My roommate used to put candles in the freezer. She said they’d last forever that way. Duh.
5:00 p.m.
Cinnamon picked me up at 6:00 this morning, complaining all the way to the W. But I was Deb Riley and I needed to be Peg Chester before I could do today’s business. It took two hours and Cinnamon’s help to get all the makeup on, and I started feeling older as I was going.
After what I found out last night, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to Georgia’s house at all. I checked out of the W and made sure I was seen as Peg leaving and getting into a cab. I specifically asked the bellman to get me a cab to the airport and took it all the way there. When I got out of the cab at the Delta drop-off, I went into the airport, downstairs, out the arrivals door and straight into Cinnamon’s car. Then we went over to the Wayward Inn and I checked in as Alice Brown. I gave them a cash card and a hefty deposit for three nights, but they didn’t ask for ID.
Cinnamon and I then headed for the estate lawyer’s office. Lars set up everything with the lawyer before he and Grover came to see me on New Years Eve. Jim Williams of Williams, Evers, Barnhardt, and Stahl (WEBS???) was charming as only a man of Lars’ generation can be. He politely offered me coffee, made sure I was comfortable and spread a batch of papers out on the table in front of me. Just as he promised, he had everything I needed to function as the legal representative of the Estate. I had death certificates, a notarized statement as the executor of the estate from the state that affirmed that I had full power of attorney to act on behalf of the estate, etc. etc. It was amazing. He gathered everything up in a neat leather portfolio, chatted with me briefly as I finished my coffee and set me on my way. The one little bomb that he dropped was that if I failed to produce a will, the matter would be considered intestate and after the government took their cut everything would go to Grover. Well, frankly that was fine with me. I didn’t want Grover’s house as part of my fee for this little job, and after last night I was more and more convinced that the real cause of death wasn’t going to be suicide. I just didn’t have the culprit yet.
Cinnamon picked me up. She had already been to Fred Meyer and picked up more packing boxes and tape. We headed for the bank next. The personal banker I met with was all too glad to meet with me. She said that she was glad they could release the accounts to me and that she was very sad for my loss. I’m sure this was the same woman who was an absolute cold fish the first time I met with her. What was sure was that I needed to make a mortgage payment on Grover’s house, and having funds to work with was going to make it much easier. I ordered paper copies of all activity on Georgia’s accounts for the previous year, explaining that I did not have access to the on-line information and wanted to get the final income tax papers prepared as quickly as possible. She explained that there would be a fee for that and I nodded. I expected there would be a fee for everything I got from this bank over the next several weeks. While I expect to have the house closed up and moved out of by the end of the month, estates usually take months to close, especially if it was, indeed, intestate. After waiting for an hour, I finally got the papers and was asked when I’d like to handle closing all the accounts. I begged off and signed several papers that simply made me a signer on the accounts so I could move the money when I’d set up everything I needed to manage the records.
In the car, Cinnamon and I started going over the papers. Holy shit! Georgia was packing in the bucks. She had a money market account with fifth grand in it, solid savings, and eight thousand in checking. There were weekly deposits in her accounts ranging from two to five thousand. Man. I didn’t think you could make that kind of money as a MILF on webcam. I set Cinnamon the task of finding out where the deposits were coming from and locating any bookkeeping records that Georgia might have. It’s odd we haven’t really found anything yet. That house isn’t that big. But most of the time that I’ve spent in the office was working on the computers. I’m hoping that I’ve missed something that the searchers in the house have missed, too.
We drove past the house slowly and looked for any sign of people watching. Early morning rain washed what was left of the snow off the streets, so all that is left now are piles of muddy ice where they piled snow in parking lots. The streets are still almost impossible to drive down, though, with cars parked on both sides of very narrow streets. At least under these conditions, we could see directly into the windows of every car that was parked and there didn’t seem to be any stake-outs. It still worried me, though. We drove through the alley behind the house which was even narrower, if possible. The houses all had tiny back yards between a detached garage and the house. There was exactly enough room to park two cars if you didn’t mind having one of them blocked in the garage. We pulled in behind Georgia’s house on the second trip down the alley. It would have been nice of Rick and Susan if they had mentioned there was off-street parking, not that it would have helped that much in the snow.
We walked to the back door and up the steps that seemed slipperier in the rain than the front had been in the snow. The same key worked in the back door as the front. Next to the door was the kind of storm cellar door you’d expect to see in The Wizard of Oz in Kansas. So there was a basement. Of some sort.
We went in and assessed the damage. They hadn’t been concerned about me finding out they were there. Every box we’d packed had been unstacked, slit open, and the contents gone through. The desk drawers in the office were pulled out all the computers were on, but locked. Well, I’d changed the passwords on all of them, so I was pretty confident that no one was going to just walk in and look at the disks. Nobody in that search party looked like a hacker. You know, there ought to be a rule about people who search houses putting everything back where they got it. Cinnamon got busy and started resealing the boxes. We didn’t bother to re-inventory since most of them were going to the local collection agency anyway. If someone found something in one of those boxes, it was as good as gone anyway. While she packed boxes, I decided to have a closer look at the area outside. The garage was locked as well, but there was a key on the keyring that opened the single door. In the garage was a black Mercedes CLK 500, shiny and new. The vanity license plate read NOTMEBB. It took me a minute to decipher, Not Me Baby. Hmmm. Was that Georgia’s message or someone else’s? Even with the money she was apparently making, it didn’t seem that she was set up to have this kind of bucks. There was no bank record of loans outstanding, so unless this was financed through the car company, it looked like it was paid for with cash. Boy. What was I going to find next? Well, the one thing I hadn’t found yet was car keys. Maybe it wasn’t Georgia’s at all.
I locked the garage up and went to the cellar. It was unlocked, but didn’t look like it had been entered in a long time. There was no light and I didn’t have a flashlight with me. There were a lot of cobwebs that didn’t look like they’d been disturbed, so I decided to go get a flashlight and take a quick look around. That was an idea that never came to fruition.
On the way up the steps this time, I slipped and came crashing down hard on my left knee. I screamed a little. Cinnamon was there in a flash and helped me up and into the house. I flopped down on the sofa and pulled my torn pants leg up. Nasty scrape and I could tell it was going to be a big bruise. It hurt like hell. Cinnamon became a regular little nurse and bathed my leg. We didn’t have any antibacterial spray—we’ll put that on the shopping list for tomorrow—but at least it was cleaned with antibacterial soap.
“Ice,” I said. “I need ice.” She headed for the kitchen. When I cleaned the refrigerator out, I didn’t even open the freezer. I was just assuming there would be ice in there. Maybe she could chip a big block of frost off the coils or something. I supposed that I would have to clean that out, too.
“Deb?” Cinnamon called. “I know you don’t want to move, but I think you should come and see this.”
Oh God. What now? I was already imagining body parts and maybe the baby I’d thought of earlier. MILF, indeed. None of that prepared me for what Cinnamon was holding.
The ice tray.
In the tray, frozen in neat little cubes were rings, necklaces, and one large square-cut amethyst.
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