In the Temple, page 11
Why hadn't she thought that far ahead? She'd only looked at the specific thing they'd been hired for: prove Gordon was innocent, get him out of jail. But Jesse was right—if Gordon was innocent, someone else was guilty. Zoe Warsaw hadn't died of natural causes, not even close. Georgia took a breath. “It would likely be somebody at the party, wouldn't it?”
Jesse nodded. “That makes the most sense. We start at the inner circle and work our way out. And another reason—”
Jesse pointed with her fork. She was already eating, and Georgia decided it was best to follow suit. Surely, she could process both the information and the food, and she was starving.
“We want to interview all the people at the party. I'm guessing they already know the Godwins think he's innocent.”
Georgia nodded, catching on. “But if we put the information out there that he actually is it may change the information we get.”
“Exactly,” Jesse replied softly.
Georgia dug into her french toast, sausage and bacon as she watched Jesse carefully eat an egg white omelet full of vegetables with turkey sausage on the side. Though it was obviously the better decision, Georgia didn't envy the other woman her healthy breakfast.
“We go to the party goers next?” She was beginning to see why Jesse thought another interview with the Godwins could and should be moved further down the list. She followed the question with a thick, sweet forkful from her plate.
“I think so.” But Jesse seemed to want to mull it over before committing. “We also need to go back to the Godwins for the purpose of finding out why they're crowdfunding us. We need to get to the partygoers and ask them what they remember. And we need to talk to anyone who’s willing to talk about Seth’s and then Nancy’s subsequent deaths.”
“The maid at the house might know something,” Georgia suggested. It was a long shot. The woman was young, maybe too young to have been working there almost fourteen years ago, but she might know who was. She and Jesse had already formed a sort of tentative rapport/lie about why they kept showing up. They could do it.
“We're close to the house,” Georgia pointed out, motioning out the window with a slice of sausage on the end of her fork before she ate it. “It'll probably be pretty fast, because she most likely wasn’t there, but if someone was . . .”
“Let's do it,” Jesse agreed, “And then we go back to the room and start scheduling appointments with the other party goers.”
Georgia nodded along. Jesse was good at forming plans and then adjusting them over and over as needed. She remembered from the last time that they'd tried to set up a string of interviews with the involved people. It could take a while to make it actually happen, even with people who were anxious to talk.
Hell, it could take a while to get that first call back just to find out if they were willing or not. Luckily, some people desperately wanted to talk to the private investigator. They felt they had something to share. But other people simply did not want to—for a variety of reasons. Some wouldn’t call back to even just say they weren’t interested. All that was on top of finding out where they were and how to reach them in the first place.
Georgia was prepared to run them down if necessary. Given the possible long time frame, getting started on that was high priority. They could get to the Godwins at probably almost any time they wanted, and it looked like the answer to the crowdfunding question wasn’t going to be a make or break decision maker. Just another thing to check off the ever-growing to do list.
Breakfast finished, they hopped back into the car and this time they headed straight to the Greenbrier estate. Georgia appreciated the landscape a little better on the long drive out to the house. It was exactly as Jesse had said.
Clearly, the fortunes of people out here varied quite a bit from home to home. Now she could see where fortunes had changed over the decades. Several larger, grander homes had fallen into disrepair. One had even begun to collapse on itself. There were other reversals of fortune, too. Several smaller homes, that were cleaner and shinier than their neighbors, now decorated with an abundance of kitsch. The kind of decor that always made her think of Elvis and what her father had said happened when people who were not used to having money suddenly had plenty.
But then they were at the Greenbrier home again. Only this time, Jesse pulled straight up the drive, passing through the bricked entry walls as if she belonged here.
When they knocked on the door, the same young woman greeted them. For a second, Georgia panicked because she did not remember the maid’s name, but Jesse was a professional.
“Lulu. It's good to see you again!” She smiled as though she had an appointment and Georgia tried to do the same.
“Mr. Greenbrier, he is not home. He works during the week,” the young woman said, as if that was all that needed to be explained. A little irritation that she was having to explain it again seeped through. Georgia understood.
“Actually,” Jesse replied, once again, not putting her foot in the door, but managing to keep it open anyway. “We came to speak to you.”
“Me?” She seemed surprised by that.
“Yes. We were curious how long you've worked for Mr. Greenbrier.”
“Ten years, eleven in October.” Lulu answered concisely. She stood in the doorway and offered the information, but didn’t wave them inside the big house again.
October was not that far away. Georgia did the quick math, and not far enough back to have been here when Seth or Nancy died.
Lulu shook her head again. “Why do you want to speak to me?”
“Mr. Greenbrier’s son died here,” Jesse said, her tone even, “and we were curious if you or the other staff might know anything about that.”
“For your article?” Lulu asked clearly either confused or suspicious.
Jesse answered, quickly reminding Georgia once again that she was on her A game, even if Georgia wasn't. “Oh, we aren’t going to put it in the article, but we do need to get all our information straight, in case it changes whether or not the home can even be listed.” The investigator waited a beat then asked, “You wouldn't know about it, would you?”
