Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  I needed to see his eyes, but he looked away from me. “Mr. Fig, just what are you about to tell me?”

  “I think someone has come to the hotel to haunt me. Unfortunately, if I’m going to help you understand who it is, you’ll also have to hear about the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, but I wasn’t at all sure.

  He made a soft noise of disbelief in his throat. “I wish that we could sit down somewhere private at least.”

  “Me too. But whatever it is, I won’t hold it against you.”

  “I appreciate that. I don’t expect you to believe this, but I truly intended to tell you the whole story one day, when the time was right.”

  This was sounding more and more ominous. “Well, I’m sorry that you have to tell me now.”

  “What I give you, I surrender willingly.”

  The skin of my arms felt raw and cold. “I’m listening.”

  Dread and doubt crept into his eyes as he started speaking. “One day, when I was a young man working for your grandparents at the Morrow house, the kitchen plumbing began to leak. I called a plumber, just as I did when you discovered the men’s room leak a few days ago.”

  He swallowed. “The man arrived later that afternoon. I was unfamiliar with his company, but he wore a uniform with their insignia and seemed capable as he assessed the leak.

  “I’ve gone over these moments so many times in the last few decades and agonized over my decision to trust him. If I had looked closer at his patch, would I have seen he’d sewn it on himself? If I had inspected his van, could I have known that he was not the man he pretended to be?”

  “I shouldn’t interrupt, but I think the answer to all of those questions is no,” I said. “You couldn’t have known. It sounds like you’ve been blaming yourself for something—whatever you’re going to tell me next—that you had no control over.”

  “You’ve not heard the whole story yet.”

  “Okay, lay it on me.” I began to think this event was one of those things Mr. Fig measured differently than most people, and I felt my chest relax. Whatever guilt he’d felt all these years, it was a result of his extremely exacting standards.

  “The plumber began a conversation with me about baseball,” Mr. Fig went on. “I realize now I should never have engaged in chitchat with a fellow service person, but I was less discriminating then.

  “We talked about the season the Braves were having. Soon we were ‘cutting up’ like old friends. It was late by the time he finished replacing the section of corroded pipe, and I had chores to finish upstairs. He said he needed to get into the boiler room.

  “And so”—he sighed heavily—“and so I lent him my keys and told him to see himself out through the service entrance when he finished. Later, I reached for my key ring to let myself into the wine cellar.”

  At this point, Mr. Fig paused, crossing his arms and uncrossing them again. “And I realized he’d never given them back.”

  Where was all of this going? “He stole your keys? And they would let him open anything in the house?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t admit that to myself right away. I was anxious over having been careless but hoped I would find them lying around somewhere later. It was purely embarrassment that kept me from reporting the loss to my manager or anyone else.

  “Then the next morning, without any sign of a break-in, the family discovered a dozen paintings were missing from their walls.”

  “The plumber used your keys to get in and steal the paintings in the middle of the night?”

  “I believe so.”

  A dozen paintings. Judging by the quality of the work the thief had left behind, the ones they took must have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions altogether. “But it wasn’t your fault he stole your keys. And surely the thief would have found a way inside the house anyway.”

  “Perhaps, but I haven’t told you the worst of it yet, and you see—the theft was a perfect crime,” he said. “With no sign of forced entry, the only suspects were members of the household and their employees.”

  “So they thought it was you?”

  He shook his head. “I wish they had. If my own neck had been on the line, perhaps I would have done what I should have and told the investigator everything I knew. Instead the family suspected a young maid. They had no proof to make an arrest, but your grandfather fired her, and I’ve carried that guilt too.”

  My lips parted, but I had no words ready to come out. Mr. Fig was telling me he had been … dishonest. It was hard to picture him as a young man, as anyone less whole than his current self. But a woman was fired because of his lies. And besides that, what if telling the police what he knew about the theft could have helped the family track down the thief? How many future thefts might have been prevented?

  “What happened to the paintings?” I asked.

  “They were never found, and I’m sorry to say that their loss cost your family dearly at a time when the Morrow fortunes were already falling.”

  I thought of my grandparents’ faces, pictured them staring at the blank walls where their paintings would have been, feeling betrayed by their own staff, unsafe in their own house. Mr. Fig could have saved them that heartache.

  “I know it was wrong, and I don’t expect you to forgive me, Miss Nichols. At the time I wondered if perhaps God had given me a clean slate. I thanked him and vowed that if he let me continue to live as a free man, I would earn enough to repay my debt to the Morrows.”

  “And did you?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” he said. “They were already in dire straits financially, and I’m sad to tell you that in the year following the horrible incident for which I am responsible, your grandfather suffered a mental break. Your grandmother took over for him, when it came to business matters, but it was ultimately a lost cause.”

  “Why? She wasn’t any good at it?”

  “Ms. Mary managed quite capably with the investments and the business still remaining in the family’s hands at the time. However, three years after your grandfather’s lapse came Black Monday.”

  “What’s Black Monday?” I asked.

