Maw-Maw snickered.
Ashara glared first at her, and then at me. “Fine. As soon as the bank opens, I’ll let them know.”
“Good,” I said. “In the meantime, we need to call Stephen. Howard doesn’t recognize his car.”
“Sure,” said Ashara. “Let me get my cell.”
Maw-Maw and I glanced at each other.
“You can both just quit it,” Ashara said. “Yes, I have his number. He’s part of this, too. I knew we might need to get in touch with him.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Maw-Maw said, clearly humoring her.
Ashara shook her head in irritation and flounced out of the room.
Maw-Maw and I snickered.
A few moments later, Ashara re-entered the living room. “Well,” she said, “I woke him up. Hope you’re happy.”
“Is he coming over here?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m happy.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “He’ll be here in about forty-five minutes. I’m going to go take a shower and get dressed.”
“Be sure to wear something pretty,” Maw-Maw called out after her.
“You are a bad, bad woman,” I teased affectionately.
She smiled sweetly. “That’s why you like me so much,” she said.
Chapter Fifteen
“So we need to find out how the Powells are connected to either the Howards or the McClatcheys,” I said after catching Stephen up on the history we’d learned from Maw-Maw.
“Do you have any idea how to do that?” Stephen asked.
“I do,” Ashara said. “At least, I know where to start. There’s genealogy stuff all over the internet.”
“Sounds like a good place to start,” I said.
“We can go back to my place,” Stephen and Ashara said at the same time.
“Not your place,” I said to Ashara. “Clifford Howard knows which street you live on.”
“Mine it is, then,” Stephen said cheerfully.
Stephen lived in an apartment over one of the old downtown buildings, overlooking the square.
“So what’s your theory?” Stephen asked me as the three of us walked in.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “But I’m wondering if the white woman that married the Powell boy was a McClatchey. That would explain how Rick McClatchey ended up with the key--maybe it was his aunt or something.”
“So how do the Howards fit into this, then?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Except that maybe the money in Mary Powell’s safe deposit box belonged to the Howards at one point. That would give the Howards a motive for killing Jimmy Powell.”
“But where did they get it?” Ashara asked.
“Maybe they had money at some point?” I suggested. “That old house Clifford Howard lives in looks like it might have been a pretty nice farmhouse at some point.”
“And if everyone calls it the old Howard place road,” Stephen said, “they were probably fairly prominent at some point.”
“Well, all that’s left now is some creepy psycho killer guy,” I said. “And he’s not going to go away until we figure out who the money belonged to originally, why the key ended up with Rick and Molly McClatchey, how Clifford Howard found out about it, and why Jeffrey McClatchey didn’t just steal it. Why did they have to kill Molly?”
“God,” said Ashara, “when you put it that way, it sounds like an awful lot of work.”
Stephen bit his lower lip and looked thoughtful. “You know what? I have an idea. You two stay here and do the genealogy research. I’m going to go to the library and look something up.”
“Okay,” I said. “Want to share?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. Come on in to the bedroom and I’ll get the computer started for you.”
His room was spare--a bed with a simple quilt, a desk with a computer, and a few bookshelves. I checked the titles on his shelf; I’ve always thought that the books someone keeps around can tell you a lot about that person. His were almost all labeled “classics”--lots of novels by people like Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. I’d been an English major in college, but I hadn’t read even a third of the books he had on his shelf.
Interesting, I thought. A man who repairs musical instruments and reads nineteenth-century novels. Probably smart, too. Ashara could do a lot worse.
“Okay, then,” Stephen said, knocking me out of my reverie. “I’m leaving. Call me on my cell if you need me. I’ll bring lunch with me when I come back.”
Ashara waved at him without looking away from the computer screen. She was already absorbed.
Two hours later we were both ready to take a break. Do you have any idea how many Powells, Howards, and McClatcheys are listed on the internet? Yeah. I hadn’t realized it, either. Roughly seventy-two bajillion, from what I could tell. We’d eliminated a bunch of them, but hadn’t yet come up with the information we wanted.
Ashara stood up and stretched her arms above her head. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to get some water or something.”
I nodded, staring at the computer and wishing I could do something more than just look over her shoulder. Sometimes I really hate being incorporeal. Life was easier when I was . . . well, alive.
“Hey!” I said, suddenly hit by an overwhelming desire to connect to my old life. “Can you check my email for me?”
Ashara stared at me. “Callie, honey, I hate to tell you this, but you’re dead.”
“That doesn’t mean that they closed off my email account. No one else even knows the password. Come on. I’m just curious.”
So Ashara sat back down, opened a browser, went to my email provider and logged me in. I had 134 new messages.
Most of them were spam.
A few of them were from work colleagues and friends, mostly posted within a day or two of my death, mostly asking if I wanted to get together for lunch or drinks or dinner.
“Doesn’t this freak you out at all?” Ashara asked as she opened one of the non-spam messages and let me read it.
I shook my head. “It makes me a little sad, but mostly it reminds me that I really did have a life. A real one, with a job and friends and everything.”