“I wasn't working here.” The answer seemed final, and Georgia was about to ask more when Lulu added, “But my mother was.”
Georgia tried to hide her surprise. While Jesse was moving cleanly, Georgia jumped a little too quickly. “Will we be able to speak to her? We can just get this all cleared up, and then the article can go ahead.”
She hoped she was as smooth as she thought she was, but Lulu was shaking her head.
“My mother passed eleven years ago.”
Something shifted in the air around Jesse and Georgia realized she wasn't the only one who recognized that those dates seemed a little coincidental.
“She passed and then you began working here?” Jesse asked as though it wasn’t possibly a revelation.
Lulu nodded, thankfully, not finding anything too bizarre with the conversation. Maybe it was easy enough to believe that this was just where the research for the article had come around to.
“I'm so sorry to hear that,” Jesse added and Georgia, once again, took notes because she had been ready to jump in with a question. In fact, Jesse seemed to be willing to play good cop-bad cop a little bit here, and clearly Jesse was giving herself the role of sympathetic cop.
After a moment of lingering silence, when it became clear the boss wouldn't ask the question herself, Georgia jumped in. “I'm sorry about your mother. Do you mind telling us what happened?”
She fought to keep her expression unsurprised and her thoughts from showing on her face. Neither she nor Jesse had been prepared for the answer.
24
Jesse had managed to keep some semblance of a kind and interested smile on her face, while Lulu Martinez explained what had happened with her mother’s accident. Then, unable to continue, Jesse had thanked the woman for her time and waved goodbye.
She’d quietly climbed back into her car—hoping Georgia followed along—and used the wide driveway to make a slow, full turn. Only after she passed the brick gates, made a left and was about a mile down the road did the seal break.
Shaking her head as if that could dispel the awful thoughts, she was glad this was a long, relatively straight road with virtually no traffic. “You have got to be shitting me! What the fuck-all was that?”
“The plot thickens,” Georgia commented from beside her. Not the term Jesse would have used.
“Four deaths.” She breathed it out. Four deaths in that house! Then she recited, “Three murders and an accident.”
“Sounds like a bad romantic comedy,” Georgia shrugged.
Why was this not worming its way down inside Georgia the way it was for her?
They stayed silent for a few minutes longer as Jesse tried to stitch back up the rip in her reality that the new information revealed. Lulu's Mother, Mariana, had tripped and fallen down the back steps. Someone in the family—Jesse would have to find out later, she hadn’t been able to deal with more information now—had called for an ambulance.
The woman had still been alive when EMTs arrived, but died before they could help her. Right there on the back steps where Lulu had walked Jesse and Georgia around the house a few days ago. Did she not look at those steps and imagine her mother dying there?
She’d barely been an adult at the time.
Jesse remembered thinking the back porch had been amazing. Red brick in a herringbone pattern, framed with white railings, it spanned the entire back of the house. Thick brick staircases led down each side—one to the driveway and garages to the right of the house. Another, wide set, opened into the lush back yard. Ceiling fans turned lazily over head. Rocking chairs and tables sat between lush plants, allowing family or visitors to sip a cold drink and look over the gardens, the pool, the tennis courts.
The tennis courts. Jesse snapped those pieces together too. Where Seth had been killed.
Pushing her thoughts back to the current death she was trying to sort, she calculated that Mr. Greenbrier had offered Lulu her mother’s job within a few months after her death.
Damn.
“Can you imagine?” Jesse started. She hadn't meant to ask anything, but it seemed she had no control over her mouth right now. At least Georgia was the only one around to hear her trying to sort things out loud. “Working at the very place where your mother died? Does she have to sweep the steps her mother fell down?”
Beside her, Georgia jolted. Clearly, the other woman had not yet thought that aspect through. Georgia didn't answer the questions, but threw back another that Jesse did not see coming. “Do you think the house is cursed?”
“Seriously?” Jesse asked.
Georgia didn’t take her tone as an insult and just kept talking. “I did get the feeling that Zoe Warsaw's death was an accident. Even the way Gordon tells it in his confession, I wouldn’t think it would be tried as murder. Manslaughter, probably. Or is it murder because they were drunk?” Georgia then admitted she didn't really know the laws surrounding that, and that maybe it was murder on a technicality.
Jesse wasn’t talking. It was easier to let Georgia roll with it while her own thoughts tumbled. She’d not been prepared for that.
“I mean, they were kids, they were drunk, they were having rough sex, and it got away from them.” Georgia recounted.
Jesse shook her head. What a shitty set of ideas to have to string together. “Why were high school kids having rough sex with choking?”
Georgia shook her head. She was looking out the window now, and Jesse didn't think she would answer, but she said, “For the same reason they huff the gas from whipped cream cans. Why they drive crazy ass fast. And drink until they are blacked out and vomiting. Drugs and choking and whippets feel good at least for a while. And they think they're immortal.”