  “October 19, 1987, the stock market crash. I believe the family lost everything then. Your grandfather suffered a heart attack the next day. He never recovered.”

  I knew Mr. Fig was not responsible for the stock market crash or my grandfather’s heart attack, but hearing the details linked together this way faked a causal relationship for a moment in my heart, as if my grandparents would still be here if Mr. Fig had simply confessed what he knew about that plumber.

  My stomach turned over, and I couldn’t look up at Mr. Fig again. “So …”

  I had to reach to remember why he had begun this sad tale. “So, you think the painting thief is back, starting the leak and leaving those pictures for you? Why? To torment you?”

  “Paulatim ergo certe. Slowly, therefore surely. The drawings are meant to represent two of the stolen paintings, capricci of Venice by Francesco Guardi.”

  “That’s clever. But why now, after all this time?”

  “I imagine the money he earned from the sale of the paintings on the black market dried up long ago, especially if he split it with his associates. He’s going to blackmail me.”

  “But who would care about this secret besides me? Who would this thief out you to if you refused to pay?”

  “That’s exactly why I had to warn you,” Mr. Fig said. “He must be aware that you are the family’s descendant.”

  It made me sick to consider it, but I wondered if this blackmailer’s goals, in part, aligned with my own. He also needed to clear Mr. Fig’s name if he expected to be paid.

  “These people rarely operate only one con, Miss Nichols. I wouldn’t be surprised if he reached out to me or you in the next day or so offering to reveal evidence that would point the finger elsewhere if I pay up. He’ll make money any way he can.”

  My shoulders had taken up residence besid
e my ears. I lowered them with effort and took one slow, deep breath.

  Mr. Fig was usually right about things, whether due to his sensitive moral compass, some innate wisdom, a lifetime of experience, or some combination of the three. If he thought this person was present and a threat to us, I would aim at least part of my attention in that direction.

  “All right, tell me everything you remember about that plumber.”

  XIV

  The Spell Begins to Break

  Mr. Fig’s confession simmered in my thoughts as I drove up Lookout Mountain again. He had, at least in some small way, betrayed my family, but I hated that his mistake had weighed on him for so long. I realized now that I’d considered Mr. Fig faultless all this time, which was naïve and stupid of me. He was capable of miscalculations, like anyone.

  I remembered how, standing in the snow a few nights before, he’d warned me about digging into the histories of people I loved. He couldn’t have known at that moment that he’d have to tell me this story in a few days’ time. He couldn’t have been talking about himself … unless, like he said, he’d already planned to tell me one day when the time seemed right to him.

  Still, I found myself wondering, over and over, if anything would have been different for my family had the paintings been recovered, had the investigator known which direction to look.

  I wished I could ask my mother how the change in the family’s fortunes affected her. How it had felt to lose her father at a young age.

  Eventually the crenelated tower of Covenant College’s campus rose above a hill on my right. The historic main building had been a magnificent hotel itself from the late 1920s to the middle of the century.

  I drove a little farther down the road, parked by the newer brown-brick student apartments, and found Selena’s dorm. I’d called in a favor from an old coworker who was a Covenant student to get her room number.

  Selena had reasons to hold me at arm’s length. Not only was I showing up here without warning, but she’d caught me spying on her dad too.

  We were of the same generation, but in the last year of my twenties, I was supposed to be at a different life stage than her, and I wasn’t.

  Given those gems, I was pretty sure we weren’t going to strike up an automatic friendship.

  My only hope was to take her side when it came to the conflict with her dad. And given all of those same gems, I had a handle on how to do that.

  Selena’s face showed neither surprise nor suspicion when she answered the door. “Ivy, right?”

  She left it wide open as if to say Come on in, so I did.

  Her eight-by-ten dorm room was decorated mostly in green and white with a simple quilt on the bed and some signs with words like Resist and Rise Up tacked to the walls. It smelled of vanilla body spray and was disappointingly boring for a girl who was supposedly unstable and hostile toward her father.

  She had no teakettle or coffeemaker, so there was nothing she could offer me, even if she wanted to, and that made things awkward. How I craved something to hold.

  She sat down on the bed, leaving me her desk chair, I supposed. It sat at the foot of her bed, piled with papers and books. “Mind if I move these?”

  “That’s fine.” Her words were monotone, as if she seemed uninterested in me or anything I was doing.

  There was hardly another place to put the stack. I commandeered a suitcase in the corner. “Are you going out of town soon?”

  “No.”

  Her phone rang. She pulled it out of her back pocket, silenced it, and turned the phone facedown on the quilt beside her.

  I got things moving. “I wanted to come talk to you because I’m looking for help.”

  Always appeal to the heart. People wanted to help. Most people. Probably even the ones who didn’t offer you places to sit down in their dorm rooms.

  “All right.” She stood and walked over to her desk.

  Her back was to me, but I heard a drawer open and the crackle of plastic.

  She took a sip from a water bottle and threw back her head.

  “You okay?” I said.

  She turned around, nodded, and sat back down on the bed.

