[Georgia 01] Genesis (aka Undone) Page 12

  "I don't know," she admitted. Her grandfather had died when Faith was a child, and her granny Mitchell had lived on her own for most of her life. She had started collecting things in her fifties, and by the time she was moved into a nursing home, the house had been filled to the rafters with useless things. Looking around another lonely old woman's house, seeing a similar accumulation, made Faith wonder if someday Jeremy would be saying the same thing about Faith's housekeeping.

  At least he would have a little brother or sister to help him. Faith put her hand to her stomach, wondering for the first time about the child growing inside of her. Was it a girl or a boy? Would it have her blonde hair or its father's dark Latino looks? Jeremy looked nothing like his father, thank God. Faith's first love had been a gangly hillbilly with a build that was reminiscent of Spike from the Peanuts cartoon. As a baby, Jeremy had been almost delicate, like a thin piece of porcelain. He'd had the sweetest little feet. Those first few days, Faith had spent hours staring at his tiny toes, kissing the bottom of his heels. She had thought that he was the most remarkable thing on the face of the earth. He had been her little doll.

  "Faith?"

  She dropped her hand, wondering what had come over her. She'd taken enough insulin this morning. Maybe she was just feeling the typical hormonal swings of pregnancy that had made being fourteen such a pleasure for Faith as well as everyone around her. How on the earth was she going to go through this again? And how was she going to do it alone?

  "Faith?"

  "You don't have to keep saying my name, Will." She indicated the back of the house. "Go check the kitchen. I'll take the bedrooms."

  He gave her a careful look before heading into the kitchen.

  Faith walked down the hallway toward the back rooms, picking her way through broken blenders and toasters and telephones. She wondered if the old woman had scavenged for these things or if she had accumulated them over a lifetime. The framed photographs on the walls looked ancient, some of them in sepia and black-and-white. Faith scanned them as she made her way back, wondering when people had started smiling for photographs, and why. She had some older photos of her mother's grandparents that were particularly treasured. They had lived on a farm during the Depression, and a traveling photographer had taken a shot of their small family as well as a mule that was called Big Pete. Only the mule had been smiling.

  There was no Big Pete on Gwendolyn Zabel's wall, but some of the color photographs showed not one but two different young girls, both with dark brown hair hanging down past their pencil-thin waists. They were a few years apart in age, but definitely sisters. None of the more recent photographs showed the two posing together. Jacquelyn's sister seemed to prefer desert settings for the shots she sent her mother, while Jacquelyn's photos tended to show her posing on the beach, a bikini low across her boyishly thin hips. Faith could not help but think if she looked that great at thirty-eight years old, she'd be taking pictures of herself wearing a bikini, too. There were very few recent pictures of the sister, who appeared to have grown plumper with age. Faith hoped she had kept in touch with her mother. They could do a reverse trace on the telephone and find her that way.

  The first bedroom did not have a door. Stacks of debris filled the room—more newspapers and magazines. There were some boxes, but for the most part, the small bedroom was filled with so much trash it was impossible to go more than few feet in. A musty odor filled the air, and Faith remembered a story she'd seen on the news many years ago about a woman who'd gotten a paper cut from an old magazine and ended up dying from some strange disease. She backed down out of the room and glanced into the bathroom. More junk, but someone had cleared a path to the toilet and scrubbed it clean. A toothbrush and some other toiletries were lined up neatly on the sink. There were piles of garbage bags in the bathtub. The shower curtain was almost black with mold.

  Faith had to turn sideways to get past the door to the master bedroom. She saw the reason as soon as she was inside. There was an old rocking chair near the door, so piled with clothes that it was ready to topple over except for the door propping it up. More clothes were scattered around the room, the sort of stuff that would be called vintage and sold for hundreds of dollars down the street in the funky clothing stores of Little Five Points.

  The house was warm, which made it more difficult for Faith to get her sweaty hands into the latex gloves. She ignored the pinprick of dried blood on the tip of her finger, not wanting to think about anything else that would turn her into a sobbing mess.

