Chapter Eighteen

Stephen pulled in and parked one street behind McClatchey’s house. The sun had set, and darkness settled in over the town. “We’ll be able to cut through between the houses and get in through his back yard, which has a big wooden fence around it, less chance of being seen that way.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

He gave me a “don’t-be-stupid” look. “Because the man was my boss,” he said in a too-patient voice. “He threw barbeques at his place every summer. I’ve been to his house before.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Stephen rolled his eyes at me.

“Can you two shut up so we can just get this over with?” Ashara said. Her voice was shaking.

“Does this scare you?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why? It’s not like anyone’s likely to come in and find us. The owner is in jail. Well, one of them. The other one’s dead, and I don’t see her suddenly showing up if she hasn’t bothered to already.”

“I just don’t want to get caught by anyone,” she said.

“Do you know what happens to black people who get caught breaking and entering? They go to jail. All the time.”

“We’re not going to get caught,” I said.

“Easy for you to say,” she said. “You’re white and a ghost.”

“Callie’s right,” Stephen said to Ashara. “And if we get caught, I’ll just say that Rick asked me to check up on things. He’ll back me on it.”

Ashara took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. If you’re positive.”

“I’m positive,” he said, reaching over and patting her hand.

“Hey,” I said, “if you two are going to get all lovey and shit, I’m outta here.” I swung out through the back-seat door and slipped between the houses until I got to Rick McClatchey’s back fence. I decided to go over it instead of through it. And then I slid through the back door and into the house.

It looked a lot like it had when I had left it after Molly’s death. Hard to believe that had really only been a few days ago. It seemed like months.

I turned back to the door and drew the lock. I was clearly getting better at manipulating physical objects, because the bolt slid back much more easily than I had anticipated it would.

A few moments later, Ashara and Stephen stepped up onto the back deck. I waved them in through the French doors.

They had to duck under the crime-scene tape that had been haphazardly applied to it—so haphazardly that it stuck to the door frame, but not the door. Good thing the door opens inward, I thought.

“You know,” said Ashara to me, “I’m getting used to you walking through walls. I can even deal with you showing up in the middle of trees, even though it’s creepy. But watching you fly over that fence may be the most ghosty thing I’ve seen you do yet.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Levitation is just not normal. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that middle-of-the-tree business is all that great. But flying around with your hair all flowing out behind just ain’t natural.”

I stared at her for a minute. “I’m dead, Ashara. And as far as I can tell, I’m the only ghost in town. I’m not sure there’s anything really ‘natural’ about any of this. So I’m just taking it as it comes.”

She inclined her head. “There is that,” she agreed.

“Can we please start doing some searching?” Stephen asked.

“Don’t turn on any lights,” I warned.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Ashara said. “Did you hear the part about how I really don’t want to get caught?”

“I’ve got a flashlight,” Stephen said and pulled it out of his pocket. It was one of those miniature flashlights that cast a tiny circle of light.

“Just don’t use it near any windows,” I said.

He nodded.

We started in the back of the house, where the McClatcheys had turned one of the bedrooms into a home office space. Stephen started with the obvious—a filing cabinet that stood in the far corner.

“Let’s take the files to the master bedroom closet to look at them,” I suggested. “It’s huge, and no one outside will notice the flashlight if we’re in there.”

Stephen gave me an odd look. “You seem to know an awful lot about this house,” he said. “You never did tell me how you ended up seeing Molly get killed.”

If I’d had blood, I would have blushed. As it was, I could feel my eyes go all shifty. “I used to come over here on Thursdays,” I said.

Stephen just looked at me, waiting for the rest of the explanation.

I sighed. “They watched CSI. I came over here to watch it because they couldn’t see me. And because they were. . . I don’t know. Nice. Comfortable. Happy.”

“So you came over and watched their television and enjoyed their company?” Ashara asked.

“Yeah.”

“Even though they didn’t even know you were there?”

“Well. Yes.”

“Okay. That may be the creepiest thing I’ve heard yet,” Ashara said, shaking her head.

“Yeah, well, just wait until you’re dead and people start peeing themselves when they see you,” I muttered. “You’ll start looking for some uncomplicated television-watching time, too.”

“Hey,” said Stephen, who had been pulling files out of the file folders. “You two want to stop talking and start helping me here?” He handed a pile of folders to Ashara, along with the flashlight. “Go on into the closet and see if any of these look promising. I’ll bring some more into you in a minute.”

I followed Ashara into the closet, where she plopped down on the floor. She took a second to look around, though.

“You’re right. This is huge.” She shook her head and started flipping through the folders, muttering to herself. “Mortgage, taxes, car loan, medical.” She looked up. “All of these seem pretty standard,” she said.

“Go ahead and look through them anyway,” I suggested. “Sometimes things get misfiled.”

Ashara shrugged and started opening the files. “Nope,” she said, just as Stephen walked in and handed her another stack.

“This all looks like old college course work,” she said.

“Molly’s. She must have been a packrat to have saved all this stuff.”

We finally found what we were looking for on Stephen’s fourth trip into the closet from the study.

