Adverse Possession Page 6

  “I couldn’t afford to keep the house on my own, and he didn’t want it—he was going to move in with his new boyfriend—so we put it on the market and split the profit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Stacy shrugged. “Any other questions?”

  Um... “Where did Virgil move to?”

  He didn’t look like he wanted to answer, but then he did anyway. “Same neighborhood. House on Warner Avenue. It belongs to a guy named Kenny.”

  “Do you have a last name for Kenny?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t suppose you ever got any weird mail while you were living in the house?”

  He blinked. He had hazel eyes surrounded by long lashes, and when I asked, they widened in something that was either confusion or innocence. “What do you mean, weird?”

  “Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “No,” Stacy said. “So is that what you’re here about? Weird letters?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to admit there were letters, but at the same time, if he had information, I didn’t want to risk not hearing it.

  He cocked his head. “I remember you. You were the buyers’ agent when we sold the house. Tim said—” He stopped.

  “Tim said what?”

  Stacy smirked. “That you were new and didn’t know what you were doing.”

  Of course he had.

  “Your clients overpaid, you know. For the house. We would have taken less. Virgil would have taken almost any offer that came in, he was so eager to cut the last tie he had to me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, not entirely sure whether I was responding to his comment about Virgil, or the fact that Aislynn and Kylie had ended up paying more than they needed to. “But my clients were happy with their purchase. And the price.” They’d offered what they wanted to offer, and enough to preempt any other offer coming in. And they’d been thrilled with the house, at least until the letters started coming.

  “So what kind of letters are we talking about?” Stacy asked.

  But at that point I’d had enough. He probably didn’t know anything about any letters. Most likely, he was just like Tim: an inveterate gossip looking for dirt.

  “Nothing that need concern you. I should go. Thank you for your time.”

  I took a step back. He took a step forward and lifted his hand. “Wait a minute.”

  And that’s all he said. Instead of grabbing me, he stopped, with his mouth open, to look over my shoulder. I turned, just as the scuff of a foot alerted me that someone was there.

  Chapter Five

  I’m sure that slight noise was deliberate. When Rafe wants to be quiet, he can move as silently as the wind. In this case, he must have moved as quickly as the wind, too, to get here from Inglewood so fast.

  I had my mouth open to ask how he’d managed that feat, but he gave me a look, and I shut my mouth again. “Ready?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Excuse us.” It wasn’t a request. More like a statement of fact. Stacy didn’t say anything, but he did close his mouth. There were spots of color on his cheeks.

  Rafe stepped aside to let me go down the stairs first. I stopped once I hit level ground to turn to him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Making sure you’re OK.”

  Of course. “How did you get here so fast?” It couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes at the most since I’d texted him. It shouldn’t have been possible to get here from the TBI building in Inglewood so fast.

  “I didn’t,” he told me. “We were on a field trip.”

  “We?”

  He gestured across the parking lot, to where a white SUV with the TBI logo on the side was parked. The engine was running, probably to keep the interior cold, and I could see a nose pressed against the passenger side window.

  I gave the car a wave and turned back to Rafe. “Field trip?”

  He grinned. “To Sally’s place.”

  Sally. I had met her for the first time almost a year ago, when Tamara Grimaldi had suggested I arm myself in case Rafe was as bad as he looked on paper. This was before she realized that he was on the TBI’s payroll, and had been for ten years, and that he’d never hurt me.

  Sally owns a little yellow cottage in the heart of the antique district on Eight Avenue, where she sells—not seashells at the sea shore, but self defense spray and knives, surveillance equipment, GPS trackers, and the like. I had a miniature knife and a mini-canister of Mace, both disguised as tubes of lipstick, in a compartment in my purse, that I’d bought from Sally. They had actually saved my hide on a few occasions, too.

  I couldn’t hold back a grin as I shot another glance at the SUV. “How did the boys handle that?”

  Sally is nothing if not an original. In her forties, with upper arms that rival Rafe’s, and with hair that’s shaved into a rooster-red mohawk on top of her head. I could just imagine how Rafe’s boys—the three rookies he’s training—had reacted to the introduction.

  “José was uncomfortable. Clayton was nervous. And Jamal acted like she was his long lost auntie.”

  About as I had expected. José seemed uncomfortable around a lot of us. Clayton was a skinny twenty-year-old who was probably afraid Sally would break him in two—I’m sure she could have, if she’d wanted to—and Jamal had never met a lamp-post he couldn’t have a friendly conversation with. The kid was a natural con-man. It would probably serve him well in his profession.

  “So that’s how you got here so fast.” The antique district was on the south side of town, much closer to Brentwood than the TBI building on the north-east.

  Rafe nodded. “And now that I’ve broken up your conversation with the almost naked guy, I gotta go back to work.”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll just follow you outta here to make sure you get on the road safe.”

  “Dang it,” I said, “and here I was just waiting for you to leave again so I could go back upstairs to the almost naked guy.”

  He arched a brow. “That’d better be a joke.”

  “Of course. He’s gay. And anyway, I’ve got you.”

  “Damn straight,” Rafe said and took my arm. “And if I didn’t have a car full of kids, I’d remind you. C’mon.”