  She started on the chest of drawers first. All of the drawers were open, so it was just a matter of pushing around clothes, looking for stashed letters or an address book that might list family relations. The bed was neatly made, the only item in the house about which "neat" could be said to describe it. There was no telling if Jacquelyn Zabel had slept in her mother's bedroom or if she had opted for a hotel downtown.

  Or maybe not. Faith saw an open duffel bag sitting beside a laptop case on the floor. She should have spotted the items immediately, because they were both obviously out of place, with their distinctive designer logos and soft leather shells. Faith checked the laptop case, finding a MacBook Air that her son would've killed for. She booted it up, but the welcome screen asked for a username and password. Charlie would have to send it through the proper channels to try to crack it, but in Faith's experience, Macs that had been password-protected were impossible to decode, even by the manufacturer.

  Next, Faith looked through the duffel. The clothes inside were designer—Donna Karan, Jones of New York. The Jimmy Choos were particularly impressive, especially to Faith, who was wearing a skirt that was the equivalent of a camping tent, since she couldn't find any pants in her closet that would button anymore. Jacquelyn Zabel apparently suffered no such sartorial quandaries, and Faith wondered why someone who could obviously afford otherwise chose to stay in this awful house.

  So, Jacquelyn had apparently been sleeping in the room. The neatly made bed, a glass of water and a pair of reading glasses on the table beside it, all pointed to a recent inhabitant. There was also a giant, hospital-size bottle of aspirin. Faith opened the container and found it half empty. She would probably need some aspirin herself if she were packing up her mother's home. Faith had seen the heartbreak her father suffered when he'd had to put his mother in an assisted-living facility. The man had passed away years ago, but Faith knew that he had never gotten over having to put his mother in a home.

  Unbidden, Faith felt her eyes fill with tears. She let out a groan, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Since she'd seen a plus sign on the pregnancy test, a day hadn't gone by without Faith's brain conjuring some story to make her burst into tears.

  She returned to the duffel. She was feeling around for pieces of paper—a notebook, a journal, a plane ticket—when she heard yelling coming from the other side of the house. Faith found Will in the kitchen. A very large and very angry woman was screaming in his face.

  "You pigs have no right to be here!"

  Faith thought the woman looked just like the type of aging hippie who would use the word "pigs." Her hair was braided down her back and she was wearing a horse-blanket shawl around her body in lieu of a shirt. Faith guessed that the woman was officially the last hold-out in the neighborhood, soon to be the crappiest house on the street. She didn't look like the yoga-loving mommies who probably lived in the renovated mansions.

  Will remained remarkably cool, leaning against the refrigerator with a hand in his pocket. "Ma'am, I need you to calm down."

  "Fuck you," she shot back. "Fuck you, too," she added, seeing Faith in the doorway. Close up, Faith thought the woman was in her late forties. It was hard to tell, though, since her face was bawled into an angry red knot. She had the sort of features that seemed built for fury.

  Will asked, "Did you know Gwendolyn Zabel?"

  "You have no right to question me without a lawyer."

  Faith rolled her eyes, reveling in the sheer childish joy of th
e gesture.

  Will was more mature in his approach. "Can you tell me your name?"

  She turned instantly reticent. "Why?"

  "I'd like to know what to call you."

  She seemed to scroll through her options. "Candy."

  "All right, Candy. I'm Special Agent Trent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, this is Special Agent Mitchell. I'm sorry to tell you that Mrs. Zabel's daughter has been in an accident."

  Candy pulled the blanket closer. "Was she drinking?"

  Will asked, "Did you know Jacquelyn?"

  "Jackie." Candy shrugged her shoulders. "She was here for a few weeks to get her mother's house sold. We talked."

  "Did she use a real estate agent or sell it herself ?"

  "She used a local agent." The woman shifted her stance, blocking Faith from her view. "Is Jackie okay?"

  "I'm afraid she's not. She was killed in the accident."

  Candy put her hand to her mouth.

  "Have you seen anyone hanging around the house? Anyone suspicious?"

