”

  “Not sure.” She took a seat in one of the wingbacks. “Check the date stamps.”

  The letters had been sent through the mail, and been delivered by the mailman. I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. If they’d been hand delivered, we could have set up a camera, or at least a stakeout, to see who dropped them off. But if the mailman was the guilty party—by default—there was no way to know who the sender was.

  “On the other hand,” Kylie said when I pointed this out, “it has to be a crime to use the US postal service to make threats.”