Losing Patients (Animal Instincts Book 4) (4 page)

“Shit,” I said. “That’s not what she’s going to want to hear, and I really liked this house. At least tell me it was a long time ago. That might make things better.”

He shook his head but didn’t say a word.

“Recently? So much for this one. Do you know how hard it is to find a house where no one has ever died? Especially if it’s an older house. They all have someone who passed away from old age or something.” I didn’t like pouring it on so thick, but I needed to get him talking. While I felt bad about it, I also remembered that the Adamsons had been separated at the time of her death, which made it less likely that he was as torn up about it.

Finally he spoke. “Yeah, it was this month. My ex-wife committed suicide here.”

I tried to feign surprise. I wasn’t sure how well I did, because I’d never really excelled at acting, but he seemed to be convinced. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have asked,” I stumbled over the words, which seemed appropriate in the situation.

He shrugged. “We were getting a divorce, so I’m not miserable, but it’s a tough thing to think about.”

“I understand. It’s especially hard on the kids,” I added.

“No kids. Just a cat, but I got custody of that,” he said with a smirk. He definitely did not seem broken up by the events.

“Why here? I mean, why not at home?”

He shrugged again. “She always liked this house, but I have no idea why she’d want to do it here. She actually went in through the back of the house and then hung herself from a pipe in the basement. Pretty nasty stuff. They called me to identify the body, so I know that I’ll never do that. What was that saying about leaving a pretty corpse? Not from hanging.”

“So you were living elsewhere? Was it near here? Is there anything for sale around there?” I asked, hoping to learn more about the situation. He had opened up, and I didn’t want him to close down before I had some information. The bad thing about not being a cop was that you were at the mercy of their time and mood. Either could have them shoo you off.

“I lived about five blocks over from here, but I traveled all the time. I was actually in Lima the night it happened. They called my hotel there and let me know.” He mentioned a hotel that I hadn’t heard of, but I filed it away for future investigation.

I nodded. “I think James Dean said that about the pretty corpse.” I hoped I was right, but I was more interested in keeping the conversation going. “So you got the house now? And you’re living here?”

He gave me half a smile. “Yeah, the only up side to this is that by killing herself now, I got everything. The house, the money, the cat, everything.”

“That is a positive,” I agreed. I wondered about couples who lost the spark that had caused them to marry in the first place. It was certainly too soon for me to be speculating about a future with Detective Green. However, I wondered what had driven my parents to stay together after Susan left. They hadn’t been happy together, and my father had drunk more than he should. Had they just stayed together out of habit, or did they truly love each other?

Given that Mr. Adamson was busy telling me that he’d inherited everything, I suspected that he’d given up on the relationship for a while. My first guess was that he’d been cheating on Mrs. Adamson like in many cases with couples who had been married for a while. No matter what they claimed to be the reason for their split, it ended up being about another person in the relationship.

So now I had two motives for Mrs. Adamson to be a victim of murder rather than a suicide. While I couldn’t discount entirely that this might be exactly what it looked like, somebody definitely gained from her death.

I thanked Mr. Adamson for his help, went back to my car, and drove home.

My answering machine light was blinking when I returned. I had finally given in and bought a smart phone, but I stayed old school enough that I kept a landline and an answering machine for my business.

I played the message. Mrs. Givens’ voice came over the machine. She asked me to call her immediately. She had something she wanted to ask their dog, Nelly. I returned her call and got back in the car again. This was not going to be a nice stay-at-home day. I was so busy visiting other people’s pets that I couldn’t spend time with my own.

I got out of my car at the Givens house. Nelly was there in a heartbeat, wagging her tail. Drool sprayed from her mouth as she tried to get me to play with her. I looked around for Mrs. Givens, but I didn’t see her. Nelly and I walked to the door together. While the dog could go in without warning, I stayed at the door and knocked several times.

Mrs. Givens came out of the kitchen, drying her hands. “I’m so glad that you came. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I needed to talk to someone.” Her face was pale and gaunt. The smiles from earlier had disappeared, and frown lines now showed around her mouth. I wasn’t sure what had happened to her, but it was severe.

“No problem. You wanted to ask Nelly something?” I wanted to hear what this was. So often in the guise of asking me to ask a pet something, people revealed all sorts of dark secrets. I had a hunch that this would be another of those instances.

She sighed. There was a gym bag in the corner of the living room that hadn’t been there before on my previous visit. Its presence was obvious since there was so little furniture in the room. I thought of the boat, and I wondered if that had been sold. If so, why weren’t there more possessions here at the house?

She walked to the gym bag and brought it to me. She slowly unzipped it and showed it to me. The bag was full of packets of $100 bills. Good old Ben Franklin smiled all over the place. My guess was that it was at least $100,000 in the bag. If my math was right, ten packs of $100s would total that much. I let out a low whistle. “Where did you find this?”

