“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?”
“Just call me Mak. Yeah. Lanier Ragan. Did you know her?”
“Not personally. I’ve only been at the paper twelve years.”
“Only,” he said pointedly.
“In Savannah, that makes me a newcomer,” she said. “You know how it is, if you’re not a native Savannahian,” she said, making quote marks with her fingers, “you’re an outsider. But I’ve had an obsession with that story ever since I got here. So don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the news?”
“We found Lanier Ragan’s wallet this week.”
She leaned across the table, her eyes wide with excitement. “Where?”
“In an old house that’s being renovated, out on Tybee. The contractors found it behind the old plaster walls, stuck in between the wall studs.”
“Any idea how it got there?”
He shook his head. “They said there was an old razor blade slot in the wall, the kind people used to dispose of used blades, and they think somebody shoved it in there.”
“Oh. My. God.” She was scribbling in a steno pad she’d whipped out of her purse. “Who’re the people who found the wallet?”
“The woman’s name is Hattie Kavanaugh. She just bought the house last week, and they’re filming some kind of do-it-yourself television show there. One of her crew members found it. This girl, well, she’s probably in her early thirties, so not really a girl. This woman, she graduated from St. Mary’s Academy. She actually had Lanier Ragan for an English class.”
“Interesting,” Molly Fowlkes said. “Tell me about this television show. They’re filming out at Tybee? That’s kind of weird in itself.”
“I don’t know that much about it,” Mak admitted. “They said it’s called Homewreckers. My wife used to watch all those shows.” He smiled slightly. “And she never missed your column.”
“Past tense?” Molly asked.
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Sorry. So. Homewreckers. What’s that about?”
He shrugged, and his whole body went into the effort. “Fixing up an old house. Here’s another coincidence for you. The family that used to own the house, for like, the last sixty years? The son played football at Cardinal Mooney for Lanier Ragan’s husband.”