Adverse Possession Read online

  Grimaldi hesitated a moment. “I wouldn’t think so. But there are always exceptions to every rule. And I’d hate to be wrong.”

  I’d hate for her to be wrong, too.

  “The letters were sent through the mail,” I said, “and handled by a lot of people. I don’t suppose there’s any point in looking for fingerprints?”

  “Probably not,” Grimaldi answered. “Every criminal with a TV knows to wear gloves these days.”

  “Any other suggestions? I have less than twenty-four hours. Can you think of anything I can do?”

  “Talk to the previous owners,” Grimaldi said, “and make sure they didn’t get letters, and that’s why they sold.”

  “Already doing that.”

  “Also, make sure that they don’t regret selling and aren’t sending letters to your clients to get the house back.”

  I hadn’t considered that possibility. Now I did. “You think they’d do that?”

  “I have no idea,” Grimaldi said. “I don’t know them. But people do strange things for all sorts of reasons. Anything’s possible.”

  “You don’t think this is a bad idea, do you? For me to talk to them?”

  Grimaldi hesitated. “You do have a habit of getting yourself in trouble,” she said, which was totally unfair, if you ask me. I rarely get myself in trouble. When I get in trouble, it’s usually someone else’s fault. And contrary to what Rafe claims, dead bodies do not follow me around.

  “Maybe I’ll just go talk to Aislynn and Kylie first. I think there were things they didn’t tell me yesterday. Maybe they’ll tell me if I get them each alone and ask.”

  “You think they know who’s sending the letters?” Grimaldi asked, interested. And added, before I could answer, “Is it one of them?”

  Something else I hadn’t thought about. “Why would they?”

  “The house is too expensive,” Grimaldi suggested, “and they want a way out, without admitting it? Or there’s something going on in their relationship, and one of them is trying to scare the other away instead of just talking it out?”

  I blinked. “I can’t imagine Kylie doing that. She seemed very concerned about Aislynn last night. She’s willing to sell the house to keep Aislynn happy.”

  “So maybe it’s Aislynn who’s doing it,” Grimaldi said. “She wants to leave, but she doesn’t dare come out and say so. So she’s writing the letters to give herself an excuse.”

  That made a weird and creepy sort of sense. Aislynn was young, and perhaps a bit immature. As Rafe and Grimaldi had both mentioned, anonymous letters are sort of a high school thing to do. And it was easier to imagine Aislynn making herself look like the victim than to imagine Kylie wanting to scare Aislynn, anyway.

  “I’ll go talk to them both,” I said. “Separately. If neither of them confesses—” and what were the chances that either of them would? “—I’ll decide whether to talk to the previous owners.”

  “Stay out of trouble,” Grimaldi told me. “Keep me up to date, and let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  I said I would, and we hung up. Me to wait for Tim to vacate the office so I could raid his filing cabinet, and Grimaldi, I guess, to deal with another dead body. Unlike me, they really do follow her around.

  It wasn’t long after that, that Tim left. I gave him ten minutes just to make sure he wouldn’t come back for something he’d forgotten, and then I headed through the lobby. If Brittany asked, I was going to tell her that I was going to the bathroom, but she didn’t even look up from the fashion magazine spread open on her desk.

  The other offices in the back of the building were occupied by other realtors, and I heard phone calls and the sounds of activity when I walked past. Papers shuffling and pens scratching, fingers tapping on computer keys. Some doors were open, some closed; some offices were dark, others brightly lit.

  Tim had turned his ceiling light off but left his door open. I went inside and debated for a second on whether I should close it behind me or leave it. I had no business being here, so it was tempting to close it so no one would see me. But leaving it open would make what I was doing look more innocent, like I had every right to be doing it.

  I left the door open and made my way across the floor and around the desk to Tim’s multi-drawer filing cabinet.

  I can count the real estate transactions I have done on one hand and maybe a few fingers of the other.

  Maybe.

