43. Lottie
Lottie
“ O kay, where do we start?” Ginny rubs her hands together through Gia’s phone screen.
It makes me weirdly happy to see her blue eyes sparkling again.
After our conversation at spa night last week, I’ve been racking my brain to think of ways to get her to open up about how she’s doing.
I can’t come up with a single option that isn’t as subtle as a bulldozer.
“Let’s divvy up the letters first. Ginny, I emailed you photos of them so you can read them, too,” I say.
“Then we can make notes on what each one contains to make referencing them faster,” Ryan suggests.
“Good idea.” I run into my office to grab my laptop. “We can pass this around when we’ve finished reading. Should we sort them chronologically?”
“Until something else comes up that we might want to use instead.” Gia starts passing out stacks of letters. We end up with five apiece.
Reading the first one in my stack breaks my heart. It’s so full of longing and the desire to be together. I make a note to ask if anyone comes across a reason why they couldn’t be together.
We’re all quiet as we read. I keep track of the main points in my letters. Most of them are mundane discussions of what they’ve been up to. One of them describes how elated they were to meet that day. My last letter makes me pause. “Are anyone else’s letters in different handwriting?”
“What?” Gia leans over to look at mine.
“Look, this one has more of a script-type font. It’s much harder to read than this one.” I hold the two side by side.
“Mine looks like this one.” Gia points to the fancier writing.
The rest of the group compares their letters to mine. Most of them are from the person who wrote a little sloppier. Gia has the majority of the ones from the other person.
“Did she have two lovers?” Gia asks.
“Maybe. They all talk about their affection for her, but it’s hard to tell for sure with how they used to write,” Carson says.
“I think it’s romantic,” Ginny says through the phone.
“Very romantic, but it makes it difficult to know exactly what they’re saying,” I point out.
Michael grimaces. “No kidding. I’m struggling to get through all mine.”
“Same.” Carson sighs as if he’s grateful to vent his frustrations.
“How about I read through them, make notes, and send the doc to you guys when I’m done?” Ginny offers.
“Are you sure you have time for that?” Gia asks.
“Trust me. I’ve got plenty of time to kill.” The annoyance in her voice doesn’t go unnoticed by us. If she’s got time to kill, why can’t she come home?
“You’re not working on a new album right now?” Carson’s surprise matches all of ours.
“Kind of hard to focus when a constant stream of people are coming in and out of my house.” Ginny shakes her head and visibly refocuses her mindset. “Anyway, I’ll be happy to read these. I love how open and honest they were with her. Can you guys figure out who they belong to?”
“That was our next stop today,” I tell her.
“I was thinking we should start with property records,” Michael suggests. “Noah and Nellie found this in the floorboards of their house. It would stand to reason these belong to a person who lived in the house.”
“Unless it was a maid or something,” Gia says.
“Maybe, but weren’t they upstairs in the bedrooms?” Carson asks me.
“That’s what Noah told me.”
“Then let’s go.” Gia stands from the couch.
“Send me the notes you have, along with the corresponding dates first. Then call me when you find something,” Ginny shouts from the phone.
“Done,” we say in unison.
“ Achoo .” Gia sneezes.
“Bless you,” I say as we walk through the records office.
“ Achoo .”
I laugh. “Bless you again.”
“ Achoo .”
“Get your shit together, Gia. Jesus,” Carson curses, making us all laugh.
“Sorry. The dust is… Achoo. Awful.”
I pull a tissue out of my backpack and hand it to her. She smiles at me in thanks.
“Okay, let’s see what we can find,” Michael says, sitting down in front of the computer. All the old records have been digitized to make searching them easier. I can’t say I’m sad about that. If we had to dig through old paperwork, Gia probably would’ve died from sneezing too much.
“Here’s their address.” I put my phone on the desk for Michael to reference. He types it into the search bar, and a list of records pops up immediately.
We grab chairs when we realize this isn’t going to be as easy as finding the right date and clicking the link. Michael navigates to the 1800s folder and opens it. We all breathe a sigh of relief when there’s only one record in it.
“It looks like the property was owned by a Theodore Ashcroft.”
“Like Sonoma’s founder, Theodore Ashcroft?” Carson asks.
We look at each other in surprise.
“I highly doubt there were multiple Theodores in Sonoma back then,” Michael says drily.
Carson whacks Michael on the shoulder. “Shut up, I was just surprised.”
“It’s highly unlikely the letters were to Theodore. They have a distinctly male voice to them. What can we find about family records?” I ask.
“Oh, what if his wife was having a torrid affair with two other men?” Carson theorizes.
Gia and I give him a flat look.
“We should be able to search birth records, as well.” Michael clicks out of the file and navigates to the correct database. “Hmm.”
“What?” Gia demands.
“Theodore and Mariana had two daughters, Victoria and Elizabeth.”
“What does that mean?” Ryan points to a second date.
“I believe that’s a death date.”
I quickly do the math. “Victoria died at twenty?”
“Elizabeth lived until she was sixty,” Gia says .
“So were the letters Elizabeth’s?” Ryan asks.
I shrug. “Not necessarily. Just because Victoria died young doesn’t mean the letters weren’t hers.”
“How do we figure out who they belong to?” Gia leans back in her chair.
“Newspaper clippings?” I say.
Michael grimaces. “If the historical society has them from that far back, it’ll be a miracle.”
“A founding family’s marriage and death would be front-page news, right?” Carson asks.
“True. If they’re going to keep anything, it would be about Sonoma’s founders,” Ryan adds.
My phone rings, and Candace’s name pops up on the screen. “Sorry, guys, I need to take this.”
I answer the call as I walk away from my friends. “Hey, Candace. How are you?”
“Uh, I’m fine. Look, I was wondering if we could meet up somewhere. I have something I want to discuss with you.”
“Oh? What’s going on?”
“I would prefer to talk to you about it in person.”
An internal alarm starts going off. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, uh… Well, maybe? I just have something I want to share with you about Ms. Mansgrove’s murder.”
“Okay, sure. Where do you want to meet?”
She suggests the café in Greensboro where we met last time, and I accept. My curiosity is piqued now. What does she want to talk about that she couldn’t discuss over the phone? Maybe she remembered something from the day Crystal went missing. But I’m not sure why she can’t say it over the phone.
Luckily, I only have to wait a few days to find out.