Genesis (12 page)

Faith wouldn't call the small bungalow lovely, but it was certainly
quaint with its gray shingles and red trim. Nothing had been done to
update the place, or even simply keep it up. The gutters sagged from
years of leaves and the roofline resembled a camel's back. The grass
was neatly trimmed, but there were no flower beds or carefully
sculpted shrubs typical to Atlanta homes. All the other houses on the
street but one had a second story added on or had simply been torn
down to make way for a mansion. Gwendolyn Zabel must have been
one of the last holdouts, the only two-bedroom, one-bath in the
area. Faith wondered if the neighbors were glad to see the old
woman go. Her daughter must have been happy to have the check
from the sale. A house like this had probably cost around thirty thousand
dollars when it was first built. Now, the land alone would be
worth around half a million.

Will asked Charlie, "Did you get the door unlocked?"

"It was unlocked when I got here," he told them. "Me and the
guys took a look around. Nothing jumped out, but you've got first
dibs." He indicated the trash pile in front of him. "This is just the tip
of the iceberg. The place is a freakin' mess."

Will and Faith exchanged a look as they walked toward the house.
Inman Park was far from Mayberry. You didn't leave your door unlocked
unless you were hoping for an insurance claim.

Faith pushed open the front door, walking back into the 1970s as
she crossed the threshold. The green shag carpet on the floor was
deep enough to cup her tennis shoes, and the mirrored wallpaper
was kind enough to remind her that she'd put on fifteen pounds in
the last month.

"Wow," Will said, glancing around the front room. It was packed
with untold amounts of crap: stacks of newspapers, paperback
books, magazines.

"This can't be safe to live in."

"Imagine how it looked with all the stuff on the street back inside."
Faith picked up a rusted hand blender sitting on the top of a
stack of
Life
magazines. "Sometimes old people start collecting
things and they can't stop."

"This is crazy," he said, wiping his hand along a stack of old
forty-fives. Dust flew into the stale air.

"My grandmother's house was worse than this," Faith told him. "It
took us a whole week just to be able to walk through to the kitchen."

"Why would someone do this?"

"I don't know," she admitted. Her grandfather had died when
Faith was a child, and her granny Mitchell had lived on her own for
most of her life. She had started collecting things in her fifties, and by
the time she was moved into a nursing home, the house had been
filled to the rafters with useless things. Looking around another
lonely old woman's house, seeing a similar accumulation, made Faith
wonder if someday Jeremy would be saying the same thing about
Faith's housekeeping.

At least he would have a little brother or sister to help him. Faith
put her hand to her stomach, wondering for the first time about the
child growing inside of her. Was it a girl or a boy? Would it have her
blonde hair or its father's dark Latino looks? Jeremy looked nothing
like his father, thank God. Faith's first love had been a gangly hillbilly
with a build that was reminiscent of Spike from the Peanuts cartoon.
As a baby, Jeremy had been almost delicate, like a thin piece of porcelain.
He'd had the sweetest little feet. Those first few days, Faith had
spent hours staring at his tiny toes, kissing the bottom of his heels.
She had thought that he was the most remarkable thing on the face of
the earth. He had been her little doll.

"Faith?"

She dropped her hand, wondering what had come over her. She'd
taken enough insulin this morning. Maybe she was just feeling the
typical hormonal swings of pregnancy that had made being fourteen
such a pleasure for Faith as well as everyone around her. How on the
earth was she going to go through this again? And how was she going
to do it alone?

"Faith?"

"You don't have to keep saying my name, Will." She indicated the
back of the house. "Go check the kitchen. I'll take the bedrooms."

He gave her a careful look before heading into the kitchen.

Faith walked down the hallway toward the back rooms, picking
her way through broken blenders and toasters and telephones. She
wondered if the old woman had scavenged for these things or if she
had accumulated them over a lifetime. The framed photographs on
the walls looked ancient, some of them in sepia and black-and-white.
Faith scanned them as she made her way back, wondering when people
had started smiling for photographs, and why. She had some
older photos of her mother's grandparents that were particularly
treasured. They had lived on a farm during the Depression, and a
traveling photographer had taken a shot of their small family as well
as a mule that was called Big Pete. Only the mule had been smiling.

