Page 148 of Exposé

She'd kept her hair in the same tight French twist, silver-white strands stretched taut against her scalp, as she had when we'd lived here.

"Hi, Miss Martha."

Martha's eyes swung toward me, the cigarette between her fingers toppling toward the ashtray in her lap.

"My God. Ava? Is that you?"

I nodded and swallowed. "Yep.

"I thought I'd never see you again." She let out a hacking cough as though her lungs were filled with fluid before she continued. "How are you?"

"I'm good, actually. I had a favor to ask you."

Martha stamped out the edge of her cigarette. "A favor? I don't have anything of your mother's if that is what you're wondering."

My stomach clenched, and I winced. "Um." I kept my heels on the threshold, not venturing further inside. "That's not what I was hoping for."

"Alright, let's hear it."

"I was wondering if you could tell me who lives in apartment two-oh-three."

She raised a brow and turned to the cabinet behind her. "What's your interest in that apartment?" Her knobby fingers sifted through file folders until she found the one in question.

"I am working on a case, and I was led to that apartment."

"A case? You a police officer now or something?" She turned in her chair and placed the file folder on her desk, then opened it up.

"No. I'm a journalist."

She cleared her throat and searched over the paperwork, her manicured pointer finger sliding down each page with her glasses perched on the edge of her nose. "Says here it's been rented out to the same person for the last fifteen years."

Fifteen years?

They were here when I was?

"What's their name?"

Her brows furrowed, deepening the wrinkles at the surface. "It doesn't say." She flipped a page, then back to the original. "That's odd. I've never seen that before."

"Maybe a typo?"

She shook her head. "No. This apartment is paid in cash in one-year increments."

"Wait..." Alarm bells sounded in my head. "This is low-income housing. There isn't a single person I know inmiddle classthat could pay that much in one lump sum."

Her gaze shot up to mine, her head affixed in the same position. "Me either. Sounds like your story just got a little more interesting."

I cocked my head and frowned. "Except, I have no idea who lives there—if someone even does." I raised my finger and wagged it. "Maybe it's a front for something?"

Martha sat back in her chair, pulled her glasses off her nose, and let them hang down her chest by delicate purple and blue chains attached to the ends. "That is a conundrum."

"You know." I sucked my cheek between my teeth and clicked. "No one is home right now."

"Where are you going with this?" Martha eyed me, her crow's feet deepening.

"Maybe I could have a key and check it out?"

She shook her head. "No. Just because I let you go into the empty ones when you were a teen doesn't mean I can let you into a rented one now."

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