“Hey!” said Ashara, loud enough to stop Stephen, who had started back into the study. “I think this is it. There are four different folders here labeled ‘genealogy.’”

Two of the files were all about Rick McClatchey’s family—copies of old letters, old photographs, marriage certificates, a carefully mapped-out family tree. The other two were devoted to Molly’s family.

And there, in the middle of the second file, was what I had been hoping we would find. The birth certificate of James Rowell, father of Molly McClatchey, nee Mary Rowell. In the space for the mother’s name was Mary Rowell.

And in the space for the father’s name was the name I’d been hoping to see.

Graham Howard.

One of the Howard brothers suspected of killing Mary’s older brother Jimmy Rowell and disposing of his body.

“I knew it!” I said triumphantly.

“You did?” Stephen asked.

“Well, yeah. You’re surprised?” Ashara asked. “I thought we all knew that’s what we were looking for.”

“You two have got to start letting me in on the whole womanly thought process business if we’re going to keep doing this detective stuff. I need to be in the loop.”

“You’re in the loop,” I said. “You knew everything we knew.”

“But that doesn’t mean that I came to the same conclusions. So you’ve got to start discussing that part of this stuff with me. Okay?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Didn’t mean to keep you in the dark.”

He nodded and settled onto the floor next to Ashara.

“So what does this tell us now?” he asked.

I sat down on the floor next to them. “Okay. Jimmy comes back from the war in the forties and hooks up with the Howard brothers. They go in together and rob a bank in Atlanta—far enough away so that they won’t be immediate suspects. We already know that his little sister was wild. She starts messing around with Graham Howard. At that point, I’m guessing that either Jimmy found out about Mary and Graham or that Jimmy just got greedy.”

“Or both,” interjected Ashara.

“Or both,” I agreed.

“So Jimmy takes the money and hides it away from the Howards,” Stephen said, continuing the story. “Then he and the Howards get into it and Jimmy ends up dead.”

“Almost certainly,” I agreed. “If he’d been alive, he would have come back for the money at some point.”

“And somehow the money ends up in a safe deposit box in Mary Rowell’s name,” Ashara said.

“Yeah. I’m a little fuzzy on that part. It’s impossible to know which Mary Rowell put it there,” I said.

“Not totally impossible,” Ashara said. “I wasn’t looking for that sort of information when I checked to see who owned the box, but I can find out when it was first rented out. That will at least give us a timeline.”

“Does it really matter?” Stephen asked.

“Probably not,” I said, “but I’m curious. Did Jimmy’s mother know about the money? Did she put it away for her children? Or because she was ashamed? And if she was ashamed, why didn’t she turn it over to the authorities?”

“I’ll check it out tomorrow,” Ashara said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Anyway,” said Stephen, “we know that the money got put there. And sat there for we don’t know how long.”

“Pretty much untouched,” I said. “The newspaper articles said that fifty thousand dollars went missing. That’s not all that far off my guess about how much was in that safe deposit box.”

“Okay,” said Stephen. “Fast forward to last week. For some reason, Clifford Howard comes in and kills Molly McClatchey.”

“And then,” I said, “searches Rick McClatchey’s house and takes a key out of a box on his dresser—almost certainly the safe deposit key. Then he goes into the bank and hands the key off to Jeffrey McClatchey, who switches the money out of Mary Rowell’s box into his briefcase. Then he splits the cash with Howell.”

We all sat on the closet floor, staring at each other.

“If Jeffrey was already on the signature card for the safe deposit box,” Stephen asked, “then why did Howard have to kill Molly?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“And another question,” said Stephen. “How did Molly end up back in Abramsville? Didn’t her father move to Atlanta?”

I nodded. “Yeah, he did. Good question.”

“Wait,” said Ashara. “I think I saw that a minute ago.”

She started flipping through files.

Stephen and I stared at her in confusion.

“Here it is!” she said, waving the file labeled

“Mortgage.” She opened it up. “When Rick and Molly got married, Molly sold the house that she’d been living in. And here’s the deed to that house, which lists the owners as first Mary Rowell, who passed it to James Rowell, who left it to his daughter when he died six years ago.”

“So she moved here because she inherited the house?” I asked.

“And probably because she could get a job teaching at the college,” Stephen said. “She said once that one of the things she liked about Abramsville was that she and Rick could live well here without having to make a whole lot of money—she even mentioned that she had been able to survive pretty happily on an adjunct’s salary before she met Rick.”

“Which she would have done pretty quickly since she was a music teacher and he owned a musical instrument repair shop,” I said.

Stephen and Ashara nodded.

“But none of this explains why they killed her,” I said.

“Even if we went to the police with everything we have, we still don’t have anything to connect Clifford Howard and Jeffrey McClatchey to the murder.”

“I don’t know,” said Stephen. “The money’s a pretty good motive.”

Ashara shook her head. “Callie’s right. It’s still not enough.”

We sat there, wracking our brains, coming up with nothing.

There’s no telling how long we would have spent in Rick and Molly McClatchey’s closet if we hadn’t heard the sound of someone coming in the front door.