“She’s from money, so he would inherit,” she surmised aloud.
“Presumably. Unless she made some special arrangements. Like a trust or whatever.”
“But no kids?”
“None of her own. Stepkids, of course. Archer has a daughter, and Mavis has one brother who lives out of state, and her mother is still alive.”
“Ooh. That’s a hard one. Outliving your kids,” Sol said.
“Yeah.” Reed thought of his own little girl and couldn’t imagine losing her. He wasn’t all that great at reaching over an emotional chasm as proven by the text he’d received from Toby Yelkis just last night:Fuck off.
Not likely.
But he’d give Sylvie’s kid some space.
For now.
“I can run down the exes,” Sol offered, finishing her tea and crumpling the paper cup.
“You got names? Addresses and numbers?”
“Yep. They’re both still in Savannah. Radley Bowers, her first husband, is the golf pro at the country club where Mavis was a member. He’s the senior pro, probably close to retiring. There’s a younger guy who gives most of the lessons, especially for the kids. Junior instructions and the like. But Bowers still gives a few to the older guys, thesenior members, I guess. And he works in the pro shop.” She checked her notes. “Bowers has a family. Grown daughters who’ve moved away—one in Augusta, the other in Myrtle Beach, and his second wife, Kelsey. As for Mavis’s husband number two? Leonard Armstrong. He’s still single. Never remarried. He works down at the First Coastal Bank and Trust, handles high-end accounts. From what it looks like, Mavis was still married to him when she hooked up with Archer Greenlee, another wealthy client of the bank’s investment department.”
“She always had money, and Billy Huber barely had a pot to piss in,” Reed muttered.
“I checked his finances. He didn’t just owe that brother, Robert. He’d taken out a loan on his property.”
“Don’t suppose it was with First Coastal?” Reed said, hoping for some kind of thread connecting the victims, no matter how fragile.
“A bank wouldn’t touch that mess of a place. Private lender: Horace Denton Investments. Super-high interest rate. Personal loan. The deed to the property was put up as collateral.”
“Let me guess,” Reed said. “Billy was behind in his payments.”
Sol nodded. “I talked to Gina Mercado, the receptionist, who told me that Horace Denton was ‘unavailable’ and that he would call me back. So far, he hasn’t.” Her lips twisted downward. “I have this sneaking suspicion he won’t pick up the phone, so I’ll pay him a personal visit.” Her cell rang, and she snagged it from the desk, looked at the screen, and said, “Gotta take this. It’s the bartender from the Stag and Boar, the one who was on duty last night when Archer Greenlee claimed he was there. I went by the place last night, and he’d gone home.” She answered, and Reed turned back to his computer, where a picture of the two stones was now visible.
Therein lay the connection. Somehow those rocks, with their cryptic messages etched in blood, were the answer.
“Mavis Crawford was two-faced,” Charlene admitted with a scowl. She was sitting on a tufted chair near the French doors of her apartment while sipping tea from her favorite Hermès teacup. She cradled the cup, decorated with fanciful horses and a shiny gold interior, as if it were precious. But then Charlene always had a tender affection for some of her most prized possessions.
Nikki didn’t argue with her mother as she sat on a barstool at the peninsula separating the kitchen from the living area. No reason to try to sugarcoat the truth, she thought, as she forced a smile at the woman who had raised her. Frail and thin, Charlene was still concerned about her appearance. Her snowy hair was neatly wound in a French braid, her slacks pressed to a knife’s edge, her creamy sweater without a snag, a pearl necklace lying gracefully around her throat.
The same attention to detail went into her living space. Her apartment was spacious and airy, with a bank of wide windows facing the garden. Blooming azaleas looked as if they were on fire, and beyond her private patio, a manicured lawn rolled down to a lake, where a pair of swans swam lazily past scattered lily pads. Charlene watched them glide through the water. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”
“The swans? Yes,” Nikki agreed. “But, Mom, Mavis’s name was Greenlee.” She checked her watch. It was after eleven, as she’d spent some time at the newspaper office before deciding to visit her mother. “Mavis was married to Archer Greenlee.”
Charlene snorted. “She traded husbands like baseball cards.”
“Mom!”
“Well, it’s true. Just ask your brother. He knew her, you know. Did all her yard work.”
“Kyle?” Nikki was surprised. Her brother was a loner, and though he lived in the same town, she rarely saw him. He barely even showed up for Christmas gatherings. In fact, she wasn’t certain he’d ever met Chloe.
“Of course Kyle.” Charlene seemed perturbed, her thin eyebrows colliding. “He held a very low opinion of Mavis.”
Nikki felt the unlikely need to defend the woman she’d barely known. “Being married three times isn’t that big of a deal these days, and certainly not a sin.”
“Not a faithful bone in that woman’s body.”