I laid both sets of files next to me and leaned back and rested my head on the back of my headboard. The moon shone through my window, and I imagined it must be past midnight. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought about how nice it would be to drift off to sleep, but I had one more pile of files to sift through, and I wasn’t a quitter. I wrapped my black satin robe around me and went to the kitchen. Bridget sat on a stool at the bar and stared into the bottom of a cup of coffee.
“Can’t sleep?” I said.
“Something like that.”
“Coffee won’t help,” I said. “I’m making some tea. Want some?”
She shook her head.
“Nah, I’m fine. I don’t feel like sleeping anyway.”
“Me neither. I took a look at some of the files.”
“Find anything?”
“So far nothing out of the ordinary,” I said.
I poured some water into the kettle on my stove and turned on the burner.
“Did you know you could put some water in a cup and nuke it?”
I nodded.
We sat in silence until the kettle hummed. I had used it so much over the years that there were dime-sized wear marks on every side, and the spout put up a good fight every time I flipped the handle to get the tea out, just like it was doing now.
Bridget stared at me in disbelief.
“Man, that seems like a lot of work to me.”
“I thought so too at first,” I said. “It was a gift from my sister.”
“I’ve got a couple of sisters myself. She probably checks to see you still use it when she comes over here.”
“Actually, she passed away a few years ago.”
Did I just say that, out loud?
“Oh shoot, I’m sorry. Sometimes I stick my foot in my mouth. Were you two close?”
“She was my only sibling,” I said.
“Did she get sick or something?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing like that,” I said.
“Did she have an accident?”
The girl asked a lot of questions.
“I hope I haven’t offended you by asking,” Bridget said.
She hopped off my stool and poured herself another cup of coffee and then made a face.
“Cold?” I said.
She nodded and put it in the microwave and then took it out and sat back on the stool.
The microwave still had :14 on it. I turned away and tried to concentrate on Bridget, but I couldn’t. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue our conversation and not think about it. I pressed the cancel button and the time displayed itself again. Perfect.
“I don’t talk about my sister very often,” I said.
“Sometimes I feel that way about things too but then my stomach starts to feel all heavy and stuff like I’m inside an old car at a junkyard and I’m about to be crushed and then I can’t breathe and I feel like if I don’t let it out, I’ll blow up or something.”
I sat down on the stool across from her.
“When I talk about it, I usually do burst,” I said. “That’s why I don’t.”
“It’s that painful?”
I cupped my hands around the mug.
“My sister was murdered,” I said.
Bridget choked down her coffee and the mug slipped from her fingers and fell through the air and shattered along the tile floor. Fragments scattered in all directions. She jumped off the stool and knelt down.
“I’m so sorry; I’ve broken your mug. Tell me where you got it, and I will get another one for you.”
I scanned the floor and went to the other side of the room and grabbed the broom.
“Don’t be. I sprung it on you, and I shouldn’t have,” I said. “Sometimes I don’t know the best way to bring it up.”
“It was my fault. I kept going on and on and now look at what’s happened.”
I scooped the broken pieces into the dustpan and dumped them in the trash. Bridget had a look on her face like she just ran over a fluffy white bunny on the road.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Your sister probably gave that to you too, and now I’ve gone and broken it.”
“I picked it up at the outlets for a buck, it’s no big deal.”
I went to my room and grabbed Vicki’s files and returned to the kitchen.
“Since neither of us wants to sleep,” I said, “what do you say we take a look at this last set of files. I could use your help.”
She nodded.
I divvied them out and we went to work. Seven transactions later I noticed a pattern.
“Is it common practice for your clients to use the same appraiser?” I said.
“It depends. If they don’t request a specific appraiser, there’s a list of people we recommend. Why?”
“So far every one of these properties lists Walker Appraisal, LLC.”
“That’s Travis Walker. Vicki uses him a lot.”
“What about Charlotte, did she go through him?” I said.
“Maybe once or twice in the past year I think. Do you want me to look?”
“Not just yet. Let me get through the rest of these first.”
I looked through all of them and found seven more that listed Walker as the appraiser. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but fourteen sales with the same appraiser in a town with dozens of appraisers to choose from attracted my attention. I handed them over to Bridget and asked her to look them over. 55 minutes and two more cups of coffee later, she closed the last of the files and turned toward me.
“Do you have a computer?”
I retrieved my laptop from my room and handed it to her. She turned it on and typed in the address for the MLS.
“I hope I can still log on with Charlotte’s username and password.”
She typed it in and pressed the enter key. After a few seconds the home page came up with a message that read Welcome Charlotte across the top.
“What are we looking for?” I said.
“I can’t say for sure, but I find it curious that all of these properties were remodels, and I wanted to take a look at their history and see…”
A page came up and Bridget glared at it for a minute and then clicked on the tab that displayed the history.
“There! Right there,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”
“What have you found?” I said.
“I had a hunch the properties had all been flipped recently, and I think I’m right.” She turned the screen toward me. “Look at this. All three of these listings were bank foreclosed homes that sold to the same client and then went back up on the market a few months later. And I bet if we looked at the others ones, they would all be the same.”
“Flipping is legal though, right?” I said.
“Most of the time, but not always. It depends.” She pulled one of the files out and opened it and handed it to me. “It’s like it doesn’t make sense yet, but it does.”
Bridget pointed to the picture in the file.
“A few days before Charlotte died they got into an argument over this listing.
“Who did?” I said.
“Vicki and Charlotte.”
“Charlotte said she needed to make it right. I didn’t think about it at the time. She didn’t yell or anything so I figured a simple mistake was made that she needed to fix.”
“Do you remember her exact words?”
“When I walked in they stopped talking about it, but I noticed the listing in her hand and,” she tapped the photo of the house with her finger, “this is the one they argued about.”
“Did you ask her about it?” I said.
“She said not to worry, so I didn’t. But what if there’s a connection between her death and this listing?”