Page 18 of Luck of the Devil (Harper Adams Mystery #3)

Guilt shot through me. I couldn't deny it was a possibility.

“You had no way of knowing,” he said behind me, leaning into the door frame.

I twisted in my seat to face him.

“And you canceled for a legit reason.”

Malcolm walked over to the coffee maker and refilled his cup. “The real question is, what made her decide to call a number she’d just received within the last two days?”

I pushed out a sigh. “Good question.”

Malcolm returned to the table and poured more creamer into his cup without sitting. “You said she’d been anxious and safety conscious. Maybe she got mixed up in something dangerous or realized someone was out to get her.”

Releasing a short laugh, I said, “She always wore her seatbelt, even if she was driving in a parking lot. She unplugged her appliances if she was leaving the house for more than four hours. She threw out milk the day before its sell-by-date. She was the epitome of careful.”

She’d always been that way, but she’d become even more vigilant after Andi’s death.

“Maybe so, but there’s no denying she called a two-day-old burner after she talked to you. It’s suspicious as hell. Especially for a woman like your mother.”

He was right. So why had she called the number? And who did the number belong to?

I did another scan of her email, this time looking for anything threatening, but came up with nothing.

Unless she’d deleted it.

I pulled up her archived emails, but there was nothing there either.

I opened her text message icon, but there were only a few texts, all spam or from stores she’d likely signed up for. My mother hated text messaging and refused to use it.

I told Malcolm my findings.

“Do you think someone came to her house?” he asked.

“Maybe? But I don’t know how we could verify that. She doesn’t have a camera doorbell. It was too high tech for her. And I don’t think the neighbors have one either.”

A grin cracked his lips. “Are they busybodies?”

I considered it for a moment, then lifted a shoulder into a shrug. “Some are, some aren’t.”

“Maybe they saw something.”

Did I really want to take the time to canvas the neighborhood right now? I needed a shower, and it was a three-hour drive to Jonesboro. Not to mention we still had to dig through my mother’s waterlogged things to see if there was a note with the phone number.

“I can ask around,” he said nonchalantly.

I nearly spat out my coffee. “ You? ”

He shrugged. “How likely are they to know who I am?” A grin spread across his face. “I can be charming when I want to be.”

“You? Charming?’ I snorted. “I’d love to see that.” But even as I said, I knew he was right. I’d seen hints of it before.

He sat back and brought the coffee cup to his lips, a smirk filling his eyes.

I shook my head. “No way are you going through the neighborhood. If anyone puts together who you are, then we’ll have a whole new mess to deal with.

I think it can wait for now. We need to go through her suitcase, and I should do that before I take a shower since it’s bound to stink to high heaven. ”

“Did you look up her pharmacy account?”

“Not yet.”

“Pull that up first, then we’ll tackle the suitcase.”

It was easy to log in since her computer auto fed the login information. A couple of clicks showed her list of medications. Zoloft was the most recent one filled.

“She had a prescription of Zoloft for 50 mg,” I said, shaking my head. “I still find it difficult to believe she’d agree to take it.”

“What if she didn’t?”

I glanced up at him and narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean? Are you suggesting someone had it prescribed for her to make it look like she was on antidepressants?”

“It would sure help sell the suicide theory.”

I pushed out a sigh. He was right, but the only person I could think of who could pull that off was my father. The prescription had been sent in three weeks ago, so if he was responsible for it, her death had been premeditated.

My heart began to pound, and I reminded myself that this was just another case. A random woman. Of course her husband was the number one suspect.

“We need to find out if she asked for the prescription,” Malcolm said.“Who prescribed it? Her usual doctor?”

I checked the screen. “Yeah. Dr. Duncan.”

“Is Dr. Duncan friends with your father?”

My stomach sank like a stone. “They’re golf buddies.”

He lifted a brow. “Say they’re out on the course, and your father mentions how anxious your mother’s been, only she’s too embarrassed to call or make an appointment to ask for help. So, your dad’s buddy offers to prescribe it and save her the visit.”

“That would be illegal. She’d have to ask for it herself.”

“You really think that kind of thing doesn’t happen?” he scoffed. “Especially in a town like this?”

He had a point, but how could I find out?

I’d deal with it after we came back from Jonesboro.

