Meredith Potts Fourteen Book Cozy Mystery Set

by Meredith Potts

  Rebecca took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I wish I knew more, but none of this makes any sense to me.”

  As I stared into Rebecca’s eyes, I knew that she wasn’t putting one over on me. She had told me everything that she knew. It just happened to be a lot less information than I was expecting.

  I pulled out my business card and handed it to her. “Again, I’m really sorry for your loss. If you can think of anything that might help me find out why this happened, don’t hesitate to call me.”

  Chapter Five

  After back-to-back frustrating conversations, I found myself desperately needing to catch a break. Perhaps a tour of Jennifer’s apartment could provide the answers that my discussions with Detective Willett and Rebecca Patterson couldn’t.

  Mark Richardson let me into his daughter’s apartment to poke around and search for clues. The first thing that struck me about Jennifer’s one-bedroom rental was how amazingly clean the place was. That was especially noteworthy given the fact that college students weren’t exactly known for being tidy. As I glanced around, it looked as if a maid had been here recently, even though I knew that wasn’t the case. According to Mark, this was exactly how his daughter had left the place.

  That made what I saw even more peculiar to me. If she was suicidal, why did she keep her place so spotless? Not just that, but there were clean dishes sitting on a rack in the sink and a basket of clean, folded clothes in her bedroom. What kind of suicidal person did dishes and the laundry before killing themselves? It would have made infinitely more sense to have walked in here to have found the place in a state of disarray.

  While my attention was on those little curiosities, Mark’s focus was elsewhere. He was too busy wrestling with grief to notice subtle details. What a poor guy. He had the unenviable job of packing up his daughter’s belongings. I could only imagine how excruciating of a task that was. Each item that he looked at, no matter how small or seemingly unremarkable, seemed to bring a tearful memory with it.

  I comforted Mark as much as I could, but there was only so much I could do. After a few moments, Mark regained some control over his emotions and encouraged me to continue my work. I looked around Jennifer’s apartment in search of any clue I could find.

  As I made a quick sweep of her place, a number of things stood out to me, but one in particular.

  “That’s interesting,” I said.

  Mark turned to me with great interest. “What’s interesting?”

  “I don’t see her wallet, purse, or cell phone anywhere, but that makes sense because she most likely would have had all of that on her at the time of her death.”

  Mark stared at me with a look of deep confusion. “I’m not following. What’s so interesting, then?”

  “Those aren’t the only things that I don’t see here. For example, you told me that your daughter had a laptop computer.”

  “She did.”

  “I have looked through the entire apartment, but I haven’t seen a laptop anywhere.”

  Mark tried to make sense of that. “Well, maybe she brought it with her.”

  “To the gorge? Why would she do that? I mean, if you’re going to jump, why would you bring your laptop with you?”

  Mark opened his mouth to reply, but none came out.

  “Can’t think of an answer, can you?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I wasn’t quite as dumbfounded as he was. “I can think of one answer, but only if her death was a murder and not a suicide.”

  “What answer?”

  “Say this was in fact a murder. What if Jennifer had something on her laptop that her killer didn’t want getting out? What better way to get rid of it than to throw the laptop into the gorge?”

  “Does that mean that you are now leaning towards the idea my daughter was murdered?”

  “It’s too early for me to tell, but my job is to consider every possibility, and a missing laptop certainly stands out as highly curious,” I said.

  Mark’s forehead wrinkled. “That being said, I don’t understand why anyone would want to kill my daughter.”

  “I don’t have an answer for you.”

  Mark sighed. “Neither do I.” As he got caught up in his grief, he became desperate to change the subject. “Did you notice anything else out of the ordinary?”

  “A couple of things, actually.”

  “Like what?”

  I handed Mark a diary that I had found under Jennifer’s bed.

  He opened it up and began flipping through it.

  “Is this what I think it is?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “Under her bed.”

  I could see a light flickering on in his head as if he had never thought to look there.

  Mark became excited. “Maybe all the answers I’ve been looking for are right here.”

  I hated to burst his bubble, but that seemed inevitable considering what I had to say to him. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Why?”

  “You said your daughter died on March sixteenth, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Flip to the back of the diary,” I said.

  He did.

  I continued. “If you notice, her last entry was on February sixteenth.”

  “Wait a minute. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “My thoughts exactly. She wrote an entry every single day until exactly a month before her death. Then on February sixteenth, she abruptly stopped, only to never start again.”

  Mark stared at the diary utterly confused. “This can’t be right. Are you sure it isn’t missing any pages?”

  “I checked the binding closely. It doesn’t look like any pages have been ripped out. For whatever strange reason, she just stopped writing entries.”

  He looked up at me with wide eyes. “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mark started reading the last entry in the diary then became frustrated.

  “My sentiments exactly. You’d think her last entry would have given a clue as to why she decided to stop writing, but it reads like everything was normal in her life,” I said.