“It was in the crawlspace above the garage. I smelled something out in the garage, so I went looking. I looked up there and found this bag that I didn’t recognize. After you’re married as long as we were, you know the possessions of the other person. I had never seen this bag, so I pulled it down, thinking I could throw it away. When I opened it up, I found all of this money. This had to belong to Andy, but I don’t know where he could have gotten it.”

“And how does Nelly tie into this?” I asked, not sure of why I’d been called in. I had an inkling that Mrs. Givens had always gone to her husband with a crisis of any kind, and now that he was gone, she was reaching out to another man to take his place – for decisions at least. She had to be twice my age.

“I want you to ask Nelly if she knows where the money came from. I didn’t think it would take much time, since it’s a yes or no question. I doubt she’d be able to tell you much beyond that. It’s not like she knows banking and finance.”

I looked at the bag, thinking that showing a person a bag full of cash was not the time to try to get a discount on a pet discussion. I thought of how that money would come in handy to fix up my own home. I stopped for a second, wondering where the thought had come from to repair my home. It was likely the work of Detective Green, who was subtly pushing me to become more mainstream.

“Sure,” I agreed. “I can talk to Nelly about the cash if you’d like.”

She nodded. “Thank you. I don’t know what else to do here.”

I sat down in the living room in the same chair I’d occupied during my last visit. I asked Nelly to come to me, and she did. She put her chin on my knee again, and I looked her in the eye. “Nelly, do you know anything about the green paper that Mrs. Givens just showed me?”

Nelly had the good graces to sneeze at that moment, which startled Mrs. Givens. I leaned closer and put my ear almost up to the dog’s drool. I nodded several times and then looked up. “She says that Mr. Givens put it there. She doesn’t know much more. He came home one day and went out to the garage with the bag and came back without it. She was upset because she was hoping that it had contained balls so they could play fetch.”

Mrs. Givens laughed. The stress lines on her face eased for a moment. “Nelly does love her fetch. She goes crazy if she even sees a ball. Normally, I have to spell it or she goes nuts.”

I had seen a stack of tennis balls on top of the dining room china cabinet, so I had suspected as much. I was glad to see that my observation skills had served me well again.

“So what will you do now?” I asked. I knew one detective who would be very interested in this development.

“I’m putting it in the safe now, and then I’ll figure out what to do tomorrow,” she replied.

Despite my best efforts, she did not want to notify the police of the development. I had a hunch that part of her wanted to keep the money and use it to fix up the house.

On the drive home, I began to come up with another point of commonality between the two cases. Both of them had a profit motive involved. The Givens case had the mysterious bag of cash while the Adamson family had the more typical motive that a widower makes more than a divorcee.

I wondered about the Marksberry case. I was going to have to read a bit more on that murder, which was actually being treated as a murder, to see if it too had a monetary motive behind it. My work would have to be more circumspect, because the police were investigating and had a rather bleak view of amateurs looking around.

I got home and found a message from my mother. She needed me to bring her fresh tomatoes, which were quickly going out of season. She was making some recipe and wanted them. My mother had retreated into herself after my sister’s death and very rarely left the house. She made those people who didn’t leave their houses and bought everything from the Internet look like social beings. She bought virtually everything from websites and the rest I had to bring her. Since I was her only relative in the area, most of that burden fell on my shoulders.

I’d been purposely avoiding her since I’d read the police report and learned that my sister had supposedly walked to meet a date while leaving her phone and keys at home. The new information explained the police’s suspicions of the family and the doubts about being abducted against her will. In the few weeks since then, I’d come to the conclusion that someone from the family had killed her at the house, someone from the family had killed her elsewhere and brought back the phone and keys, or she’d left with her money and no intention of coming back ever.

Of those three options, I preferred the third one, but given that no one had seen or heard of her in over a decade, that seemed unlikely. There’s nothing like a suspicion of murder to put even more distance between you and your family. All of the family narratives I’d been told were wrong, dead wrong. I had spent more than a few sleepless nights over the past few weeks thinking about what could have happened to her. Some of my dreams from a decade ago began again. While Sheila Green had not meant to cause this heartache, she had just the same.

That knowledge had made me begin to question the coping skills I’d developed over the years. I’d hid from attention by looking like I didn’t care about me or my appearance, in hopes that others would feel the same. Now I had to wonder if those had helped at all, since Susan had either left or been killed by a family member. In the heat of my anger at this discovery, I’d buzz-cut my own hair and begun mowing the grass on a regular basis. Not huge steps, but steps nonetheless.

I listened to the message again, wondering what my mother really knew. When she’d heard that I had a copy of the police report, she’d thrown a fit, insisting that I turn it over to her immediately. I had, but I’d made a copy before I did so. Did she think that the family stories were safe now? She certainly didn’t seem any different, but it was hard to tell over the phone.