There was no Big Pete on Gwendolyn Zabel's wall, but some of
the color photographs showed not one but two different young girls,
both with dark brown hair hanging down past their pencil-thin
waists. They were a few years apart in age, but definitely sisters.
None of the more recent photographs showed the two posing together.
Jacquelyn's sister seemed to prefer desert settings for the shots
she sent her mother, while Jacquelyn's photos tended to show her
posing on the beach, a bikini low across her boyishly thin hips. Faith
could not help but think if she looked that great at thirty-eight years
old, she'd be taking pictures of herself wearing a bikini, too. There
were very few recent pictures of the sister, who appeared to have
grown plumper with age. Faith hoped she had kept in touch with her
mother. They could do a reverse trace on the telephone and find her
that way.

The first bedroom did not have a door. Stacks of debris filled the
room—more newspapers and magazines. There were some boxes,
but for the most part, the small bedroom was filled with so much
trash it was impossible to go more than few feet in. A musty odor
filled the air, and Faith remembered a story she'd seen on the news
many years ago about a woman who'd gotten a paper cut from an old
magazine and ended up dying from some strange disease. She backed
down out of the room and glanced into the bathroom. More junk,
but someone had cleared a path to the toilet and scrubbed it clean. A
toothbrush and some other toiletries were lined up neatly on the
sink. There were piles of garbage bags in the bathtub. The shower
curtain was almost black with mold.

Faith had to turn sideways to get past the door to the master bedroom.
She saw the reason as soon as she was inside. There was an old
rocking chair near the door, so piled with clothes that it was ready to
topple over except for the door propping it up. More clothes were
scattered around the room, the sort of stuff that would be called vintage
and sold for hundreds of dollars down the street in the funky
clothing stores of Little Five Points.

The house was warm, which made it more difficult for Faith to
get her sweaty hands into the latex gloves. She ignored the pinprick
of dried blood on the tip of her finger, not wanting to think about
anything else that would turn her into a sobbing mess.

She started on the chest of drawers first. All of the drawers were
open, so it was just a matter of pushing around clothes, looking for
stashed letters or an address book that might list family relations. The
bed was neatly made, the only item in the house about which "neat"
could be said to describe it. There was no telling if Jacquelyn Zabel
had slept in her mother's bedroom or if she had opted for a hotel
downtown.

Or maybe not. Faith saw an open duffel bag sitting beside a laptop
case on the floor. She should have spotted the items immediately, because
they were both obviously out of place, with their distinctive
designer logos and soft leather shells. Faith checked the laptop case,
finding a MacBook Air that her son would've killed for. She booted
it up, but the welcome screen asked for a username and password.
Charlie would have to send it through the proper channels to try to
crack it, but in Faith's experience, Macs that had been password-protected
were impossible to decode, even by the manufacturer.

Next, Faith looked through the duffel. The clothes inside were
designer—Donna Karan, Jones of New York. The Jimmy Choos
were particularly impressive, especially to Faith, who was wearing a
skirt that was the equivalent of a camping tent, since she couldn't find
any pants in her closet that would button anymore. Jacquelyn Zabel
apparently suffered no such sartorial quandaries, and Faith wondered
why someone who could obviously afford otherwise chose to stay in
this awful house.

So, Jacquelyn had apparently been sleeping in the room. The
neatly made bed, a glass of water and a pair of reading glasses on the
table beside it, all pointed to a recent inhabitant. There was also a
giant, hospital-size bottle of aspirin. Faith opened the container and
found it half empty. She would probably need some aspirin herself if
she were packing up her mother's home. Faith had seen the heartbreak
her father suffered when he'd had to put his mother in an
assisted-living facility. The man had passed away years ago, but Faith
knew that he had never gotten over having to put his mother in a
home.