  Tim had drawers full of folders, separated out by year and month. I went to the drawer for January and opened it. Folders were neatly hung, one after the other, in alphabetical order by last name.

  Bummer. I had hoped they’d be filed by street number and address, since I knew what the address was. The late Brenda Puckett, back when I had been snooping through her drawers, had used that method. But not Tim. He filed by last name. Last name of his clients, not mine. And since they’d been his clients and not mine, I had no idea what their names were. I’d known it in January, I guess, but a lot of things had happened since then, and that wasn’t one of the pieces of information I had retained.

  There was nothing for it but to open every file in the drawer and check the address. And I was just getting started on that when the door to the hallway opened wide—wider—with a squeak.

  I spun on my heel.

  “What are you doing?” Heidi Hoppenfeldt asked suspiciously, hands on her ample hips.

  Heidi is by way of being Tim’s assistant, gofer, and general dogsbody. She was Brenda Puckett’s protégée before Brenda died, and when Walker was sent up the river and Tim ended up in charge, he took over not just the brokerage and Walker’s office, but Heidi, too.

  She’s about my age, a couple of years shy of thirty, with fluffy brown hair and a round face. These days, we’re pretty close to the same size. The difference is that Heidi isn’t pregnant. She just likes to eat. There were orange crumbs on the front of her green dress. Cheetos, or maybe nacho chips; something she must have been snacking on, on her drive to work.

  I swallowed my heart back down into my chest and turned back to the filing cabinet. It’s easier to lie when you’re not facing the person you’re lying to, I’ve found. “Looking for something.”

  “Those are Tim’s files,” Heidi said.

  “It was my transaction, too.”

  “Then you should have a copy of the file,” Heidi said, her voice getting louder as she came toward me.

  “I can’t find it,” I told her, without looking up. “That’s why I need a copy of Tim’s.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “He isn’t here,” I said, stuffing one manila folder back into the drawer and pulling out the next.

  Heidi slapped her hand on it before I could open it up.

  “Hey!” I protested. “Knock it off. It isn’t like it’s anything secret. It’s a closed transaction. Over and done with. They aren’t even Tim’s clients anymore.”

  “Until they want to move again,” Heidi said, “and then Tim would want them to call him. He wouldn’t like it if you started farming to his clients.”

  Farming, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is the marketing act of sending postcards and letters to everyone in an area in an effort to pick up new business. I had no plans of farming to Tim’s clients, and told Heidi so.

  “All I want is a copy of the paperwork for the transaction we did together in December and January. He had the listing, I had the buyers.” Just to mess with her mind a little, I added, “And I’d better not find out that Tim has been soliciting my clients.”

  Heidi looked mulish.

  “If you just want to find that folder for me,” I said, “I’ll stop looking through the files right now. Make me a copy of the paperwork, and I’ll walk away from Tim’s filing cabinet right this minute.”

  Heidi thought about it for a second. “What’s the name?” she asked.

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be standing here looking at every folder.”

  I told her the addre
ss instead, and stepped away from the drawer so she could start digging. A few seconds later she pulled a folder out and handed it to me. “Make your own copy.”

  “What do you want me to do with the original when I’m done?”

  “Give it to me,” Heidi said, “and I’ll put it back.”

  Fine. She waited for me to walk out the door into the hallway, and then she closed Tim’s door ostentatiously behind us both. I rolled my eyes and headed for the copier while Heidi disappeared into the much smaller office next to Tim’s that was her domain.

  Copying everything didn’t take long. I fed the originals through the machine, it spat them out on the other side, and while I waited for the print job to be done, I took the originals back to Heidi. “Here you go. Thanks.”

  She was sitting behind her desk, and there was orange dust on her chin. I heard the telltale crinkle of a chip bag from under the desk. She didn’t answer, either because her mouth was full or because she didn’t feel she had to. I put the folder on the desk and retreated to the copier.