I decided for an element of surprise. I picked up the tomatoes and stopped by her house to drop them off. She still lived in the same house where we’d lived when Susan disappeared. I knocked on the door, not having to worry if she’d be home or not. She was always home. She’d open the door to family, what little of it there was, and to delivery people.

She came to the door and looked at me. Her jaw dropped as I realized that she hadn’t seen me since I’d shaved my head. It was a very drastically different look. “What happened to you?” she asked finally.

I shrugged. “Didn’t see a reason to keep it, so I shaved it myself. It’s much easier to take care of.”

“You look more like your father this way,” she said without judgment. However, given that he’d drunk himself into a stupor after Susan’s disappearance and stayed there until he died, I didn’t think that this was truly a compliment from her. She rarely mentioned him, so I was surprised to hear him mentioned so casually in conversation.

I handed over the tomatoes, and she invited me in. As I stood in the doorway, I realized that what I really wanted out of today’s meeting was to see Susan’s room again. I hadn’t been in there in years, and I had obviously missed the keys and phone in all the times that I’d seen it since her disappearance. I wondered if I could notice more as an adult than I had as a child.

“I have to finish this recipe,” she said without looking back at me.

“Hey, do you mind if I get something out of my room? I’m hoping it’s still there.” I was halfway up the staircase before I heard her agree. I didn’t want to give her a chance to say no to my request or ask me a bunch of questions about what I could suddenly want after all these years out on my own.

I went into my old room. It was amazing to me that my mother kept this part of the house unchanged, nearly a shrine to the children. My twin-sized bed was still neatly made with a duvet on it that had allowed my mother to change the paint color more often for me. My student desk was pushed against the wall, and the dictionary and thesaurus were still standing, held in place by plastic cups that I’d picked up at high school football games. The entire thing was covered by a thin layer of dust, telling me that no one had been in here in ages. I wondered when the last time my mother dusted. I would have suspected she’d be cleaner given that she never left the house.

My room was nearly as neat and full of my childhood as my sister’s was. I walked around the room a few times and looked in the closet just for plausible deniability. The closet held a few outfits that had seen better days and a few old board games. Nothing more.

I left my room and headed next door to my sister’s room. No one had used it since she’d disappeared, though I’d often heard one or the other of my parents in here crying in the years after she left. The room had a dank odor from the years of disuse.

Even so, there wasn’t any dust that I could see on the surfaces, meaning that my mother still cleaned the room. I thought wryly that my room had a covering of dust over most the furniture whereas hers was immaculate. So much for my place in the family.

Of course, I didn’t find any signs of the keys or the phone. I imagine that at least the phone had been bagged and taken to the police station as evidence. They’d want to look at her phone log and text messages. I wondered if Detective Green would be able to get me a list of those calls. It might help to know what was going through her mind. Maybe she’d communicated with a friend or relative who might know what she was planning on doing. I made a note to ask her about it.

As for her keys, they were likely taken as evidence as well. I wasn’t sure if keys could be checked to see if any duplicates had been made or not. Even so, that did mean that another set of keys to the house were out there somewhere. I knew that my mother had never changed the locks after Susan went missing, thinking that she might want to come back and come in. Now I had to wonder if there was another reason why she might not change the locks. Susan hadn’t taken her keys and would need to knock to enter the house.

I did find some photos of us at in the year or so before she left, and I smiled at how young and innocent we’d all looked. Those were certainly days gone by. Now I was the only one left in Toledo. I wondered what my mother would say to a request to take these photos and get reprints of them. I had next to nothing of Susan to remember her by.

I left the room and went downstairs to see my mother finish her recipe. My mood was more somber now, thinking about what the family had lost, and specifically what I had lost. She looked at me again as I sat down. “Did that police officer insist that you cut your hair? I’m not sure I like you seeing someone like that,” she said. “You need someone who cares for you just the way I do. You don’t need to change to find the right girl.”

“No one forced me to cut my hair. I just thought it was time for something different.” I felt the anger swell up in me. She was criticizing my choices when I knew that her choices had included the false impressions of the disappearance that she foisted on the family for years. In the bad choices category, she was light years ahead of me.

She humphed and turned her back, going back to her cooking.

“Mom, I know about the keys and the phone,” I said softly.

She didn’t need to be told what I was talking about. Any random thought typically led back to Susan and her disappearance. It was practically the family code. “What about them?”

“Her phone and keys were here the night Susan disappeared. She wasn’t planning on going to the movies, was she?” I spoke clearly, but I could hear the tremor in my voice. I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out. I was tampering with the only family I had left. Good or bad, right or wrong, she was it, and I was concerned about the fall-out from a no-holds-barred talk with her.