Unbidden, Faith felt her eyes fill with tears. She let out a groan,
wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Since she'd seen a plus
sign on the pregnancy test, a day hadn't gone by without Faith's brain
conjuring some story to make her burst into tears.

She returned to the duffel. She was feeling around for pieces of
paper—a notebook, a journal, a plane ticket—when she heard
yelling coming from the other side of the house. Faith found Will in
the kitchen. A very large and very angry woman was screaming in his
face.

"You pigs have no right to be here!"

Faith thought the woman looked just like the type of aging hippie
who would use the word "pigs." Her hair was braided down her back
and she was wearing a horse-blanket shawl around her body in lieu of
a shirt. Faith guessed that the woman was officially the last hold-out
in the neighborhood, soon to be the crappiest house on the street.
She didn't look like the yoga-loving mommies who probably lived in
the renovated mansions.

Will remained remarkably cool, leaning against the refrigerator
with a hand in his pocket. "Ma'am, I need you to calm down."

"Fuck you," she shot back. "Fuck you, too," she added, seeing
Faith in the doorway. Close up, Faith thought the woman was in her
late forties. It was hard to tell, though, since her face was bawled into
an angry red knot. She had the sort of features that seemed built for
fury.

Will asked, "Did you know Gwendolyn Zabel?"

"You have no right to question me without a lawyer."

Faith rolled her eyes, reveling in the sheer childish joy of the gesture.

Will was more mature in his approach. "Can you tell me your
name?"

She turned instantly reticent. "Why?"

"I'd like to know what to call you."

She seemed to scroll through her options. "Candy."

"All right, Candy. I'm Special Agent Trent with the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation, this is Special Agent Mitchell. I'm sorry to
tell you that Mrs. Zabel's daughter has been in an accident."

Candy pulled the blanket closer. "Was she drinking?"

Will asked, "Did you know Jacquelyn?"

"Jackie." Candy shrugged her shoulders. "She was here for a few
weeks to get her mother's house sold. We talked."

"Did she use a real estate agent or sell it herself ?"

"She used a local agent." The woman shifted her stance, blocking
Faith from her view. "Is Jackie okay?"

"I'm afraid she's not. She was killed in the accident."

Candy put her hand to her mouth.

"Have you seen anyone hanging around the house? Anyone suspicious?"

"Of course not. I'd call the police."

Faith suppressed a snort. The ones who screamed about the pigs
were always the ones who called the police for help at the first whiff
of trouble.

Will asked, "Does Jackie have any family we can get in touch
with?"

"Are you fucking blind?" Candy demanded. She jerked her head
toward the refrigerator. Faith could see a list of names and phone
numbers taped to the door that Will was leaning against. The words,
"
EMERGENCY NUMBERS
" were typed in bold print at the top, less than
six inches away from his face. "Christ, don't they teach you people to
read
?"

Will looked absolutely mortified, and Faith would have slapped
the woman if she had been standing close enough. Instead, she said,
"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to go downtown and make a formal
statement."

Will caught her eye, shook his head, but Faith was so furious she
struggled to keep her voice from shaking. "We'll get a cruiser to take
you to City Hall East. It'll only take a few hours."

"Why?" the woman demanded. "Why do you need me to—"

Faith took out her cell phone and dialed her old partner at the
Atlanta Police Department. Leo Donnelly owed her a favor—make
that several favors—and she intended to use them to make this
woman's life as difficult as possible.

Candy said, "I'll talk to you here. You don't need to take me
downtown."

"Your friend Jackie is dead," Faith said, her anger making her
tone sharp. "Either you're helping our investigation or you're obstructing
it."

"Okay, okay," she said, holding up her hands in surrender. "What
do you want to know?"

Faith glanced at Will, who was looking at his shoes. She pressed
her thumb into the end button, disconnecting the call to Leo. She
asked Candy, "When's the last time you saw Jackie?"

"Last weekend. She came over for some company."

"What kind of company?"