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Dani had stared at the image of the man who had fled the elevator on the fourteenth floor.
Who are you? she’d wondered. And how are you involved in all of this? One way or another, she intended to find out.
CHAPTER 19
The Reliant Agency didn’t exist. At least, it didn’t exist in the context of an office within a building with a front door and four walls. The “suite” in the building was actually a post office box within a mail annex, and Remmi suspected the telephone number she’d found online and left messages on was never answered. The whole agency was a scam. “Someone must pick up the mail here,” she said to the twentysomething worker behind the counter.
“I can’t give out information about our customers,” the clerk said primly, with a certain amount of relish. He was a string bean of a man, with thin shoulders and hips and a feeble, sparse attempt at a Lincolnesque beard.
“Someone pays for that space,” she said, pointing to the box in question. “Or else you mail it somewhere else. But someone pays the bill.”
“The box is registered to the Reliant Agency,” he told her. “That’s all I can tell you. Next.” He looked over her shoulder to a woman in a pink coat and gloves who was balancing three packages in one hand while dealing with a toy poodle on a leash with the other. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said pointedly to Remmi as the woman pushed past her and let her packages tumble onto the counter with a scale. She declared, “I need these to be insured, and they have to get there by the end of the week!”
Sensing she wasn’t going to get any more information from the guy, Remmi left the building and walked onto the street. Nearby, rising higher than its neighbors, the Montmort Tower knifed into the gray sky. She counted up to the nineteenth floor and studied the window and ledge from which Karen Upgarde had leaped to her death.
As Didi Storm.
Why?
She turned her gaze to the base of the hotel, where potted plants had been decorated with festive garlands and lights. Cars, vans, and taxis pulled into the curving drive in a steady line, moving around the fountain to drop off or pick up patrons of the Montmort. And on the pavement, just to one side of the illuminated, bubbling water feature, Karen Upgarde had given up her life.
Remmi felt cold inside as she remembered the horrid fall and then the body crumpled on the pavement.
The suicide leap would have been the kind of splashy, front-page exit so like her mother, except that Didi Storm had never had a death wish. No matter how bad times became, Didi always worked up a way out. If Plan A doesn’t work, then go to Plan B.
Ending her own life didn’t seem like either.
But could Didi really still be alive? Would she have existed twenty years and never so much as contacted Remmi? The same cold sense of abandonment she’d felt as a teenager wrapped an icy blanket over her heart. She’d almost come to grips with the fact that her mother had died somehow, that whatever she’d planned to do to the father of the twins had backfired and she’d disappeared without a trace.
How odd that Didi’s ghost was rising now. First that damned book—I’m Not Me—and now this? A stranger dressed in Didi’s things to look like her leaping to her death? If she were a God-fearing person, she might think she was being given a sign. Surely, her aunt would believe that God was talking to her . . . well, or maybe Satan. For a second, she stopped in her tracks to stare at the fountain and hotel doors where people were going about their lives, unconcerned about the tragedy that had unfolded only steps from this very spot.
“Excuse me!” A woman in knee-high boots and a long coat that billowed behind, quickly stepped around Remmi. She was holding an umbrella and shot Remmi a perturbed look. A man in a business suit and raincoat, his collar turned up against the persistent precipitation, followed after her, and only then did Remmi realize she was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, caught up in her thoughts, holding up pedestrian traffic. Hastily, she continued toward the parking structure where she’d left her car, the same garage she’d used before.
She spent the rest of the day waiting for Detective Settler’s call while running errands and checking on two of Greta’s rental properties. The first was in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and as she drove over the wide span high above the neck of water linking San Francisco Bay to the Pacific, she thought about her half brother and sister, wondering if they were alive and where they might be. She’d registered years ago on several websites that were supposed to connect people with missing loved ones, but so far, she’d had no responses, which was not surprising. She’d known the chance of finding either Ariel or Adam was a long shot. If they had survived, they probably knew nothing of their birth or family.
From the bridge, through its cables, she caught a glimpse of the island of Alcatraz, its famous prison and lighthouse visible, a ferry churning toward its rocky shore. Usually the drive was uplifting—freeing, somehow, as she left the city behind, but not today. The weather was as gray as her mood, and by the time she’d stopped at the triplex, a sprawling older home that had been converted into three large apartments with water views, she couldn’t shake the feeling of doom that had been with her for the past two days. She found a PowerBar in the console, unwrapped it, and ate the stale mixture of oats, peanuts, chocolate, and God-knew-what-else just before she pulled into the short driveway of the rental.
The property was in good shape, but one of the tenants had reported a water leak in the bathroom, so Remmi met with the single mother who lived there and saw that, sure enough, the ceiling in the bathroom showed water damage. She promised to have a repairman out to fix it. The second property was a six-plex, basically a shoebox of a building with three units up and three down, located in Berkeley, not far from the university, where Remmi had eventually gone to college. (Even with her scholarships, she still had the debt to prove it.)
One of the six-plex tenants had quit paying. When she arrived at the apartment, she found that the front door was unlocked, the unit empty and smelling of filth. Leftover trash littered every room, and the plumbing was obviously not working, the sinks, tub, and toilet filled with garbage. Remmi was completely disgusted. “Not going to get the security deposit back,” she muttered grimly, as if the delinquent renter could hear her. She locked the mess up for the moment. The neighboring tenant didn’t answer the door, so Remmi called the handyman she used and explained the situation. Once he’d agreed to clean, disinfect, and paint the apartment, along with making repairs to the triplex in Sausalito, she wiped her hands with sanitizer she kept in the car and backed the Subaru out of the shared, oversized driveway to join the traffic heading south toward Oakland and the Bay Bridge on her way back to the city.
Detective Settler contacted her just as she reached the western shore of the bay. Remmi took the call through her speakers via Bluetooth, so she could keep both hands on the wheel as she exited the freeway.
“Got your messages,” Settler said. “I assume you heard that the victim was IDed.”
“It’s all over the news.”
“Do you know of any contact your mother would have had with Karen Upgarde?”
“No,” Remmi said, having trouble hearing Settler over the sounds of her car’s engine, tire noise, and the road noise from the other vehicles crowded around her. “I’ve never heard of her before. And I tried to go to the Reliant Agency today. It doesn’t exist, not like you’d expect. It’s just a mailbox.”
“Yeah, we checked that out, too, but we’re looking for the owner.”
“Jennifer Reliant.”
“Maybe.” Settler didn’t seem convinced. “Did you ever hear from the author? Osgoode?”
“No.”