  "Of course not. I'd call the police."

  Faith suppressed a snort. The ones who screamed about the pigs were always the ones who called the police for help at the first whiff of trouble.

  Will asked, "Does Jackie have any family we can get in touch with?"

  "Are you fucking blind?" Candy demanded. She jerked her head toward the refrigerator. Faith could see a list of names and phone numbers taped to the door that Will was leaning against. The words, "EMERGENCY NUMBERS" were typed in bold print at the top, less than six inches away from his face. "Christ, don't they teach you people to read?"

  Will looked absolutely mortified, and Faith would have slapped the woman if she had been standing close enough. Instead, she said, "Ma'am, I'm going to need you to go downtown and make a formal statement."

  Will caught her eye, shook his head, but Faith was so furious she struggled to keep her voice from shaking. "We'll get a cruiser to take you to City Hall East. It'll only take a few hours."

  "Why?" the woman demanded. "Why do you need me to—"

  Faith took out her cell phone and dialed her old partner at the Atlanta Police Department. Leo Donnelly owed her a favor—make that several favors—and she intended to use them to make this woman's life as difficult as possible.

  Candy said, "I'll talk to you here. You don't need to take me downtown."

  "Your friend Jackie is dead," Faith said, her anger making her tone sharp. "Either you're helping our investigation or you're obstructing it."

  "Okay, okay," she said, holding up her hands in surrender. "What do you want to know?"

  Faith glanced at Will, who was looking at his shoes. She pressed her thumb into the end button, disconnecting the call to Leo. She asked Candy, "When's the last time you saw Jackie?"

  "Last weekend. She came over for some company."

  "What kind of company?"

  Candy equivocated, and Faith started to dial Leo's number again.

  "All right," the woman groaned. "Jesus. We smoked some weed. She was freaked out about all this shit. She hadn't visited her mom in a while. None of us knew how bad it had gotten."

  "None of us meaning who?"

  "Me and a couple of the neighbors. We kept an eye on Gwen. She's an old woman. Her daughters live out of state."

  They must have not kept too close an eye on her if they hadn't realized she was living in a firetrap. "Do you know the other daughter?"

  "Joelyn," she answered, nodding toward the list on the fridge. "She doesn't visit. At least, she hasn't in the ten years I've lived here."

  Faith glanced at Will again. He was staring somewhere over Candy's shoulder. She asked the woman, "The last time you saw Jackie was a week ago?"

  "That's right."

  "What about her car?"

  "It was in the driveway until a couple of days ago."

  "A couple as in two?"

  "I guess it's closer to four or five. I've got a life. It's not like I track the comings and goings of the neighborhood."

  Faith ignored the sarcasm. "Have you seen anyone suspicious hanging around?"

  "I told you no."

  "Who was the real estate agent?"

  She named one of the top realtors in town, a man who advertised on every available bus stop in the city. "Jackie didn't even meet him. They handled it all on the phone. He had the house sold before the sign even went up in the yard. There's a developer who has a standing offer on all the lots, and he closes in ten days with cash."

  Faith knew this was not uncommon. Her own poor house had been subject to many such offers over the years—none of them worth taking because then she wouldn't be able to afford a new house in her own neighborhood. "What about movers?"

  "Look at all this shit." Candy slapped her hand against a crumbling pile of papers. "The last thing Jackie told me was that she was going to have one of those construction Dumpsters delivered."

  Will cleared his throat. He wasn't looking at the wall anymore, but he wasn't exactly looking at the witness, either. "Why not just leave everything here?" he asked. "It's mostly trash. The builder is going to bulldoze it anyway."

  Candy seemed appalled by the prospect. "This was her mother's house. She grew up here. Her childhood is buried under all this shit. You can't just throw that all away."

  He took out his phone as if it had rung. Faith knew the vibration feature was broken. Amanda had nearly gutted him in a meeting last week when it had started ringing. Still, Will looked at the display, then said, "Excuse me." He left by the back door, using his foot to move a pile of magazines out of the way.

  Candy asked, "What's his problem?"