  Mark stared out the window at the horizon in the distance. “We have to be missing something.”

  I reached out for the diary. “Do you mind if I take this and read it over?”

  “Be my guest. If it’ll help you figure all this out, it’s yours,” Mark said.

  I put the diary in my purse to look it over later.

  Mark groaned. “I’m more confused now than ever.”

  “I hate to say it, but I found something else.”

  “More?” he asked anxiously.

  I nodded.

  “What is it now?”

  I handed him a pill bottle that I had found in the medicine cabinet of Jennifer’s bathroom.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A prescription for Miloxinex,” I replied.

  Mark was in disbelief. “Miloxinex?”

  “Let me guess. It’s a complete surprise to you?”

  “It sure is.” Mark read the label on the bottle. “Isn’t this for anxiety?”

  I nodded. Unfortunately, I knew a little about Miloxinex. A friend of mine had been wrestling with anxiety for years. That being said, anxiety and depression were very different things. Typically, anxiety did not lead to suicide. Although, if a person’s panic attack was severe enough, it made them feel like they wanted to die.

  At the same time, it did seem curious that Jennifer had a prescription for an antianxiety medication and not an antidepressant. I took note of the doctor’s name that was on the pill bottle in case that would come in handy later.

  “So you had no idea that she was taking this?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I wonder when she started a prescription,” I speculated.

  Mark shrugged his shoulders. “I have no clue. This is really concerning to see, though.”

  “I�
��ll say.”

  Mark took a deep breath as he tried to process all the things I had just thrown at him. After taking a moment to let it all sink in, he turned his focus back to me. “Did you find anything else?”

  I shook my head. “No. But it’s a good start.”

  Chapter Six

  Suddenly, my head was filled with even more questions than before. As Jennifer’s boyfriend lived in the same apartment complex as her, he was the logical person to turn to for answers. I decided to pay him a visit, only to find myself becoming distracted along the way.

  I couldn’t help it. As an investigator, one of the key components of my job was to observe details. Walking through the halls of that apartment building, the details that stood out to me all related to how ragged the place was. Student housing was a unique animal. For notoriously cash-strapped college students, the cost of rent had a tendency to matter infinitely more than all other factors combined.

  While the price was right for these apartments, it was jarring to have come from such a beautiful brick campus to such an unkempt apartment building. Granted, the selling point of the building was that it was only a five-minute walk to campus, but the proximity to such beauty only made these charmless apartments look rattier in comparison.

  When I finally reached Tyler Wright’s apartment, the sticker on the door indicating the unit number was nearly completely peeled off. I could have gone on a rant about what a slumlord the apartment manager clearly was, but there were bigger fish to fry, especially when Jennifer’s boyfriend opened his front door.

  Tyler Wright was a cocky nineteen-year-old with long black hair, a slender body, and a handsome face. The problem was, he knew exactly how attractive he was. Humility was not a word in his vocabulary. The guy acted like the world revolved around him.

  I knew for a fact that it didn’t. Not that he would be interested in hearing that. Tyler reminded me of Brock Jones, a guy that lived in the same dorm as me back in my college days. It was hard to believe that was a decade and a half ago. Yikes. Time had really slipped away from me quicker than I realized.

  It turned out the swagger had slipped away from Brock as well. I had seen a post of his on social media a few months back. Gone was the world-conquering mindset. It had been replaced by the sobering humility that came with raising children. Not just any old kids, though. It was safe to say that karma had been busy doling out the most fitting revenge that a ladies’ man could ever be confronted with—having to raise three boy-crazy teenaged daughters.

  Yikes. It came as no surprise that Brock was in over his head trying to juggle the hormones, drama, and overabundance of estrogen in his house and had begun prematurely losing his hair.

  That wasn’t to say that Tyler Wright would eventually suffer the same fate that Brock was now dealing with, but I wouldn’t put it past the universe to give Tyler the same lot in life down the road. Time would tell.

  In the meantime, one thing was certain—Tyler believed that life existed to operate by his own rules. His arrogance aside, one thing about him stood out to me more than anything. Namely, while I had a slew of questions to ask him, he did not look the least bit interested in answering them. That was even before I had told him that I was a private investigator.

  The moment he found out that I was there about a case, he looked like he wanted to slam the door shut on our conversation before it really had a chance to begin. What was curious to me was why he was being so cold to me in the first place.

  I knew that some men kept their emotions walled off, but this was ridiculous. His girlfriend had died only a few weeks ago. If ever there was a time to show some vulnerability, it was now. The fact that he wasn’t doing that made me think he had something to hide.

  One thing was clear—if I was going to get any information out of him, I would need to find a way to make him lower his guard.

  I started off simply, making an appeal to his softer side—if he even had one.

  “I’m sorry about your loss,” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s terrible,” he replied.