I closed the laptop and plugged it into the charger at the table to make sure it was fully charged before I took it with us. Malcolm would be driving, which would give me plenty of time to search her computer using the hotspot on my phone.

I took a long sip from my mug before I stood. I couldn’t put this off any longer. “Let’s dig through her bag.”

He nodded and drained his cup.

I was dreading this. Not only the smell but going through her things. It felt like an invasion of her privacy, even if the sheriff’s department had done it before us.

We headed out the back door and walked over to the detached garage at the end of the driveway.

My mother had never kept it locked, so it lifted easily, revealing the clear plastic bag containing a black, carry-on sized suitcase in the middle of the concrete floor.

Her handbag was also in the bag. The smell of mildew was already strong, and we hadn’t even opened it yet.

Malcolm approached the plastic bag first and began to work on the loose knot at the top. Once he had it open, the smell nearly knocked me over. I buried my nose in the crook of my arm.

“That’s even worse than I expected,” I said, my voice muffled by the sleeve of my sweatshirt. But burying my nose into my own rank shirt reminded me that I wasn’t smelling like a rose myself.

“No denying it’s ripe,” he said, tugging down the side of the bag. “Got any gloves?”

“Not latex or nitrile.”

He lifted his gaze to me, flashing a smile. “What kind of PI are you?”

“I just got my license,” I said half-defensively. “I’ve barely gotten started.”

He walked over to my father’s work bench and began rifling around until he found a pair of grimy work gloves.

I expected him to complain, but he just shoved his hand in the first glove and tugged it up to his wrist, then started tugging on the other.

“I’ll open the suitcase and spread it open, then we’ll go through it, item by item. ”

“I have a pair of winter gloves upstairs. I’ll get them so I can help.”

“I think it will work better if I go through it, and you point out if anything’s off.”

I gave a short nod, my stomach starting to protest at the stench. It would be faster if I got my own set of gloves, but he was right—I really needed to look at everything since I was more likely to spot if something was off.

He pulled out her purse first and set it on the concrete, water still dripping from the bottom.

The image of my mother and her purse sinking into the river filled my head, sending a wave of panic through me. I drew in a sharp breath, then instantly regretted it as my nose filled with more of the putrid stench.

He glanced up at me as I coughed, repressing a gag. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said testily, pissed at myself for showing a reaction like a damn amateur. Sure, I hadn’t examined submerged purses and suitcases before, but I’d seen a lengthy list of equally disgusting things. “Keep going.”

He pulled out her wallet, then opened it, revealing her driver’s license, a credit and debit card, and sixty-four dollars and fifty-three cents in cash.

“No receipts,” he said. “A lot of people keep a receipt or two in their wallet. Like a recent gas purchase.”

I wasn’t sure if he knew that for a fact or was just guessing. “Not my mother. Her wallet was always neat and tidy.”

“No paper with the burner phone number.”

I couldn’t stop my frown. “Yeah, not that we’d necessarily be able to read it anyway. The ink may have bled.”

“True,” he said, setting the wallet aside. “But we still don’t know how she remembered the number, so even a blank piece of paper would have been worth our consideration.”

He was right. I wasn’t sure why I was being contrary, but I also wasn’t going to apologize.

Next, he removed a compact with powder and a puff, two tubes of lipstick, her key fob for her car, and her slim planner. I hadn’t considered her planner, which I could only attribute to my brain working on half its cylinders.

“There might be clues in here about what she was up to before her death,” Malcolm said.

My stomach knotted. Was it too much to hope she’d recorded where she was going or who she’d met with to get the burner? Could it be that easy?

Malcolm stood and walked over to me, carefully opening the cover. The printed ink was still slightly intact and readable, so I was hoping whatever she’d written was legible.

He started flipping pages, and once he hit January, my hopes were dashed. While I could see that something had been written on certain days, the words were mostly unreadable smears.

“We’re looking for March,” Malcolm said. “The interior pages might be more legible.”

Possibly, but I wasn’t going to risk getting my hopes up.

He carefully turned the page and February was the same, just ink smears on the page. Next was March, which was just as unreadable, but held more smears than the other pages.

“Maybe if we let it dry, it will reveal more,” he said.

I narrowed my eyes as I glanced up at him. “Since when did you become delusional?”

He shrugged slightly. “You never know what’s going to turn up. Maybe we’ll be able to see indentations where she wrote.”