  I came, and let him put me into the Volvo and close the door. Then he sauntered over to the SUV and got in. When I pulled out of the apartment complex, the SUV was right behind me.

  I lost it once we got to the interstate. Rafe drives like he always needs to be somewhere ten minutes ago. As soon as we moved off the exit and merged with traffic, he shot past me and disappeared up Interstate 65 toward town. I made no attempt to keep up. He could probably get away with it, in his official vehicle. I couldn’t, in mine.

  By the time I reached East Nashville, the SUV was nowhere to be seen. It had been nowhere to be seen a lot longer than that. I exited the interstate at Shelby Avenue and headed away from downtown into the historic district. A few minutes later I was on my way back down Aislynn and Kylie’s street, scoping out the new neighbors.

  A green Craftsman bungalow one block away had changed hands recently. I rolled past slowly, peering into the yard. A brightly colored big wheel sat on the grass, next to a pink miniature bicycle with training wheels and pink-and-white streamers hanging from the handlebars. A family with young kids, obviously. And while you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—or people by the outside of their house or the contents of their yard—they didn’t seem like the kind of people who would send two gay girls a block away anonymous letters.

  The other new neighbors, a block in the other direction, had bought a new construction infill: a pale blue two-story with an attached garage. No bikes or trikes here, but there was a rainbow flag hanging limply from a pole, and a porch swing filled with matching pillows. A fat, striped cat was lying in a patch of sunlight on a windowsill upstairs.

  I reached the next block just in time to see a figure slip around the corner of Aislynn and Kylie’s
house and disappear into the backyard.

  I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop at the curb on the other side of the street. And that description makes it sound louder and more violent than it actually was. I was going less than fifteen miles an hour, so it was really more like rolling gently to a stop at the curb and cutting the engine. Then I was out of the car and hustling across the street.

  I really do know better than to follow nefarious characters around. But it was just past two in the afternoon, and broad daylight. The sun was having a grand old time up in the cloudless sky. There were a couple kids playing in a yard up the street, their shrill screams and laughter echoing as they ran back and forth through a sprinkler, and a woman was jogging down the other sidewalk, ponytail bouncing. Why anyone would choose to go for a run during the hottest part of a ninety-degree day is beyond me, but there she was. A dog in a yard ran up to the fence and yipped as she passed.

  Aislynn and Kylie’s yard had been nicely landscaped, with green bushes and flowers in beds and containers on the porch, and with the stereotypical white picket fence enclosing the front yard, giving way to an eight-foot privacy fence enclosing the back, extending left and right of the garage. That’s where the stranger had gone: through the gate and into the privacy-fenced back yard. He could be doing anything at all back there, with nobody being the wiser.

  I made my way through the front over to the gate in the privacy fence. It was unlocked—of course; the stranger had just gone through—and yielded to my touch. I was worried it would squeak and announce my presence, but it swung in without a sound. I slipped through and closed the gate gently behind me before looking around.

  The backyard was nice, too. There was a wooden deck off the house, with a roof over part of it, with little twinkling Christmas light strung back and forth. They weren’t twinkling right now, of course, but I could imagine they would twinkle at night, when it wasn’t uncomfortably hot and Aislynn and Kylie were entertaining.

  The privacy fence enclosed the entire backyard. There was a gate in the back wall; I assumed they used it to take out the trash. Everything within the yard was open and easy to see. There was a little pond with rippling water in the middle of the grass, with flashes of orange moving through the water. Koi.

  Besides that, the yard was empty. Whoever the guy had been—if it had been a guy, and not just a butch girl in jeans and a plaid shirt—he wasn’t here.

  Maybe it’d just been a neighbor cutting through the middle of the block instead of going around?

  Although there had to be easier ways to get across to the next street than to choose a yard with an eight-foot privacy fence. There were properties all up and down the block with no enclosed backyards. Wouldn’t it have been easier to cut through one of them?

  The conspicuous benefit of a fenced yard was that nobody would see him or what he was doing. But that assumed he was doing something he shouldn’t be.

  I skirted the koi pond and walked across the grass to the back gate and unlatched it. Like the gate beside the house, it was unlocked. I peered up and down the alley and into the yards on the other side, but saw no sign of the blue and green plaid.

  The man in plaid—sounded like the title of an Agatha Christie mystery!—had either hustled away from the alley after coming through the gate (possible), or he hadn’t left the yard at all. I turned around to look at the back of the house.

  There was the deck, as I mentioned. A set of double doors led into the family room next to the kitchen. I had noticed it when I was inside yesterday. That part of the house was an addition; they didn’t build family rooms with kitchens and double doors to the backyard back in 1902.

  I made my way back across the grass and up the couple of steps to the deck. My heels thumped against the plank floors, keeping time with the hard thump of my heart.

  My palm was sweaty when I reached out and wrapped it around the doorknob and twisted.

  The door was locked.

  I bent and peered at the lock. It didn’t look forced. There were no scratches or anything, and the keyhole looked normal.

  I leaned closer and cupped my hands around my eyes to peer in, but there was nothing to see. No movement. No lights—and why would there be, in the middle of a sunny afternoon? No sign of anyone being inside.