  Back in my own office, I put the copies on the desk and started looking at them.

  I did have my own copies of a lot of the paperwork, and I knew exactly where it was: in the bottom drawer of my desk. Unlike Tim, I have neither space nor need of a filing cabinet.

  But Tim’s file included things mine didn’t. Most importantly, information about the sellers—Virgil Wright and Stacy Kelleher.

  The first thing I did was check the online property records, to see where Virgil and Stacy lived now.

  It didn’t take long, mostly because there wasn’t much to find. Neither of them showed up as owning property in the Nashville area, so they didn’t seem to have bought another house in the time since they’d sold the one Aislynn and Kylie now lived in. Someone named Stacy Kelleher rented an apartment in Brentwood, but there was no Virgil Wright listed there, so it might be someone else. It isn’t a particularly unusual name. Or they could have left town and moved to another city or state, and I wouldn’t know.

  So I flipped through the paperwork until I got to the client information sheet, where both names were listed with phone numbers and other pertinent information. I picked up the phone and dialed Virgil’s number. A couple of rings passed, and then a canned voice came on. “You’ve reached the voicemail for Virgil Wright. I can’t pick up right now, but leave a message after the tone, and I’ll get back to you.”

  I hung up without leaving a message. I still wasn’t sure I should be doing this, and if there was no chance I’d get to talk to him anyway, I didn’t want to tip my hand.

  At first I thought the same thing would happen when I dialed Stacy’s number. It rang, and rang again. I was preparing myself for another voicemail, and another disconnect, when a male voice answered. “Hello?”

  “Oh,” I said, rattled. “Hello. Um... I’m looking for Stacy?”

  There was a moment’s pause. “Who’s this?” the voice said suspiciously.

  “Oh. Um... My name is Savannah. I’m calling from LB&A. Lamont, Briggs and Associates. Real estate company.”

  I waited for some sort of acknowledgement—something like, “we’re not interested in selling our home,” since that’s what usually happens when you cold call people to talk about houses—but it didn’t happen.

  “Stacy sold her house in East Nashville in January,” I said eventually, when the silence had dragged on for long enough, “and I had a couple of follow-up questions about the transaction. Whether there were any problems. Her level of satisfaction with her agent.” Whether she’d been receiving creepy anonymous letters. “That kind of thing.”

  There was another pause. “We were satisfied with our agent,” the guy said.

  “Oh.” This must be Virgil. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Virgil said, and hung up. I arched my brows and did the same.

  Chapter Four

  Kylie worked in one of the high rise buildings in downtown. I caught her just as she was crossing the lobby to head out to lunch with a coworker. “Kylie!”

  She glanced at me, and for a second I was afraid she would pretend she didn’t know me. It looked like she was thinking about it. Then she said a few words to her associate, and changed direction to intercept me, while the other woman continued on out the door, after a curious glance in my direction.

  “Savannah,” Kylie said. She sounded about halfway between surprised to see me and annoyed that I was there. “What are you doing here?”

  “I had a couple of questions,” I said, “that I couldn’t ask yesterday, with Aislynn there. I thought maybe you had time to grab lunch so we could talk.”

  She hesitated, and glanced over her shoulder, to where her friend had walked out.

  “My treat,” I added. Not because she couldn’t afford to pay for her own lunch—and mine—a lot better than I could, but because it was all I could think to say. When she still looked unwilling, I got desperate. “Or I could just walk there with you and let you have lunch with your friend. This won’t take long.”

  She looked relieved. That didn’t feel good, but at the moment I’d take what I could get.

  “I spoke to Rafe last night,” I told her as I fell into step beside her and we passed through the doors to the outside. A wall of humid heat hit us as we left the air-conditioned lobby for the sweaty outside. “He said I should talk to Detective Grimaldi, so I did.”

  Kylie gave me a sideways glance. “What did the detective say?”