Then all the personal emails stopped three days after my death. I guessed that was when the news got around.
Except for one. There was one email at the very bottom of the “new messages” list. It was dated almost two weeks after my death.
It was from my mother.
I pointed to it. “Open that one,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“Are you sure?” Ashara asked.
I nodded silently, not trusting my voice.
“My dearest, darling, baby girl,” the message began. “I know you’ll never get this, but I need to send it.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
Ashara stood up. “I’ll leave you alone to read this one.”
I won’t give you the details. It hurts too much. Suffice to say that it was an expression of my mother’s grief and rage and deep loss, emailed out into the void, sent to a daughter she believed would never receive it.
Ghosts can’t cry, I discovered as I read it.
For one insane moment, I wanted to ask Ashara to answer it for me. But I knew I couldn’t. If I couldn’t go to her myself, then I couldn’t send my mother an email. She’d think it was a hoax. It would cause her even more hurt than she already felt. I couldn’t do that to her.
Ashara came back into the room a few moments later.
“Done?” she asked softly.
“Completely,” I said. “Remind me never to do that again.”
“Agreed,” she said. I looked up at her and saw tears in her eyes.
“I kind of wish I could give you a hug right now,” she said.
“Yeah. Me, too,” I admitted. I took a deep breath--marveling again that I could actually feel as if I were breathing--and said, “Okay, enough weepiness. Let’s get back to work.”
* * * *
An ho
ur later, we found what we’d been looking for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I had expected.
The younger Mary Powell had named her son after her brother Jimmy. The elder Mary Powell had brought him up and when he moved to Atlanta, James Powell had married a woman named Gloria Lee. No relation to the McClatcheys.
“Damn,” I muttered.
“Double damn,” Ashara agreed.
We both jumped when we heard the front door slam.
“It’s just me,” Stephen called out from the living room. “I brought food in case anyone’s hungry.”
I followed Ashara into the living room. “I’m not hungry,” I said, “but I bet Ashara is. And we’ve got something to tell you.”
“I’ve got something to tell you, too,” Stephen said, excitement in his voice.
“Did you find anything useful?” I asked.
“Maybe.” He began pulling burgers and fries out of a paper bag. “You tell me what you found while Ashara and I eat, and then I’ll tell you what I found.”
My telling didn’t take long. I left out the bit about the email from my mother, of course, just sticking to the genealogical search on the Powell family.
“Well,” said Stephen, then paused dramatically.
“What?” I demanded.
“I think I figured out where all that money came from.”
Ashara stared at him open-mouthed. “Really? Where?”
“Jimmy Powell and the Howard brothers stole it,” Stephen announced. “From a bank in Atlanta. They were bank robbers.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ashara and I ran over one another answering him. “You’re kidding”--“No way”--“Really?”
When we had finally stopped talking, he pulled a file folder out of a backpack lying on the floor next to his plaid couch. In the folder was a sheaf of papers, all photocopies of old newspaper reports about a bank robbery in Atlanta, Georgia.
“Your story about a safe deposit box full of old money made me think about bank robberies,” he said. “I mean, where else does anyone get that much cash?”
“But what makes you think it was Jimmy and the Howards?” I asked.
He tried to hand one of the copies to me. I cocked an eyebrow at him and waved a hand through the paper.
“Oh. Right,” he said. “I forgot.”
“That’s okay. Just read it to us.”
“It’s short,” he said. Stephen cleared his throat and began to read aloud.
“Dateline. Atlanta, Georgia, July 25, 1947. Yesterday morning, three armed gunmen robbed Atlanta’s Fourth Federal Bank.”
“Fourth Federal?” interrupted Ashara. “Who banks at Fourth Federal? Who names a bank Fourth Federal?”
“Do you want to hear the rest of the article or not?” Stephen said.
“Okay, okay. I’ll shut up. But still. Fourth Federal.” She shook her head.
Stephen smiled and continued reading.
“The gunmen are believed to have gotten away with over $50,000 in cash.”
Ashara let out a low whistle. I nodded. I didn’t think that there had been quite so much in the safe deposit box, but then, some of it might have been spent. And how would I know what fifty grand in cash looked like, anyway? I was a ghost who used to design pamphlets for phone companies.
“Witness say that the three men were wearing masks. However, at least one witness claims that two of the men were white, but that the third man was a Negro.” He paused over the word, shaking his head briefly before continuing.
“At this time, police are claiming no leads in the case. Anyone with any further information about the case is urged to come forward.”
He looked up. “That’s about it.”
“So what makes you so sure these bank robbers are Jimmy Powell and the Howard brothers?” I asked.
Stephen shook his head. “I’m not, entirely. But it makes sense.”
“Why Atlanta?” Ashara asked. “Birmingham’s closer.”
“That may be exactly why they chose Atlanta,” Stephen said. “It’s far enough away that no one is likely to recognize them.”
“And Fourth Federal couldn’t have been one of your bigger banks,” I said, “so they might have felt safer going after it.”