  His mouth said one thing, but his body language said another. Either he wasn’t a very expressive person, or he wasn’t all that broken up about Jennifer’s death. Neither of those scenarios cast him in a favorable light. Not that he cared what I thought about him. He showed zero interest in hearing my opinion. That was unfortunate because I was going to tell him what I thought whether he wanted to hear it or not.

  “Do you have any idea how this could have happened?” I asked.

  Tyler’s eyes widened. “It beats me. The news came out of nowhere.”

  “So there was no indication that she was thinking about taking her life?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  I waited for him to elaborate, so far with nothing to show for my efforts. It was a good thing I wasn’t holding my breath, or my face would have turned blue. I still couldn’t figure out why getting an answer from him was like pulling teeth. Why was he making me work so hard? Didn’t he want to know the truth behind his girlfriend’s supposed suicide? Or was he being cagey because the truth made him look bad?

  I was already having enough trouble getting him to answer basic questions. The more advanced ones would take some serious perseverance to get answers to. Luckily, I happened to be a doggedly determined woman.

  “Did you know that Jennifer was taking Miloxinex?” I asked.

  A blank expression came to his face as he replied, “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It’s a medication that treats anxiety.”

  Tyler was at just as big of a loss as ever. “She was taking antianxiety medication?”

  “I was hoping you would have the answer to that.”

  “You came to the wrong place, then.”

  I hated to keep shaking him down, but there just seemed to be a lot more to the story than he was letting on, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. “She never mentioned being overly anxious to you?”

  “No.”

  It took all the restraint I had to keep from letting out a groan. I don’t know how he did it, but he kept finding new ways to rub me the wrong way. It just didn’t seem possible that he knew as little about his girlfriend as his answers indicated. Either he was lying, or he truly didn’t know his girlfriend very well. My bet was on the former.

  “Did she ever have any panic attacks that you know of?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about depression? Did she recently show signs that she was really unhappy?”

  “Not really.”

  Tyler’s answers had been so black and white up to that point that I seized on the first sign of gray area that I spotted.

  “What do you mean, not really?” I asked.

  “Well, no one’s life is perfect. We’re all unhappy every once in a while. But I would have never called her depressed.”

  “So she just had a few bad days every now and then?”

  Tyler nodded.

  “What was the cause of those bad days?”

  “Sometimes it was stressing about a really tough test coming up. Other times it was being short on money. You know, the usual stuff.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Apparently, in Tyler’s world, that’s what passed as an in-depth answer. It was no wonder that this conversation was so frustrating.

  Argh.

  I continued down my list of questions, hoping to dig up some kind of a lead.

  “Do you know of anyone that might have been out to get her?”

  “What do you mean, out to get her?”

  I couldn’t figure out why that was such a difficult question for him. I thought it was pretty self-explanatory. But if he really needed me to spell it out for him, I would do it.

  I followed up. “Was there anyone she really didn’t get along with?”

  He hesitated before shaking his head. “No. I can’t think of anyone.”

  This conversation was maddening. I was ready to scream, but I decided to save that f
or later. Since I was getting nowhere with that line of questioning, I switched gears.

  “How would you describe your relationship?” I asked.

  “Good.”

  Once again, I found myself waiting for elaboration that never came. I could barely believe it, but that was all he was going to give me. Who knew syllables were so hard to come by? If he hadn’t noticed already, I wasn’t about to put that topic to bed so easily.

  “So you two weren’t having any problems?” I replied.

  “No.”

  I don’t think I had ever heard the word “no” so many times in one conversation. After another one-word reply, I opened my mouth to ask him a new follow-up question. That’s when he surprised me by speaking up.

  “Anyway, have to be getting to class,” Tyler said.

  I didn’t know his class schedule, so I couldn’t call him out, but the timing of him cutting our conversation short did seem rather curious. Since he clearly didn’t plan on sharing any more information with me, I decided not to put up a fight.

  “I understand,” I replied.

  I let Tyler go on his way but kept an eye on him from afar. My gut was telling me to keep tabs on him. After finishing up his conversation with me, Tyler grabbed his book bag, slung it over his shoulder, and headed out of the apartment complex.

  I expected him to start walking towards campus, but much to my surprise, he strolled across the street to a blue, beat-up sedan that was parked across from the apartment complex. Tyler got in the passenger side of the vehicle, which was being driven by a redhead with curly hair.

  I didn’t recognize the woman, but I made a mental note to find that out. That became especially important when I saw Tyler lean over in the car to give her a kiss. Suddenly, determining the identity of the redhead took on great importance.

  So much for mourning the loss of his girlfriend. No wonder Tyler didn’t seem terribly broken up about Jennifer’s death. He had apparently already moved on. I couldn’t believe it. As the redhead fired up her car to drive away, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and took a quick picture of her.

  Chapter Seven