Adverse Possession Page 18

  A small, dark stain on the rug made my stomach lurch for a moment, until I reminded myself that I’d just seen Kylie, and she was alive and well. The rug would have to be shampooed, though. Or replaced. Blood is very difficult to get out of fibers.

  I hadn’t paid a lot of attention yesterday morning. All of my focus had been on Aislynn and Kylie and on swallowing back nausea. Now I took a good look around and compared the room now to what it had looked like Thursday night, when I’d sat here with Kylie.

  Several of the drawers had been upended and the contents dumped on the floor. I saw gaping manila folders labeled in Kylie’s neat handwriting, mixed with paid bills, old bank statements, and tax forms.

  There were lots of interesting things there, for your standard burglar. Bank account numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, PINs... And that might be one explanation for what had happened. Someone had broken in looking for something like that. To do a spot of identity theft, or just to clean out someone’s bank account.

  The other explanation was the anonymous letters. I didn’t see any of them in the mess. Not a single letter or a single envelope with that distinctive, spiky handwriting.

  Not that that meant anything. Detective Mendoza could have taken them with him when he was here earlier in the evening. Or they could have walked out in the afternoon, with the man—or woman—in the plaid shirt.

  Someone would have to go through this mess to make an inventory of what was missing. That would fall to Kylie, most likely, when she felt up for it. Or Aislynn, if she came back. Although this office, and the organization of it, struck me as being more Kylie’s doing than Aislynn’s. Aislynn was more of a free spirit. If it was up to her, there probably wouldn’t be any paper statements, nor for that matter any records of any kind.

  The Rolodex was still on the desk, threatening to fall off one corner. I rescued it, and started flipping through. The Turners’ number in Bowling Green was the first one I looked up, and once I found it, I pulled out my phone and dialed.

  A half a minute passed. Then another. I was about to give up when a breathless woman’s voice came on the line. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said politely.

  “Oh, it’s no bother. We were sitting on the porch having some sweet tea.”

  A proper Southern pastime on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer.

  “Mrs. Turner?”

  She murmured in the affirmative.

  “My name is Savannah Martin,” I said. “Can I speak to Aislynn?”

  “’May I.’”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s ‘may I speak to Aislynn?’”

  Of course it was. “I’m sorry,” I said. “May I speak to Aislynn?”

  “She’s not here,” Mrs. Turner said.

  “Has she left already? Is she on her way home?”

  “Home from where?” Aislynn’s mother asked. “We haven’t seen Aislynn for months.”

  Shit. I mean... shoot.

  I thought about clarifying—asking whether she was sure Aislynn hadn’t driven up yesterday afternoon and spent the night with them—but of course she was sure. If her daughter had been there, she’d know. And telling her that Aislynn wasn’t where she was supposed to be, would only serve to worry her.

  So I pretended that nothing was wrong. “Would you have any idea where I could get in touch with her?”

  “This is her cell phone number,” her mother said, rattling it off. It was the same number I had myself, the one Aislynn wasn’t answering. “She works at a restaurant called Sara Beth’s in Nashville.”

  In Brentwood, if you wanted to be technical, but I didn’t say so, just pretended to take down the information. I’d try calling Sara Beth’s in a minute. It was a pretty good idea, actually.

  “She has a roommate,” her mother said. “Her name is Kylie. This is her number.”

  She gave me Kylie’s cell phone number, which I also already had. I thanked her anyway, while I noted the fact that Aislynn’s mother called Kylie Aislynn’s roommate and not her girlfriend or lover or significant other. Denial, or something else?

  “So you haven’t seen her lately?” I asked when she’d finished giving me numbers.

  “Not for a few months. We were down in Nashville for a theatre performance in May, and we had dinner with her before the show. But I haven’t seen her since.”

  She sounded sincere.

  “I appreciate it,” I told her. “I’ll try the numbers you gave me. If you hear from her, would you mind telling her that I’m looking to talk to her? My name is Savannah.”

