This couldn’t be a coincidence—Marin being shot less than twenty feet away from the former home of her former sister-in-law? Unlikely, but then again, if Agnes Harlow’s actual blood relatives weren’t fond of her, it was hard to imagine an enduring connection between Agnes and her brother’s second, contested wife.
A house full of antiques did seem like something Marin would like, though.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed curtains rustling in one of the apartments on the other side of the alley. Edward Bennett Wilkington, who had rustled curtains at me the last time I was back here.
I knocked on his door again. “Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”
He nodded, uneasy.
“You’re pretty attentive to this alley.”
Another nod.
“Are you sure you didn’t see or hear anything?”
The big man’s eyes were wide. “I told you, I didn’t. I’m just vigilant now that something happened back there.”
I stared at him for a while. He seemed like a class-A weirdo, but that alone didn’t mean anything. Still, my hackles were up. “Vigilant.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I have a question for you. Do you know your neighbors? Especially the ones in the houses that face the park.”
Edward Bennett Wilkington shrugged.
“How about the green house down there?”
I pointed.
His eyes said both yes and no. “I know her to see her. But she’s weird. Always muttering about stuff in the alley.”
“Who’s she?”
“Agnes. The lady. Who lives there. Lived. I haven’t seen her in a few weeks. Months.”
“She lives alone?”
He nodded.
“Has anyone been in the house?”
“Not that I saw. She might know more,” he said, pointing across the courtyard to Meredith Burns’s apartment. “The other neighborhood cat lady.”
* * *
Meredith Burns told me where to find Agnes: a convalescent home called Brighton Lake, where she’d been since early April. “It was the Sunday after Easter,” she said. We were sitting on her porch, an annoying wind chime clanging over my shoulder. “That’s when it happened. I remember because I fed the cats the last of my leftover Easter ham. She usually fed them, the strays in the alley, that is. She kept her garage half open so they had a warm, dry place to go, and she’d put out the kibble every morning. I knew something was wrong when I saw the cats prowling around one day, begging for food. Agnes has her problems, but she always takes care of the cats.”
“That’s sweet.”
She nodded. “So I went in through the garage and up to the house, and she’d fallen. In her basement. I have no idea how long she’d been down there. But it was a frightening scene.”
Agnes had been trapped at the bottom of her basement steps for days, Meredith told me—hip broken, no food or water. And no antipsychotic medication, which she used to manage her paranoid schizophrenia. “I thought she was dead. She wasn’t moving. But I turned on a light and she started shrieking.” Meredith’s eyebrows knit together. “About Salome.”
“Salome.”
Another nod.
“Like, the Oscar Wilde play? Dance of the seven veils?”
“I don’t know. That’s just what she kept saying. I called 911 right away, of course. I tried to calm her down but I don’t—I had no idea what to do. She was very deep into something, in her mind.”
“Calling 911 seems to be your role here in the neighborhood.”
Meredith smiled. “Maybe you’re right.”
“So you and Agnes are friends?”
“Yes, I guess we are,” she said. “We sit out here in the evenings sometimes, when the weather is nice. My cats—I have three—they love Agnes. You can always tell that there’s something different about her, from her mannerisms. She doesn’t say a lot—the medication makes her feel fuzzy, she told me once. But she’s witty, very smart. It’s terrifying, frankly, how so many things can go wrong in the brain. And so quickly, too.”
She was right. I didn’t like thinking about that, the brain’s potential to betray us. “Since it happened, have you seen anyone at her house?”
“No.”
“Not even family?”
She pursed her lips. “Well, a few days after it happened, her daughter Suzy stopped by here. To thank me, for getting Agnes help. When I asked her if I could visit Agnes at Brighton Lake, she looked at me like I was an alien. Like why in the world would someone want to visit Agnes. They didn’t have much of a relationship. I’d never even seen her before.”
“So Agnes is just alone all the time.”
“Well, there’s a case manager from OHMH who checks on her. Once a week, I think.”
“OHMH?”
“Ohio Hospital for Mental Health. I drove her to appointments a couple times, but usually he takes her—A.J., that’s his name. A real nice young guy. He built the cat shelter in the garage. And I know she liked him. She even gave me his card once—she said, if anything ever happens to me, call A.J. first. He’ll know what to do.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Was she expecting something to happen to her?”
“She meant here,” Meredith said, tapping a temple. “And I thought she was just being sort of self-deprecating—I had no idea what was really going on under the surface. But when I saw the cats, that morning—I did call him, only he didn’t answer. That’s why I went into the house. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s probably good that you did,” I said. “She might not be alive otherwise.”
Her expression told me that she wasn’t so sure she’d done Agnes any favors.
I showed her a picture of Marin, but she didn’t recognize her.
“If you go see Agnes,” she said as I went down the porch steps, “would you tell her that I’m feeding the cats?”
TWELVE
I added the names of the Harlow family to my corkboard and leaned back in my desk chair, staring at them. Rather than narrowing my focus, what I’d learned about Crazy Aunt Agnes and the stray cats had actually only broadened it.
