Chapter 71
I find our box and open it. I ignore the pile of uncollected mail, and my gaze settles on the white oblong card in a metal slot on the inside of the door.
It has our names written on it so the mail person knows who the box belongs to.
Behind it, I see the edge of another card.
When I lift our card out to reveal the one beneath, there’s another set of names written in the same handwriting.
Addison and Mark McGlocklin.
I draw a sharp breath. They must be the previous owners of our apartment, the people who moved to California.
I was right. They didn’t remove the old card before putting ours in.
I take the card out and put our card back, grab the mail, then close the mailbox door and lock it.
Back in the apartment, I drop the mail on the kitchen island and hurry to my laptop, where I spend the next two hours searching.
There are plenty of people named Mark and Addison McGlocklin, but I can’t find anything about them as a married couple.
I come across a bunch of Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles for each name, but when I dig deeper, they’re either too young or too old (I figure they must at least be in their mid-twenties, and I remember Frank commenting that they were “a polite young couple,” so I can disregard anyone over forty), in relationships with other people, live in another country, or have no connections to either Boston or California.
Then I come across a profile for an Addison McGlocklin living in San Francisco.
She’s the right age, and even better, she’s originally from Boston.
But when I click on the profile, I’m disappointed.
Her relationship status shows that she isn’t married and is instead dating a person by the name of Lawrence Siegel.
Beyond that, I can’t see much, because there are barely any posts on her timeline, which means she has it set to private.
Only her friends can see what she writes.
But I can see some of her photos, and within them lies a glimmer of hope, because her relationship with Lawrence Siegel must be fairly new.
In her older photos, she’s with a different man, and they are clearly together.
In one image, they’re kissing. In another they’re standing with their arms around each other and making goofy faces.
There are plenty more. And I notice with rising excitement that many of them were taken in and around Boston.
And finally, proof positive. A photo of Addison with the same man taken four years ago on the steps in front of the Glendale’s lobby, grinning and holding up a set of keys. The caption reads, Move-in day.
It’s her! I’ve found the woman who lived in this apartment before us.
But despite what both Catherine and Frank said, Addison and Mark McGlocklin didn’t move out recently, because the photo is four years old.
If they only lived here for six months, their move to California must have happened three and a half years ago.
Which means that Jennifer’s comment about our apartment being empty for a long time was true.
That raises some unsettling questions. Why would the Glendale’s executive board let it sit empty like that for so long, when there must have been plenty of people who would have jumped at the chance to purchase a place like this in Boston’s scorching-hot property market?
And more to the point, why would Catherine and Frank lie about it?
I don’t have an answer to either question . . . But I intend to find out.