  She assured me she would, and I let her get back to her sweet tea and, presumably, her husband.

  The number for Sara Beth’s wasn’t hard to find, either. It was in the Rolodex. I dialed, and waited. And waited some more.

  Finally, a recording came on. “You’ve reached Sara Beth’s Café, in the Brentwood Commons Shopping Center. Our business hours are from 11 AM to 9 PM Monday through Friday, and 11 AM to 6 PM on Saturdays. We’re closed Sunday. Please come back during our regular business hours.”

  So that took care of that. Aislynn wasn’t working today, and if she was at Sara Beth’s, she was camping out in a closed restaurant, probably subsisting on a diet of field greens and McDonald’s French fries. And not answering the phone.

  I kept looking through the Rolodex, and made a note of Damian Mitchell’s phone number. It was probably left over from before Aislynn and Kylie got together. The name and number were written in the same neat cursive as the file folders strewn across the floor, while the numbers for the Turners and Sara Beth’s Café were written in a spikier, less even hand.

  I flipped through the Rolodex for anything else of interest, but didn’t see any other names I recognized. Kylie must have removed Lauren’s info card once she and Aislynn got together.

  Kylie’s purse was on the floor, sideways and gaping open. It was a brown leather satchel, that I recognized from Friday afternoon when she was going to lunch. Some of the contents had spilled out, or perhaps the burglar had dug through the purse after knocking Kylie over the head.

  The mental image of that was a bit disturbing.

  And maybe it hadn’t happened that way. Maybe the bag had opened and the contents escaped when Kylie collapsed. Maybe the burglar had hit her and beat it as fast as he could.

  I squatted on the floor next to it, and picked through the stuff, looking for anything of interest, but it all looked much like the contents of my purse, or the purse of any other woman of around thirty in the US. A couple of lipsticks. A mirror—luckily not broken in the fall. Two tampons in a discreet case. A small package of tissues. A wallet—and a quick look inside showed me the edges of a couple of bills, as well as the corners of credit cards. Only Kylie would be able to tell whether one or more of them was missing, but chances were that the burglar would have taken all the money if he wanted money at all, and he wouldn’t have picked and chosen between the credit cards. If money was something he was interested in, he would have just taken the whole wallet.

  I tucked it all back in the purse and set it upright next to the wall. Nothing of interest there, that I could see. And while I hated to leave Kylie with all this to clean up, a lot of it was confidential papers, so I didn’t feel like I could take it upon myself to clean up, either.

  Besides, I’d have a hard time trying to figure out where a lot of it belonged.

  A thought occurred to me, and I got to my feet and headed back up the stairs to the second floor.

  When the house was renovated—by Virgil and Stacy or whoever came before them—the entire second floor had been turned into a master suite. And while that probably sounds excessive, let me just explain that this was a Folk Victorian cottage, one-and-a-half stories tall, with maybe fifteen hundred square feet on the first floor and a much smaller space in the middle of the upstairs where the ceiling height was such that it was possible for a normal adult to stand upright. Rafe might have fe
lt a little squeezed.

  The master suite might have been four hundred square feet, maybe. Probably a little less. A large bedroom with skylights, a 10 x 10 walk-in closet, and a slightly bigger bathroom. There was no shower curtain here. It was all floating glass, bright and open. I could see everything from just inside the door, and nobody was hiding anywhere.

  I made a beeline for the closet and pushed the door open. One side was dedicated to business suits in black, gray, and navy blue. The other had flowing gypsy skirts, beaded blouses, and lots of crazy colors. Colors and designs the conservative Kylie wouldn’t be caught dead in. It didn’t take genius to see which part of the closet belonged to which woman.

  And Aislynn’s clothes were there, hanging in neat rows with no obvious gaps where anything had been removed. A fact that made me breathe easier. I couldn’t tell Kylie where her girlfriend had gone, but at least I didn’t have to report that Aislynn had moved out of the house in Kylie’s absence. That wasn’t the kind of news I would have wanted to impart.