I pulled some background information on Nate Harlow and saw that Marin might have been telling the truth about one thing: Her son had been in legal trouble. Seven years ago, in the Cincinnati area, he’d been convicted of grand larceny. There was little detail available online, but I got the names of the arresting officer and the prosecuting attorney from the clerk of courts website, and left a pair of voice mails—which I gave twenty percent odds on actually getting returned.
Armed with the knowledge that at one point in her life, his mother had been Marin Harlow, I finally got somewhere on her background: a few misdemeanors in Delaware County, just like Georgette and Paul had said. Shoplifting, shoplifting, passing a bad check to a department store.
I wondered which had come first, the shoplifting or the check?
The eternal question.
None of these crimes sounded like the type of thing to require bail money, as the Harlows had said, but maybe that was a slight exaggeration on their part.
I got a drink and opened the balcony door and stood there looking out at the street while I sipped. Whiskey didn’t have magical properties. But sometimes it shook something loose. I thought back over what I’d done for the past few days.
Got shot at.
Got lied to.
Got into arguments with the cops who could help untangle this mess.
I wanted to know what the hell the police had found that made things look worse for my client. But if Tom hadn’t been willing to tell me that yesterday, there was probably no chance that he’d be into it after I kicked him out of my house. I remembered a conversation we’d had in bed late last year, about my tendency to stop an argument in its tracks by suggesting sexy times. He’d said something like If we weren’t doing this, what would happen if I said something you didn’t want to hear? Would you just throw me out? Apparently that was exactly what I would do.
A curious response, considering that Tom was one of the only people I could stand half the time.
While I was puzzling over that, I heard footsteps on the landing and a quiet knock at my door.
Spontaneous visits to my apartment hadn’t been going that well as of late. Gun in hand, I parted the curtains for a peek at who was out there.
Shelby.
She offered a sad little smile and my heart sank. My thoughts raced over my mental calendar—did we have plans? I couldn’t remember anything like that. I covered the gun with a stack of mail and unlocked the deadbolts.
“Shel, were we supposed to meet? Did I stand you up?”
“No,” she said, “no, I’m just, I needed somewhere to go and I, um, I need to talk to you. I hope it’s okay.”
I was relieved, but not that relieved. “Come in, of course it’s okay.”
Shelby sat down on one end of my sofa and I sat on the other end. She sighed. “This is going to sound so stupid.”
“Don’t worry about how it sounds. Just tell me.”
She looked at me. “So, you know that girl, Miriam.”
“Tori Amos. Right.”
“Yeah. We were talking today and she said she and some friends are going to this cabin next week, in Hocking Hills—it’s her aunt’s and it’s usually rented on the weekends but Mir can stay there during the week. Whatever, the point is, she’s going there with some friends on Tuesday and she invited me.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah, well. So I was telling my dad tonight, that I was going. And he was just, he said no way could I go to a cabin with a bunch of strangers, especially not some girl. And he asked,” she said, her eyes welling, “he said, are they all gays too, like that made the trip some kind of twisted orgy or something.”
Heat rose to my face. “Dammit, Joshua,” I said. “Shel—”
“No, before you say he didn’t mean it, after he said that, I told him Dad, I’m just telling you where I’m going, not asking if I can go, I’m eighteen, and he went well, you’re still living in my house and it just—I don’t even want to live in that stupid house. So I said fine, I don’t live here anymore and I left.” Her voice shook. Her eyes were on the floor a few feet in front of us.
I could tell that she’d never left her house that angry before. When I first met them, Joshua and Shelby were very close. I wanted them to be close. I wanted that for her—to have a good relationship with her dad, something I never had, and never would.
She continued, “And it was like he was saying that, because I’m, you know, that nothing would ever be normal, going camping with some people is like automatically deviant or something. I know you’re going to say that he’s just trying to protect me from the world but that’s crap, he doesn’t even care, he just wants to control me. If he wanted to protect me, he wouldn’t expect me to stay in that house. If he had his way, I’d live there till I was thirty and never go farther than the front porch.”
“Shelby, does he know where you are right now?”
She shook her head.
I turned to her. “I hear everything you’re saying. But you do know that he’s worried out of his mind right now.”
“I don’t care! He doesn’t get it. At all. God, why can’t I just live with you? You get it. I could pay you rent, I mean, you have all this space, and it would just be for a while, till I find a place—”
I opened my mouth, momentarily speechless. The thought of another person witnessing my day-to-day life filled me with spontaneous panic that had basically nothing to do with Shelby and everything to do with me.
She got up and went over to the screen door, where the soft sounds of early evening drifted in. “I’m such an idiot,” she muttered. “I’m not kidding when I say I have no friends. Not friends you go to in a crisis. Veronica wouldn’t even have been my friend if she didn’t live next door. I couldn’t really have friends, not with all his rules, him wanting to keep track of me all the time. And I’m never going to make friends at this rate, either.” Eyes still on the street, she folded her arms tightly across her chest. “But you know what, if I hadn’t had that stupid curfew, if I’d just gone with Veronica that night, none of this ever would have even happened.”
She covered her face with her hands, thin shoulders shaking.
“Shel,” I said. But then I didn’t know what else to say.
