Chapter Fifteen

“So we need to find out how the Rowells 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 Rowell 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 Rowell’s safe deposit box belonged to the Howards at one point. That would give the Howards a motive for killing Jimmy Rowell.”

“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 into 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 Rowells, 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 hour later, we found what we’d been looking for.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I had expected.

The younger Mary Rowell had named her son after her brother Jimmy. The elder Mary Rowell had brought him up and when he moved to Atlanta, James Rowell 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 Rowell 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 Rowell and the Howard brothers stole it,”

Stephen announced. “From a bank in Atlanta. They were bank robbers.”