  With that possibility at least off my mind, I headed back down the stairs. I made sure the front door was locked, and then I locked the back door, too, and shoved the key back inside the thermometer. It still said ninety-five degrees.

  On my way to the car, I stopped at the mailbox.

  Of course I knew there hadn’t been any mail delivered today. It was Sunday. But I thought it possible that no one had picked up the mail yesterday, between one thing and the other, and so it would still be in the box.

  And so it was. An electric bill, a circular from a local grocery store, coupons for pizza, a letter from St. Jude’s Hospital, and a square envelope, addressed in a spiky hand, ripped open at the top. Addressed to Aislynn Turner.

  I peered inside. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the envelope had been empty. If whoever opened it had kept the letter. But it wasn’t. There was a piece of paper inside, the usual 92 brightness Xerox copy paper.

  I unfolded it and read the message.

  YOU’RE NEXT, it said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I admit it, I felt a shiver go down my spine, and the letter wasn’t even addressed to me. I could only imagine how Aislynn must have felt, reading it.

  She had told Mendoza she was going home to her parents, but she hadn’t gone there. Now that made perfect sense. I wouldn’t have gone to Sweetwater either, if someone was gunning for me. I might not even have gone home to Rafe, although he’s quite capable of taking care of himself—and me—so I might have risked that. Especially as, if he’d found out I was in danger and I hadn’t come to him, he’d have killed me himself.

  But I wouldn’t have involved my mother or siblings. Or anyone else I cared about.

  Maybe she really was hunkered down at Sara Beth’s, waiting for Monday morning and her coworkers to come in.

  Or maybe the anonymous letter-writer had her, and that was why she hadn’t shown up at her parents’, and why she hadn’t come to the hospital to see Kylie. Not because she chose not to, but because she couldn’t.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed Mendoza’s number. It rang and rang until finally his voicemail picked up. “You’ve reached Jaime Mendoza with the Metro Nashville PD. I can’t take your call right now. Please leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If this is an emergency, please call 911.”

  It wasn’t an emergency—or probably not what Mendoza would consider an emergency—so I waited for the beep and told him to call me when he had a minute. Then I disconnected and called Tamara Grimaldi instead.

  “Good,” I said when she answered, “you’re working.”

  Her voice was dry. “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but yes, I am.”

  “I tried to call Mendoza, but he didn’t answer.”

  “Afternoon off,” Grimaldi said. “He’s probably spending it with Elias.”

  Elias must be the kid. And it was hard to blame him for not answering the phone if he had an afternoon to spend with his son. Especially as he’d taken the time to visit Kylie this morning. “I have something for him. If I give it to you, can you make sure he gets it?”

  “What is it?” Grimaldi wanted to know.

  “Another anonymous letter.” I explained where I was, why, and how I’d checked the mailbox. “I think all the other letters are gone. At least I didn’t see them inside. Granted, the place is a bit of a mess. But they weren’t in the piles of paper I could see. I think whoever wrote them must have come back for them. Maybe he thought there was something there that we could trace to him.”

  “We?” Grimaldi said.

  “You. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  “I think Jaime probably got them on Friday,” Grimaldi said, “and they’re already at the lab, but if you have another—one that hasn’t been handled by so many people—that’s great.”

  “I’ve handled it. And I figure Aislynn probably did.” I explained about the ripped envelope and how it wasn’t likely to have been anyone else reading the mail. “She’s gone. Nobody knows where she is. She told Mendoza she was going to go spend the night with her parents in Bowling Green, but she didn’t go there. She didn’t come to us. She hasn’t been home, and she hasn’t visited Kylie in the hospital. I’m worried.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Grimaldi said bracingly. “Just lying low until she doesn’t have to be in the house alone.”

  “Kylie won’t be much help even when she gets there. She’s flat on her back with a concussion.”