  "He's allergic to bitches," Faith quipped, though if that were true, Will would be covered in a head-to-toe rash after this morning. "How often did Jackie visit her mother?"

  "I'm not her social secretary."

  "Maybe if I take you downtown, it'll jog your memory."

  "Jesus," she muttered. "Okay. Maybe a couple of times a year—if that."

  "And you've never seen Joelyn, her sister, visit?"

  "Nope."

  "Did you spend much time with Jackie?"

  "Not much. I wouldn't call us friends or anything."

  "What about when you smoked together last week? Did she say anything about her life?"

  "She told me the nursing home she sent her mom off to cost fifty grand a year."

  Faith suppressed the urge to whistle. "There goes any profit from the house."

  Candy didn't seem to think so. "Gwen's been failing for a while now. She won't last the year. Jackie said might as well get her something nice on her way out."

  "Where's the home?"

  "Sarasota."

  Jackie Zabel lived on Florida's Panhandle, about five hours' drive away from Sarasota. Not too close and not too far. Faith said, "The doors weren't locked when we got here."

  Candy shook her head. "Jackie lived in a gated community. She never locked her doors. One night, she left her keys in her car. I couldn't believe it when I saw them in the ignition. It was dumb luck that it wasn't stolen." She added ruefully, "But Jackie was always pretty lucky."

  "Was she seeing anyone?"

  Candy turned reticent again.

  Faith waited her out.

  Finally, the woman said, "She wasn't that nice, okay? I mean, she was fine to get stoned with, but she was kind of a bitch about things, and men wanted to fuck her, but they didn't want to talk to her afterward. You know what I mean?"

  Faith wasn't in a position to judge. "What things was she a bitch about?"

  "The best way to drive up from Florida. The right kind of gas to put in your car. The proper way to throw out the freaking trash." She indicated the cluttered kitchen. "That's why she was doing this all by herself. Jackie's loaded. She could afford to pay a crew to clean out this place in two days. She didn't trust anyone else to do it the right way. That's the only reason she's been staying here. She's a control freak."

  Faith thought about th
e neatly tied bundles out by the street. "You said she wasn't seeing anyone. Were there any men in her life— ex-husbands? Ex-boyfriends?"

  "Who knows? She didn't confide in me much and Gwen hasn't known the day of the week for the last ten years. Honestly, I think Jackie just needed a couple of tokes to take off the edge, and she knew I was holding."

  "Why'd you let her?"

  "She was okay when she unclenched."

  "You asked if she'd been in a drunk-driving accident."

  "I know she got stopped in Florida. She was really pissed about that." Candy was sure to add, "Those stops are completely bogus. One measly glass of wine and they're cuffing you like you're some kind of criminal. They just want to make their quota."

  Faith had done many of those stops herself. She knew she had saved lives just as sure as she knew Candy had probably had her own run-ins with the cops. "So, you didn't like Jackie, but you spent time with her. You didn't know her well but you knew she was fighting a DUI rap. What's going on here?"

  "It's easier to go with the flow, you know? I don't like causing trouble."

  She certainly seemed fine with causing it for other people. Faith took out her notebook. "What's your last name?"

  "Smith."

  Faith gave her a sharp look.

  "I'm serious. It's Candace Courtney Smith. I live in the only other shitty house on the street." Candy glanced out the window at Will. Faith saw that he was talking to one of the uniformed patrolman. She could tell from the way the other man was shaking his head that they hadn't found anything useful.

  Candy said, "I'm sorry I snapped. I just don't like the police around."

  "Why is that?"

  She shrugged. "I had some problems a while back."

  Faith had already guessed as much. Candy certainly had the angry disposition of a person who had sat in the back of a squad car on more than one occasion. "What kind of problems?"

  She shrugged again. "I'm only saying this because you're going to find out about it and come running back here like I'm an ax murderer."

  "Go on."

  "I got picked up on a solicitation when I was in my twenties."

  Faith was unsurprised. She guessed, "You met a guy who got you hooked on drugs?"