“Thank you.”
The bagel and coffee brought me back to life. I needed it. My eyes were raw and aching from a lack of sound sleep. My landlord was supposed to have the new lock—a dead bolt—installed early in the day. I hoped so, so I could take a nap later—if I could manage to sleep in my apartment again.
“Sleep okay?” Paul asked, although I suspected he knew the answer.
“Could have been worse,” I said. “How about you?”
“Not too bad,” he said.
I told him about his nightmare, and how I’d gone to his door and knocked until he stopped yelling. He listened to my story, his smile turning wry.
When I was finished, he looked more shaken than I would have predicted, and I wished I hadn’t told him. He said, “I’ve had quite a few of those dreams since… you know. I think in all of them your mom needs my help, and I can’t give it to her. Sometimes we’re kids in the dreams. It’s weird. The dreams are disturbing, but I almost like having them.”
“Because she’s alive again,” I said. “Even just in your head.”
Paul stood up and started doing the dishes. He didn’t say anything else and didn’t need to. We understood each other.
Paul promised to see Ronnie early that day. Not only did I have a stack of student essays to grade, which had been sitting in my briefcase since before Mom died, but I also woke up to two messages on my phone. One was Detective Richland asking me to call him back. I assumed the two officers who’d responded to the break-in at my apartment had told him about it, and he wanted to get the straight story himself.
The other call was from Mom’s attorney, Frank Allison. He too wanted me to call him back about, as he put it, a matter concerning my mother’s estate.
Estate, I thought to myself. Such an expansive word for describing the worldly possessions of someone who didn’t have that much. I thought Detective Richland’s call would be more complicated, so I called the attorney first. I hadn’t heard from my landlord about the lock. I opted to head to a local coffee shop and grade my papers there. I was on my way, cautiously driving with one hand on the wheel and holding the phone with the other, when I was connected with Mr. Allison.
“Ms. Hampton?”
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to touch base with you about filing your mother’s will.”
I skirted the edge of downtown and headed north toward campus and the Grunge, my preferred coffee and grading hideaway.
“I know I have to do that,” I said. “Everything’s been crazy.”
“Oh, no, no,” he said. “I’m not calling to put pressure on you.” His voice practically boomed through the phone, his tone somewhere between commanding and jolly. “I just wanted to let you know about a phone call I received.”
“Okay,” I said as I slowed to allow pedestrians to pass in front of me. Classes were changing. It was close to nine, and the intersections around campus swelled with students. Traffic backed up at every crosswalk and corner.
Mr. Allison continued. “Someone called, a woman, asking about Leslie Hampton’s will. At first I thought it was going to be you. Your mother named you executrix, after all. But it turns out it was someone asking if the will had been filed yet. Apparently this person thought she might be named in there and wanted to know if she could do anything to speed the process along. I guess she needs the money.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
“She didn’t leave a name. All I could tell her was that the will hadn’t been filed for probate yet. You know, there’s no time limit on such things. But you may want to tell your relatives that you haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
He didn’t say why, but I understood. He didn’t want to have a bunch of relatives calling to ask him if their ships had come in.
But there was something about the whole thing I didn’t understand: who was this woman who thought she would be named in my mother’s will?
Chapter Nineteen
I managed to grade a few papers at the Grunge. My mind wandered every chance it got—to Paul’s state of mind, the break-in at my apartment, the woman calling about the will. I wondered how anyone functioned in the world when dealing with a crisis. And I answered my own question: you just do it. You do it because you have to.
I’d called Detective Richland back after talking to Mom’s lawyer. Richland seemed thrilled to hear from me, as if I’d called to offer him a year’s supply of tooth pain. He didn’t give me a chance to mention the break-in. He was on his way to a meeting—could I come by the station around noon?
“Sure,” I said.
And he hung up.
Which is how I ended up at the Dover police department after leaving the Grunge. It was a deceptively cheerful-looking little building constructed out of red brick in an almost Colonial style. Despite its classic appearance, it had been built only a decade earlier thanks to a property tax increase that most of the citizens of Dover still complained about. They wanted the police to do their jobs—they just didn’t want to have to pay for it or give them any additional space.
An officer greeted me at the front desk, then buzzed back to tell the detectives I was here to see them. Detective Post arrived in a matter of minutes and led me down a short hallway and then through a roomful of desks where officers in uniform and plain clothes pecked away at computers and talked on phones. Post turned back to me and said, “We can go into the conference room. It will be quieter.”
A heavy oak table dominated the center of the conference room, and the thick carpet and heavy drapes absorbed most of the noise. When Post closed the door behind me, it felt as if I’d been sealed in an airtight chamber. We were the only ones in the room. Detective Richland was nowhere in sight, and I asked about him.
“He’s out on another call,” Post said. “We’re covering a lot of cases, so we divide the labor.”
I didn’t say it out loud, but I didn’t miss him.
Post pointed to a small table in the corner of the room. “There’s coffee,” she said. “Or I could get you a soda.”
“I’m good,” I said.
We both sat down near the end of the table closest to the door. Post carried a manila folder, which she placed in front of her but didn’t open. Post wasn’t wearing a jacket, and her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows as if she was about to do some serious work.
“I hope things have been going okay for you,” Post said.
“Aside from my mother dying and my apartment being broken into, things are fine. Oh, I forgot that my brother is the prime suspect in the murder of my mother.”
“What about your apartment?” Post asked.
“It was broken into last night,” I said. “I thought that’s what I was here to talk about.”
Post looked puzzled. “Tell me about this.”
“Two of your officers responded to my house,” I said. “I told them about Mom’s death, and that you and Richland were investigating.”
Post took a deep breath. I could tell she was trying to project calm and professional cool. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a little notebook.
“I’ll deal with the communication issues later,” she said. “Can you tell me about this break-in?”
“They really didn’t tell you?” I asked.
“I mostly work with men,” she said. “What happened?”
So I told her about coming home, the still, quiet night. I told her about passing the man on the stairs, the one in a hurry who apparently wasn’t coming from any of the other apartments. I told her about the shattered lock and the ransacked apartment, including the violated medicine cabinet.
“The cops who were there chalked it up to meth heads or something like that,” I said. “But none of my electronics were missing. Granted, they might be worth up to three or four dollars on the open market.”