  I began explaining to her that Mr. Fig was a good friend and that I was trying to prove his innocence.

  She listened with her eyes, but there was little compassion in them.

  “I know Renee wasn’t a good person.” I really didn’t. “But Mr. Fig is, and I think you may be able to give me information that would free him.”

  “I’m not sure how I can help, honestly.”

  “Well.” Easy now. Don’t spook her. “I’m sure your dad isn’t perfect. No one is. But I don’t know him. I’m sorry if this isn’t cool, but do you think …”

  The twist of her mouth told me she’d gotten my gist. She looked thoughtful but not offended by the suggestion that her father might have killed someone.

  Her phone vibrated this time, and she checked it but didn’t answer or text back.

  “I mean.” She shrugged, eyes on her phone. “I don’t know if he’s a murderer, but he’s a liar. He promised me he wouldn’t marry her, and then he proposed anyway, and he didn’t even tell me. Autumn did.”

  Now that was suspicious. It seemed intentionally hurtful when Autumn must have known the news would upset Selena. And what other point would there be in telling her if Renee had turned him down?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That sucks.”

  She typed something into her phone with her thumbs. “He made me come to school here too. He loves this place.”

  “Has your dad ever said anything negative to you about Renee?”

  “No. He wouldn’t. He was trying so hard to get me to like her.” She glanced at the bathroom door and back at me. “He’s been so paranoid lately. First, thinking my mom is vandalizing his house, and then the thing with Dr. Chaves, and he keeps talking about how he can’t say anything anymore.”

  “Wait. Leonard Chaves?”

  “Yeah. Dad thinks he’s after his job.” She put her phone down again and swallowed hard.

  “And what do you mean that your dad can’t say anything?”

  “Like the way he’s so upset that he has to use words like member of Congress instead of Congressman, or how he doesn’t understand why some people don’t want to celebrate Columbus Day.”

  “Oh, yeah, I get it. Okay, boomer.”

  “Exactly.” She raised her voice, excited. “I try to tell him he’s not in the Bible Belt anymore.”

  “And that he’s not in the twentieth century anymore.”

  “Oh my God. Yes.”

  Now I had put myself on her team. I could dig in. “So did you visit him at his hotel room? I mean, at Hotel 1911 … before the murder?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  I wondered if she’d admit to whatever she’d been doing in the conservatory last night. “So you haven’t been to the hotel at all then?”

  “No.” She shrugged.

  She was a good liar. But the hairs I’d found in the Achilles room didn’t come close to matching anyone else. I had brought them with me. I just had to find a way to compare them to hers without being really creepy.

  “Has your dad ever threatened to hurt anyone?” I asked. “Is he jealous?”

  “I mean, no, he hasn’t threatened to hurt anyone specifically, but he’s definitely made some people uncomfortable, like if my mom talked to another man. I don’t want you to think she’s perfect either, but she’s justifiably angry.” She got up, grabbed her water bottle from the desk, and leaned against the wall.

  “About what?”

  “I didn’t—” She blinked hard and swallowed again. “I just mean like any other ex-wife who stayed a little too long, you know?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.” I didn’t want to make this about me, but I couldn’t help thinking of my mother, who hadn’t stayed. “So your mom was angry, and your dad said someone’s been tearing up his house.”

  “It couldn’t be her, though, because at leas
t one of those times she was here, staying with me.”

  I nodded. I believed her.

  “Anyway,” Selena went on, “Renee probably had plenty of enemies.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I said. She was horrible.” Selena rubbed her head and let it rest on the wall.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She swatted away my concern. “Renee does the hiring, did the hiring, for Autumn’s company, and she exploited undocumented workers.”

  “Oh, I see. It’s some kind of security that Autumn does, right?”

  She scratched one arm. “Like security guards for businesses and stuff, not cybersecurity.”

  A twinge of doubt pricked my thoughts. Selena was really forthcoming about everyone other than herself.

  I set it aside for now and thought of the mysterious money Clyde had hassled Autumn about. “Does your father have anything to do with Autumn’s company?”

  “Autumn was a student of his, and then when she started her company, he became an investor. That’s how Dad met Renee, actually.”

  “Oh. So that’s why Autumn owes your dad money?”

  She shrugged and took a sip of water.

  “And why did Autumn fire your mom?”

  “Autumn accused Mom of stealing, but my mom wouldn’t have done that. In fact, I have it on good authority that Renee had something to do with it.”

  Hmm. If Selena’s mom was fired for something Renee was guilty of, would Selena have sought revenge? Or maybe Selena and her mother were in on it together. “Is your mom in town now?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about Autumn? Do you like her?”

  “I don’t know. We kind of bonded over my dad, I guess.”

  “Because neither of you wanted him and Renee together?”

  “Yeah. I think Autumn couldn’t stand to let Renee live her life without her constant input. She loved finally getting to be her boss for real.” Selena lifted her weight off the wall, and her long hair swung forward as she lost her balance and tipped forward.

  I reached out instinctively to catch her, but she got her feet under her and fell back against the wall again.