  A lot of things, most of which I didn’t want to share with her. “That I should talk to the previous owners and see if maybe they’re regretting selling the place and want it back.”

  Kylie nodded.

  “I plan to do that this afternoon. But first I have a question for you.”

  She looked wary.

  “Last night, you said you didn’t have any idea who might be behind this. But you didn’t look like you were telling the truth. I thought maybe you didn’t want to talk about it in front of Aislynn. So I thought I’d get you alone and ask.”

  We traveled a couple of yards along the sidewalk while she thought about it. It was close to a hundred degrees, and the blacktop felt squishy under my feet. The occasional blast of cold air from inside a door that opened and closed felt good. I had pinned my hair up this morning, but the wisps at the back of my neck were wet. And my stomach was getting big enough to be unwieldy. Although I could console myself with the knowledge that by the time I got really pregnant, at least the weather would be cooler.

  Kylie sighed. “I was wondering about Aislynn’s parents,” she said.

  That was not what I’d expected at all. “Her parents?”

  Kylie nodded. “They weren’t happy when she ‘turned gay.’” Her tone of voice made quotation marks around the words. “I think they blame me. They wanted her to marry and give them grandbabies.”

  “She could still marry and give them grandbabies.”

  Gay marriage was legal in Tennessee now. And they’d already talked about having children.

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” Kylie said. And I guess for parents who wanted a traditional relationship for their daughter, with a strapping husband and a white picket fence and 2.5 kids, it wouldn’t. Rafe hadn’t been my mother’s first choice for me, either, so I could relate.

  “Do you think they’d go as far as to scare her like this, though? She’s their daughter. Surely they care enough not to do that.”

  Mother may not have been happy about my choice, but other than voicing her opinion, loudly and clearly, she hadn’t actually done anything to interfere. I wouldn’t have tolerated it if she had.

  “They don’t care enough to be happy that she’s happy,” Kylie said, stopping in front of the entrance to a café. “Or that she was happy, anyway. She isn’t so happy now.”

  No, she wasn’t. “I don’t suppose I can come right out and ask them.”

  Kylie shook her head. “Don’t do that.”

  “Will you at least te
ll me who they are and where I can find them? Are they local?”

  “Aislynn’s from Bowling Green,” Kylie said.

  “Kentucky?”

  She nodded. “The family name is Turner. They live somewhere on Green Street. I can’t remember the number.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll look it up.” And call them, or else make the trip up there. Bowling Green is less than an hour away.

  “Anything else you need to know?” Kylie asked, with a glance at the café door.

  I shook my head. “Thank you for the time. Have a good lunch.”

  She nodded. I had turned away when she stopped me. “Savannah?”

  I turned back, thinking that maybe she’d changed her mind and was going to ask me to join her and her friend after all.

  She didn’t. “Did the detective you talked to say anything else? Anything I should know?”

  I hesitated, while I tried to figure out whether it was suspicious that she didn’t want to have lunch with me. We were three women around the same age. It wouldn’t have been strange to invite me to tag along.

  “She said she doesn’t have much experience with poison pen letters,” I said eventually. “People don’t write letters anymore. They spoof their phone number and make prank calls instead. But she said that anonymous letters don’t usually escalate into violence. That people who write letters, do it because they’re afraid of confrontation.”

  Kylie nodded, looking relieved.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about anything happening to Aislynn. Or to you. The most someone is trying to do, is probably scare you.”

  She smiled. “Thank you, Savannah.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  She ducked into the café. I turned back in the direction we’d come, back to the parking lot and my Volvo. If I wasn’t having lunch with Kylie, I might as well drive to Brentwood, to Sara Beth’s, and talk to Aislynn over a salad.

  By the time I had driven there and found a parking space in the crowded strip mall lot, it was the end of the lunch hour. I only had to wait a couple of minutes for a small, round, marble-topped table over in a corner. “Is Aislynn working?” I asked the beefy young woman who brought me the menu and asked if she could get me a drink.