  I put my hands on my hips and my back to the door to survey the backyard. I could call Aislynn or Kylie to tell them what had happened, but the man in plaid was probably just a neighbor who had cut through the yard because he knew Aislynn and Kylie were at work and the house was empty, and he had made it out of sight before I opened the gate to the alley. Telling them would just make them worry. If they came home and discovered that someone had been inside, there’d be time enough to tell them about the man I’d seen then.

  I trudged back to my car and drove off. And although I took a circuitous route back to the office—circling a couple of blocks and keeping my eyes peeled—I saw no sign of the man in plaid.

  Back at the office, I booted up the laptop and spent some time in the online courthouse records looking up homeowners on Warner Avenue, where Stacy said his boyfriend had moved in with someone new. There’s no way to look up homeowners by first name—just last name or address—so I had to click on each record for each property on Warner and see who owned it. It was tedious and took a long time—Warner is a long street with many houses—but eventually I had what I wanted. A man named Kenneth Grimes owned the property at number 1806. He was the only Ken, Kenneth, or Kenny I could find, so unless Virgil’s Kenny was a renter, this was likely to be him.

  The tax assessor’s image—of the house, not the owner—showed a symmetrical 1920s Craftsman Cottage with stacked stone pillars holding up the front porch and a wide, three-window dormer on the second floor. The tax assessor said it was worth two hundred eighty thousand dollars, which probably meant I could get at least a hundred grand more on the open market. Probably more.

  Not that I thought Kenny wanted to sell. He’d paid less than two hundred thousand six years ago. He couldn’t hope to get anything similar these days. Not at that price.

  But I had his address. I shut off the computer and headed over there.

  Warner Avenue was named after the Warners, a family who came to Nashville from Chattanooga just after the beginning of the Civil War—or the War Against Northern Aggression, as we call it in these parts.

  James Warner, the father, was one of the founders of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, and his sons Percy and Edwin both went on to become civic leaders and benefactors. Percy served on the Nashville Park Board, and both he and Edwin have parks named after them. Percy Warner Park and Edwin Warner Park in South Nashville.

  They lived in the Renraw Mansion in East Nashville for a while—Renraw is Warner spelled backwards—and got a street in the neighborhood named after them. Streets in other parts of town, too, for that matter. Warner—like Robertson, Donelson, and Sevier—is one of those names you see again and again in Nashville, in street names and park names and neighborhood names.

  Warner Avenue looked just like Aislynn and Kylie’s street. Lined with Victorian cottages, Craftsman bungalows, and the occasional new-construction infill made to look old. There were kids playing in picket-fenced yards, dogs barking from behind privacy fences, and a lawnmower humming. Somewhere a band must be rehearsing—there are a lot of musicians in East Nashville—because when I had parked the car and gotten out, I could hear the sound of muffled percussion.

  Kenny Grimes’s house looked like it had in the website picture, except for the color. Sometime between the time when the picture was taken and now, he had repainted it pumpkin with dark blue trim, instead of sage green with saffron. There was no fence around the front, just a green lawn leading up to two flowerbeds flanking the front steps. They were filled with plants in three precise tiers: small, spiky, pale green clusters in the front, medium-sized round bushes in the middle, and pointy, dark evergreens in the back. It was lovely, and must have taken a lot more th
ought that I had ever put into the landscaping around my house. My big concession to yard work is sitting on the porch with a glass of sweet tea while Rafe mows the lawn. Shirtless.

  The front door was a fifteen-light: three rows of windows horizontally, five vertically. It allowed me to peer into the front room while I waited for my knock to be answered. I saw hardwood floors, a big stone fireplace flanked by two ornate brass sconces—surely original to the house—and a matching brass chandelier suspended from the ceiling. I liked Kenny Grimes already.

  But he didn’t answer my knock on the door. I knocked again, and waited, looking around.

  There was a porch swing suspended from the ceiling at one end of the porch, and a seating arrangement with two Cracker Barrel rocking chairs on the other. Both were piled high with colorful pillows. The welcome mat was your standard brown bristly construction, but it had Hello Darling painted on it. And a brass mailbox was hanging beside the door. With no fence at the street, I guess the mailman had to come up onto the porch to deliver the mail.

  I know it’s highly illegal to mess with other people’s mail. I wasn’t really messing with it, though. I was just going to take a quick look. Just in case Kenny and Virgil—mostly Virgil—was also receiving letters addressed in a spiky, anonymous hand.

  In spite of telling myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong, my heart still beat a little harder as I lifted the lid of the mailbox and stuck my hand inside.

  There was a handful of mail in the box. I blushed guiltily as I pulled it out for a closer look.

  Bill, bill, what looked like a greeting card—roughly square envelope instead of rectangular; Colorado postmark—another bill, a circular from Office Depot... nothing hand-lettered except the card from Colorado, and the handwriting was neat and rounded.

  It was all in Kenny’s name except for the circular. Maybe Virgil did the shopping.

  That could be significant. Office Depot sells things like plain copy paper and plain envelopes and magic markers. The stuff that was used to create the anonymous letters.