  Grimaldi did the sort of shrug I could hear. “I’m in the office,” she told me, “if you want to come downtown with the letter now.”

  I might as well. I wasn’t doing anything else, and I was only a mile away. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Grimaldi said and disconnected.

  She was as good as her word. When I walked into the lobby of the police headquarters building—quiet now on a Sunday afternoon—she was there, leaning on the counter where the duty cop was sitting, chatting. “This is her,” she told him when I came in.

  He nodded. “I still need to see your ID, ma’am.”

  I produced it, and signed the log he put in front of me, and then Grimaldi and I headed upstairs to her office.

  Once there, she took a seat behind her desk and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. There was already an empty space cleared in the middle of the desk. “Put the letter here.”

  I pulled it out of my purse and put it on the desk. Carefully, by the edges, so I wouldn’t add any more fingerprints than the ones I’d already added.

  Grimaldi sprinkled the envelope with fingerprint powder and blew it off.

  “Got a couple of good ones here.” She fumbled for tape.

  “Probably mine. And Aislynn’s.”

  She nodded. “We’ll see. Yours are on file. We’ll have to get hers.”

  “That could be tricky. I told you I have no idea where she is.”

  “She’ll turn up,” Grimaldi said, moving fingerprints from the envelope to little index cards on the back of pieces of tape. “OK. Let’s take a look at the letter.”

  I moved to open the envelope, and she shook her head. “I’ve got it.”

  She took the envelope by the edges and shook the letter out, then used a couple of pens to unfold it. “Hmmm.”

  “Scary,” I said.

  “Could be. Depends on what it refers to.”

  “I assumed it referred to what happened to Kylie. Or maybe even to Virgil Wright.”

  “And you could be right,” Grimaldi said, busy with her powder and pieces of tape again. “We’ve got a couple of prints here. Just about in the position I’d expect them to be if someone took the letter out of the envelope and held it up to read.”

  “So mine and Aislynn’s.”

  She nodded. “Most likely. But we could get lucky.”

  “The post mark is East Nashville again,” I pointed out. “Just a few blocks from where Aislynn and Kylie live. For the letter to arri
ve on Saturday, it must have been mailed on Friday.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “I spent Friday talking to a bunch of people. Aislynn and Kylie themselves, Stacy Kelleher, Kenny Grimes, Tim...”

  She arched her brows. “Surely you don’t suspect Mr. Briggs of sending the letters?”

  “There isn’t much I would put past Tim,” I told her. “He could have been hoping for another house to sell. But no, I guess not. Aislynn and Kylie wouldn’t call him. They’d call me.” As in fact they had.

  “Your point?” Her fingers stayed busy with the letter and envelope.

  “I talked to people on Friday. About the letters. On Friday night, someone broke into Aislynn and Kylie’s house to take the letters back. Maybe it was because he or she realized that someone was looking into it. That it had turned into something more than just private poison pen letters sent to an individual. Or individuals.”

  “Could be,” Grimaldi agreed. “That means it’d be one of the people you talked to. Or someone they talked to.”

  Kenny Grimes’s dinner date came to mind. Although if that guy had hit Kylie over the head, she’d probably be dead.

  Or there was Kenny himself—although why he’d send threatening, anonymous letters to the current owners of his lover’s former house was beyond me. He might have had a reason for wanting to get rid of Virgil, though, and the letters might just be a part of that. A red herring, so to speak.

  And Stacy—ditto. Although if he was retaliating for Virgil leaving him, he sure had waited a long time to do it. And the letters made no sense from his perspective, either, although again, they could just be a red herring to detract from the real reason someone wanted Virgil dead.

  Kylie may have explained who I was and what I was doing to Lauren during their lunch on Friday. If Lauren had been writing the letters—to scare Aislynn away so she could get Kylie back; a reason that actually made sense—she might have decided it was a good idea to get them back before someone connected them to her. She had said she’d been out on a date on Friday night, but who knew where she’d really been?