I gathered from her tone that the neighborhood wasn’t big on renters. I’d grown up in a similar neighborhood, where most people had owned for years, and renters were considered interlopers because they were transitory. Not very welcoming, but looking at this woman now, I was sure that was what was going on.
“Well, I guess we’ll see if we can find something else,” Eli said.
“Y’all should go check the post office. They’ve got a bulletin board up there. Sometimes people post rentals.”
“What about the man who was here?” Eli asked. “You send him to the post office, too?”
She shrugged, took a long drag off her cigarette. “Might have done.”
“All right, then. I guess that’s our next stop. Nice to meet you.”
She just grunted and stood in the driveway, hands propped on her hot pink hips, her cigarette burning down to the filter, watching as we got back in the SUV.
“Well, that was interesting,” I said, pulling up the address of the town post office on my phone. “Who’s the guy?”
“I don’t know,” Eli said.
“Yes, you do,” I shot back.
He shot me a sidelong glance. “How do you know?”
“I saw it. Your lips got tight, and you straightened your shoulders.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m starting to think, Sylvie Calloway, that you’re too smart for your own good.”
“Too smart foryourgood,” I corrected. “Plenty smart enough for mine. Though not smart enough to have skipped over Emily Shaw’s case.” I thought of my explodedvan and the number of times I’d almost died in the last seventy-two hours.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Eli said, clearly not wanting to tell me what he knew.
“Yeah,” I said, “we will. Later.”
Eli knew more about Emily Shaw than he was telling me. If he was working her case for a client, I understood, even if I didn’t like it. But I was starting to wonder—wasthis for a client? Or was something about Emily Shaw’s murder personal for Eli? Or for Sinclair Security? It was a lot for him to come here, and despite his explanation of why it was okay, I didn’t buy that unless it was personal on some level. Sinclair Security had a big team. He could have sent someone else. It didn’t quite make sense.
Whatever was going on, sooner or later, I was going to find out.
Chapter Thirteen
ELI
The neighbor’s description of the man she’d spoken to was too close not to be my missing mentor. One more tie connecting Silas Creed to Emily Shaw. I didn’t know how to put the pieces together. It was potentially a break in the case that Silas had been to Emily’s childhood home since Emily had died, but I didn’t know how it fit in with the puzzle of what was going on with him. We also now knew Shaw was either a married name—though we hadn’t turned up any information that she had ever been married—or it was an alias. If she was using an alias, she’d kept her first name, since the neighbor hadn’t commented that we’d gotten that wrong.
I chewed on the problem at hand as I drove to the post office, not needing Sylvie’s map to find the little cottage tucked off Main Street, the same building I’d known from my childhood. I could drive there with my eyes closed, despite all the years since I’d last been back.
I wasn’t sure there was a point to visiting the post office, but if the neighbor had sent Silas there, we had to check it out. The parking lot was empty when we pulled in, a singleblue hatchback around back. At the sight of the building, I felt the tense flutter in my gut of long-repressed memories. The gray siding was faded, the white trim in need of a fresh coat of paint. I knew this place. I could remember stopping in with my mother when she needed to buy stamps, standing in line for ages with wet, cold feet to mail Christmas packages.
Was the postmistress still Miss Carmody? Would she recognize me? Everything inside me revolted at that idea. This wasn’t a homecoming. I didn’t want to be remembered. I was thinking about stopping by the graveyard before we left, or driving by the house I’d grown up in. Maybe. I hadn’t decided. What I did know was that I didn’t want to talk to anyone who might remember me. But now we were here, and it was too late to back out.
I felt an immeasurable wave of relief when Sylvie met me at the front of the vehicle, slid her arm through mine, and said, “Let me do the talking.”
“Happy to,” I agreed.
We walked up the front steps. Sylvie pushed open the door, her eyes scanning the room and locking on the corkboard off to the left of the front counter.
“Be there in a minute,” a rough female voice called from the back.
“Take your time,” Sylvie called back. “Just looking at the board here, we don’t really need anything.”
We stood in front of the corkboard covered in flyers, business cards, and a few sticky notes. Guitar lessons, a pet sitter, a local accountant drumming up business. And a few rentals: single-family home, two-bedroom apartment in town. As expected, nothing about the house we just left.