It was interesting, Jesse thought, Georgia wasn't a teenager. She was certainly more mature than that, and she said they not I. But she was far closer to her teenage years—and teenage understanding—than Jesse was. It was a good reminder that the people they were dealing with on the boat and later at the party had not been fully functioning adults, even if they'd been able to murder one of their own as though they were.
“You don't really think the house is cursed?” Jesse pressed. Her initial instinct was to say she didn't believe in things like that, but one of the last cases she'd seen in Florida sure as hell had changed her way of thinking. She still wasn't sure what she saw.
“Not like voodoo or a hex,” Georgia clarified. But then she turned in her seat and looked at Jesse, “but I guess I believe in bad vibes. Sure seems like if you murder a teenager that some bad juju would hang around. Maybe affect other things.”
“Fair enough,” Jesse conceded. And it would be hard to argue that she was wrong given the Greenbrier house history.
They made it further away, turning from the old two lane road with no stop signs and no lights, closer into town. Once they entered the city proper, they almost immediately passed a Greenbrier Bank branch.
Jesse shook her head and pointed it out to Georgia. “You don't see these old family-owned banks much anymore. They've mostly all been snapped up by the big four.”
Georgia didn't ask what the big four were. The Greenbriers seemed to have done okay. “How many locations are there in town?”
“Five.” Jesse already knew.
“How many of the big guys?”
“Five, all totaled.”
Georgia put that together. “So, the Greenbriers probably own half the banking in the town.”
Jesse would imagine that was about right. “My guess is for a century, they owned all of it. I don't know how new the rest of this is.” She waved her hand around as if indicating various branches with American flags and stars on their logos.
“Do you think it affected the family?” Georgia asked next, but Jesse could only shrug.
She was pulling into the hotel lot before she even realized what she'd done. This was where they were supposed to come, wasn't it? She wasn't sure. She was more than rattled by Lulu’s revelation about her mother.
Georgia rightly held her tongue while they passed through the back entrance, through the lobby, and then rode up in the elevator in silence. Once they were in the room, however, all bets were off. “If the family owned all of the banking in town, then what? Somewhere over the last fifty, maybe thirty years, the big banks have crept in and eaten up half of it. Do you think it affected them?”
Jesse hadn't thought of that before. But it made sense. “I don't see how it couldn't, but they still seem to be doing quite well.”
“And then a girl dies at their house, and then the son is absolutely murdered at their house—that one's not in question—” Georgia raised her eyebrows at that, “and then the mother dies by suicide and the maid has an accident, falls down the back steps and dies, all within the span of less than six years. Do you think it's all related?”
“Oh, God, I hope not,” Jesse replied immediately, the feeling from her gut telling her she didn’t want it to be.
Then she realized it didn’t matter what she felt, what she hoped. She would have to prove to herself that it wasn't. “Here's the thing,” she told Georgia, “we weren't looking for another murder. Or a suicide. And we weren't looking to see if a maid had fallen down the steps and died.”
Georgia's eyes snapped up to meet hers. “What you're saying is we should look?”
Jesse nodded. She could tell from the expression in Georgia's eyes that she was also afraid of what they might uncover.
25
Georgia sighed as she checked the time. Why hadn't the day progressed any further?
They'd gone out for breakfast, they'd done an interview, gotten a shock and it still wasn't even time for lunch yet. She turned to Jesse. “Do you want to see if you can hunt down and get in touch with the people from the party and I’ll look up the Greenbrier family history?”
“Sure,” Jesse replied, though she didn't look up from where she'd already opened her laptop and logged into something.
It had seemed an equitable distribution to Georgia, and Jesse was definitely the better person to line up those interviews. She had more credentials, more experience. She was more likely to talk them into agreeing. Georgia didn’t have her finesse.
An hour later, Jesse set down her phone and looked up. “Have you found anything interesting?”
“I've got this.” Georgia tapped at the screen and turned her tablet around for Jesse to see, showing off the diagram she'd drawn up. Using her pen to point, she tried not to activate the screen. She motioned to a few ovals at the top. “I've got Seth and then Nancy.” She tapped another “I've got daddy—Hank. Zoe's over here, not part of the family but definitely part of the history. Mariana is over here—the maid—” She tapped at that oval, showing Jesse. “Also not part of the family history. Then I have this, too.”
This time she meant to touch the screen with the pen. She dragged it up, pulling up the image and showing information back four generations of Greenbriers.
“Holy shit,” Jesse replied, eyes flying wide. “I didn't expect you to get that far that fast.”
Jesse had been on the phone most of the time, and Georgia had been staying quiet, so she hadn't been updating her partner—her boss, whatever. “I told you, my mom taught me how to research anything, how to speak Russian, and how to disappear on a moment's notice.”
She'd said it with a quirk in her voice. She'd known that these were all increasingly odd things for a parent to teach a young child. But things were starting to make a sick kind of sense. Georgia stopped cold.
The tablet still in her hand, facing Jesse, the pen was now in a death grip as pieces at the back of her brain suddenly started to click together.
“What?” Jesse asked cautiously.