“And it explains why Jimmy Powell got into it with the Howards,” Ashara said. “That much money in 1947? It’d be enough to kill for.”
Stephen and I nodded.
“But how can we be sure the money came from that particular bank robbery?” I asked.
“There’ll be records,” Ashara said confidently. “Serial numbers, that sort of stuff. Even Bank South has records going back to the 30s and 40s.”
“But does Fourth Federal even still exist?” I asked.
“Actually, it does,” Stephen said. “I checked that out, too.”
Ashara smiled at him admiringly. I pretended not to notice.
“Okay, then,” I said. “I guess the next thing is to get at least one of those bills.”
“Were there any five-hundred-dollar bills?” Ashara asked.
“I don’t remember seeing any,” I said. “Why?”
“Because either a five hundred or a thousand-dollar bill would be best,” Ashara said. “Those are the least common, the easiest to trace.”
“Okay. So we need a big bill,” I said.
“You know,” said Ashara thoughtfully, “those high-denomination bills haven’t been in circulation for ages. They stopped printing them in the thirties, I think. They’d be worth a lot more than their face value now.”
We all stared at each other for a long moment.
“So,” Stephen finally said. “How do we go about stealing a thousand-dollar bill from one of these guys?”
“I’ll have to go in and figure out where they’re hiding the money,” I said. “But then y’all are going to have to go in to actually get the bill. On accounta I’m dead and all. Makes it hard to carry things.”
Stephen gave me a sidelong glance.
“Sorry,” I said. “I get sarcastic when I get nervous.”
“I’m beginning to notice that.”
I took a deep non-breath. “Okay, then. I’ll start at Jeffrey McClatchey’s--he seems less dangerous. He hasn’t actually cut anyone into tiny pieces.”
“That we know of,” Ashara said.
“Great,” I said. “Thanks for the reminder.”
She shrugged. “We need to remember to keep our guard up. Just because he didn’t kill Molly doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of killing one of us.”
Stephen nodded. “She’s right.”
“I still say he’s the lesser of the two evil dudes,” I said.
“Oh, hell yeah,” said Ashara. “Definitely hit his place first.”
“Okay. I’ll be back in a bit to tell you what I find.”
“We’ll be waiting,” Stephen said.
* * * *
It took me a while to find Jeffrey McClatchey’s house again--I’d only been there once, after all. But I did finally find it. Eventually. All those subdivisions looked the same to me.
I poked my head in through the door, waiting to see if an alarm went off. None did, so I slipped into the house. In retrospect, it probably would have made more sense to go in through a wall or a window--someplace less likely to have an alarm attached to it. I’m still getting used to this being a ghost business.
The house was empty. I started in the bedroom, looking for the bag of cash he’d stuffed under his car seat.
It wasn’t in the closet. Or under the bed. Or under the sink in the bathroom, or under the couch in the living room, or in the vegetable crisper in the refrigerator. It wasn’t in any of the places that I would have tried to hide it if I’d had a bag full of money.
I heaved a sigh and stood in the middle of the living room. Where else might a thirty-something man hide a briefcase full of extraordinarily valuable bills?
A single thirty-something man. What did I know about single thirty-something men?
Well, I used to
date some of them. Not that my dating experience was going to be of any help here. I could pretty much claim with impunity and complete honesty that every single thirty-something man that I had personally dated had had something terribly wrong with him. If he hadn’t, he would have been married by then. At least, that was the conclusion I’d come to when I was still alive.
Then again, there was clearly something wrong with this guy, too. He’d been involved in having his sister-in-law chopped into little bitty bits.
And then it hit me. The biggest stereotype in the book. Single men don't cook. I knew it wasn't true; I'd gone out with some men who had cooked extraordinarily well. But it was worth a try.
The oven was empty. On second thought, the oven might not be anyone's first choice, particularly someone who didn't want to cook the big pile of money he'd just gotten.
I spent another hour looking in every spot I could think of. And some that just caught my attention as I passed by. I don't know until then that I could search a house quite so thoroughly.
"Dammit," I said aloud. "Where did you put it?"
He'd only had it for a little while. He hadn't had all that long to stash it away.
Maybe he has it with him, I thought. If I had a briefcase full of cash, I might not want to let it out of my sight. For all I knew, it might still be shoved under the passenger seat of his car.
I let out several loud curses--the sort that Maw-Maw might have washed my mouth out with soap for, if I'd had a real mouth to wash out.
I was going to have to go to Clifford Howard's house and see if I could find the money there.
And I couldn't leave town without Maw-Maw.
More curses. I was glad Maw-Maw wasn’t here.
With a huge sigh, I went back to Stephen's.
I walked in on them kissing. Stephen and Ashara. On the couch. Total make-out session. Oops. I guess that's what I get for walking in through locked doors. Well, I thought, that progressed faster than I thought it would. I ducked back out of the room and made a big show of calling out as I re-entered through the door, swinging my leg in first to give them a chance to disengage. Untangle themselves. Whatever.
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