The Homewreckers(39)

Mak looked off toward the river. “Up and died on me. Heart attack.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone. Just like that. Suddenly, I had way too much time on my hands.”

“I know how that is,” Hattie said, touching his arm. “I lost my husband in a motorcycle accident seven years ago.”

“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “You’re so young. Not even thirty, right?”

“I’m thirty-three,” she said. “But Tybee must be pretty boring after Atlanta.”

“Oh no, lots of excitement. Already today I picked up a punk for taking a piss in some old lady’s front yard on Jones Street, and then I took a stolen bike report from a college girl who, it turns out, was so drunk she forgot the rental company came and picked it up last night.”

“A regular crime spree,” Hattie said.

Makarowicz held up the evidence bag. “Tell me this. Was she ever found?”

“Not that we know of,” Cass said. “And we probably would have heard.”

“St. Mary’s is the Catholic girls’ high school, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Hattie said. “My mother and grandmother graduated from there.”

“My mom did too,” Cass added.

“I’ve got a daughter who’s about your age,” Makarowicz said. “I remember when Lorna was in high school. Lots of gossip. Lots of drama. At the time, what did all you girls think happened to this Mrs. Ragan?”

“Some people thought she ran away with a man,” Cass said.

“So, a married woman runs off with another dude. Not a very original concept.”

“I never believed that,” Hattie said. “Her husband was the hot football coach at Cardinal Mooney, that’s the Catholic boys’ prep school. They were really a cute couple.”

“And she had a little girl,” Cass added. “She talked about Emma all the time in class.”

He’d taken a small notebook from his pocket and was jotting down notes. “Did she have any ties to this house that you know of?”

“Maybe,” Hattie said. “The family that owned this house—the Creedmores? Their kids all went to St. Mary’s and Cardinal Mooney, and I think Holland played football for Coach Ragan. He was a couple years older.”

“Creedmores? Do any of them still live in the area?”

“Yeah,” Cass said. “Mavis, kind of the matriarch, goes to church with my mom.”

“Holland Junior lives here too,” Hattie said. “I had a run-in with him last week, at city hall.”

“What was that all about?” Makarowicz asked, still taking notes.

“He wasn’t happy that I was able to buy the house. After the family basically abandoned it, the city condemned the property and put it up for sale, with sealed bids. It was all perfectly legal, but he was furious. Threatened to sue the city, then yelled at me, then offered fifty thousand to buy it from me outright.”

“Why was it abandoned?”

“According to Holland, the roof was damaged after a hurricane, and nobody could agree on who should pay for the repairs, so the family just walked away and quit paying taxes.”

Makarowicz looked dubious. “Looks like a lot of work.”

“We’ll finish the ground floor restoration in six weeks,” Hattie told him, sounding more confident than she felt.

“If you say so.” He handed his notebook over to Hattie. “Write down your contact information there, please. And hers. And the name of the guy you ran into at Tybee City Hall. Holland…”

“Creedmore,” Hattie said.

She scribbled her number and Cass’s on the notepad and handed it back to him.

“Okay, I’m gonna call this in to the Savannah PD. Somebody will be in touch. In the meantime, if you happen to find anything else of hers…” He took a business card from his pocket. “Gimme a call.”





19

Alert the Media




“Well, this is certainly a first for me,” Molly Fowlkes said. They were sitting in a scarred wooden booth at Pinkie Masters’, a dive bar in downtown Savannah. She was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, Al Makarowicz was drinking ice water.

“Being in a bar?” Mak asked.

Her laugh was gravelly—incongruent with the appearance of a delicate-featured woman, in her late forties, with short, light brown hair, and a fringe of bangs that brushed the frames of her tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses.

“No. I’m a reporter. Bars are like church for people like us. I mean, having a cop call me with a story. That doesn’t happen. Especially in Savannah.”

“Tell you the truth, I’ve never called a reporter before, so it’s a first for me too,” Al said. Makarowicz had found Fowlkes’s byline on a newspaper clipping from the case file a Savannah detective had let him borrow long enough to make an under-the-table copy.

“I checked you out, you had quite a career with the Atlanta PD,” she said. “How’d you end up out on Tybee Island?”

“Fed up with Atlanta crime and Atlanta traffic,” he said. “A buddy told me there was an opening, I applied, and now here I am, living the dream.”

“So, Detective Makarowicz, you said you had some news? About the missing English teacher?”