Page 34 of Luck of the Devil
While I’d planned to log on to her pharmacy first, I saw the phone icon at the bottom of the screen. My mother had connected her phone to her laptop, so the first thing I did was search her phone calls.
She hadn’t made many, and most had names attached, which meant they were in her contact list. But my gaze narrowed in on the call she’d made after I’d phoned to cancel on her last Tuesday around noon.
It had been made ten minutes later after my call was recorded. There was only a number with no name attached. The interesting part was that it had a 327 area code, which was a relatively new area code. While Northwest Arkansas and Little Rock and the surrounding areas had their own area codes, the rest of the state had used 870. But recently, the FCC had added a second area code—327—since the 870 area was nearly out of numbers. Lone County and all the southern and northern parts of the state fell into the 870 and 327 areas. So did Jonesboro. Did the number belong to my grandparents? It didn’t seem likely since the number had to be relatively new.
I pulled up the service I signed up for skip tracing after I’d passed my PI license test and entered the number. I expected to see a name and hopefully an address pop up, but there was nothing.
No name. No utilities or credit attached. No address. Just the carrier, a known burner phone service. And the most ominous part was that the phone had been activated a week ago Sunday, two days before my mother called the number.
Whoever my mother had called wanted to be untraceable.
What had my mother been up to?
Chapter 11
Malcolm walked into the kitchen. “I smell coffee.”
Still reeling from my discovery, it took me a moment to acknowledge what he’d said. I nodded toward the coffeemaker. “Help yourself.” I nearly told him there was creamer in the fridge, but he already knew that. He’d made coffee here last week.
He opened the cabinet where my mother stored her mugs and grabbed two, then poured coffee into both.
“Find anything?” I asked, sitting back in my seat and watching him.
“Nope.” He answered flippantly. I was tempted to question him, but mostly out of habit. He brought both cups to the table, setting one in front of me and the second on the other side of the table, then headed to the fridge.
I looked up at him. “I found something interesting.”
When I didn’t continue, he said, “Go on.”
“I told you that I called my mother last Tuesday around noon to tell her I couldn’t take her to her luncheon. I just looked up her calls on her laptop, and ten minutes after I placed that call, she made a call to a number that’s not in her contacts.”
He shut the fridge with his hip, grabbed a spoon from the drawer, and carried both to the table before he sat in the chair across from me. “I take it you already looked up who it belongs to.”
I added creamer to my coffee. “It’s a burner phone with no other information. No name or address. It’s not linked to anything. And even more suspicious, it was activated two days before my mother called the number.”
His brow shot up as he took the creamer from me. “What do you make of that?”
I picked up the spoon and stirred. “It’s strange, that’s for sure. She lived a small life. Sure, she was in all the women’s clubs, but this town’s pretty small. I can’t see how she’d even know someone with a burner phone, let alone call one.”
“Was she good with numbers, or would she have needed to write it down somewhere? Like on her phone or a notepad?”
I shook my head, then regretted it as the dull ache expanded. “She had a terrible memory. She must have stored it somewhere.”
“But likely not on her phone,” he mused, “otherwise she would have saved it as a contact, even if she’d used some kind of code for the name.”
He was right.
“So where would she have kept it?” he asked before taking a sip of the coffee.
“I think she would have either written it down here somewhere in the house or kept it in her purse.”
“If it was here in the house, where would it be?”
“Maybe her address book, but I doubt she’d put in a number for a phone that was only two days old. What I don’t get is how she even had a chance to get someone’s brand-new number sometime between Sunday and Tuesday at noon. As far as I knew, she mostly stayed home lately. But if it’s here in the house, she might have kept it in the pen drawer. Or maybe a drawer in her dining room hutch.”
“Maybe someone emailed it to her.”
“It’s possible.”