What had happened to Veronica Cruz wasn’t Shelby’s fault, or Joshua’s. But I could see her point, could see why she was so desperate to get away from Belmont, why Joshua’s my house, my rules was the very last thing she needed. “It’s not that I don’t want you here.”
“No. Forget I said anything.” Even though she didn’t look up at me, I could see the tension and embarrassment on her face and hear it in her voice. “It was a dumb idea, sorry, we don’t have to talk about it.”
“No, it’s not dumb, you just surprised me. But Shel, I know I probably need a role model more than you do, and I know you’re not a kid—but, well,” I paused, my stomach twisting as I tried to think of how to say it, “I’m kind of a mess. You know?”
She shook her head, still not looking at me.
I thought about my own teenage years, how my dad had kicked me out a few months shy of my high school graduation. If my brother Andrew hadn’t taken me in, there was no telling what would have become of me. And Shelby didn’t have siblings. I heard myself sigh. “You can stay here tonight.”
She finally turned to face me, her green eyes hopeful. “Really?”
“Really. What’s a cool surrogate aunt for?”
Shelby smiled and wiped her face.
“But you have to call your dad first so he knows where you are. And tell him that we need to talk.”
THIRTEEN
The door to my guest bedroom was half open when I woke on Sunday morning, Shelby still asleep in that dramatic teenager way with one foot hanging off the mattress and the blankets over her head. I fished a spare key out of my desk drawer and left Shelby a note on the bulletin board in the hallway: Lock up, and come back if you need to. Then I grabbed a spoonful of peanut butter by way of breakfast and headed out into the world to see about some loose ends.
As I walked up the sidewalk, I called Shelby’s house. “Hi, it’s Roxane Weary,” I said when Joshua Evans answered.
“Roxane,” he said, his voice tense, “oh God, is everything okay?”
“Hey, relax,” I said. He sighed audibly. “Everything’s fine. Shelby’s still asleep. Listen, how about we get together this week?”
A beat passed before he answered, and when he did, his voice had turned hopeful. “The three of us?”
“No. You and me. We can get a drink, have dinner, and catch up.”
“That—yeah, that would be nice.”
“Great,” I said. Last fall I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to meddle in their lives any more than I already had, but that seemed unavoidable at this point. We made plans to meet up that night at Taverna Athena, whose melitzanosalata was literally the only good thing Belmont had going for it.
After another drive by Agnes’s house—where exactly nothing was happening yet—I tried Leila’s building again. The UPS notice remained on the door, but today that door was propped open while two deliverymen carried in a mattress and box springs.
I parked on a side street and went in behind them.
Leila’s apartment was on the second floor. When I knocked I heard nothing, not the hopeful unlatching of a chain lock, nor the less promising—but better than nothing—scuffle of somebody trying to escape out the window.
Nothing.
I knocked on the other three apartment doors on the floor. Only one person answered, a harried woman in hospital scrubs.
“Yeah, hi,” I said, “I need your neighbor’s signature, have you seen her—”
“Maybe try knocking on her door then,” the woman barked at me. “I need to go.”
She bustled out of the apartment and into the stairwell.
It made m
e feel almost fond of my neighbor Birdsong for a second.
Back in the narrow lobby, the deliverymen were bringing in a bed frame. I pressed myself against the wall to let them by, taking the opportunity to examine the row of—locked—mailboxes. Leila’s was bursting at the seams; a wrinkled white envelope was sticking out from the bottom corner.
Once the bed frame was gone and I was alone in the lobby, I tugged on the edge of the envelope. It came free easily, but it was only an American Express solicitation. I opened it anyway, in case it contained some previously unknown bit of information about the woman. But it didn’t.
Hardly worth the federal crime now on my conscience.
I ripped it into eighths and tucked it into a coffee cup on the top of an almost-full trash can by the door, then shoved the entire thing deep into the rest of the garbage, delicately avoiding drips of coffee and whatever else was in there. The maneuvering caused me to shift the balance of stuff that had been thrown away, and something interesting displayed itself on the top of the pile.
A flyer, featuring a photo of the building in which I now stood.
AVAILABLE!
1 and 2 bedroom modern lofts
Secure parking
24/7 fitness center access at Snap
Some units fully furnished
Possible short term lease
$1295-$2195
The exorbitant rent wasn’t what interested me. It was the logo at the bottom right of the sheet:
THE PHOENIX GROUP
Vincent Pomp’s company.
I plucked the flyer out of the trash and gave it a shake, then sat down on the modular sofa by the window and smoothed out the flyer.
So Pomp owned or managed the building where Leila lived, and his daughter was murdered at Leila’s former place of employment.
I could make excuses for one coincidence, but not two.
* * *
While I was making connections left and right, I decided to follow up on Arthur’s other employee. Bobby Veach lived in the end unit of a row of town houses north of Crosswoods—or had lived, anyway. The door to his unit stood open as I approached it and I could see an expanse of beige carpet and a pile of boxes and hear the hum of a vacuum. I knocked on the doorframe and waited. I’d hesitated before coming up here, since I had just seen the man yesterday and he didn’t seem keen on talking to me. But in fairness I’d given him two business cards and four days during which to call me, and he hadn’t.
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