Page 47 of Giving Up The Ghost
“Go back to the estate agent one,” I murmured, taking it when he handed it over to dive back into the drawer.
“Oh, shit. A laptop. Jackpot!” Ezra emerged, all smiles, and flipped it open. “Some battery left,” he noted as he powered up.
“How do you think you’re getting in there? Another pen?”
“People never notice how easy they make it to figure out their passcodes and shit,” Ezra muttered, squinting at the sign-in screen. “What’s with the estate agency?”
“Apparently she owes a huge chunk of change,” I noted, reading the dunning notice. “It doesn’t give much other info, but it’s a threat to take her to court over it.”
“Shit. So, she’s desperate for dosh then. Ha, here we go!”
I glanced over to see he’d managed to access the computer already. “How the hell’d you do that so fast?”
“She has a touch screen with a pattern log-in. She wears hand lotion. So put the two together and there’s a nifty little trail on the screen for me to follow.” He waved his finger in the air, mimicking the log-in pattern. “Where shall we start? Oh, emails. Here we go.”
Most of them were spam or general correspondence between Charlotte and Nadine. But in a folder markedFelloweswere dozens of messages between her and Oscar. “These all sound normal,” I mused. “Not like the Charlotte we’ve met in person.”
“Sometimes putting a screen between you and someone else makes you brave. Or, in her case, polite.” He clicked on a folder just labeledNewand frowned. “Huh. So. She’s been making appointments, or trying to, with several mediums. As late as yesterday.”
I read down the list of names, recognizing a few, including Heinrich. “Most of these people are dead. When did she email Heinrich?”
He checked the date. “Right after he came to Boo Con. A few days after his arrival.”
“So, a few days after the death of his friend from the medium circle.”
We exchanged wary glances. “Keep digging,” I muttered. “Shit.”
Within half an hour, Ezra had pulled several emails that she’d sent to mediums we recognized, and an email from Sunshine Meadows Hospice and Palliative Care informing her of her “dear friend Matthew’s death“ just that morning. “Another fall,” Ezra muttered. “What a strange time it is to be a medium in England. So many seem to lack traction.”
He started to close the computer down so we could move on to the cellar, but I stopped him with a raised finger. “Wait. Can you see if her bank information is on here? I want to find out how in the hole she is. I’m thinking maybe all of this is some scam to get money from Oscar.”
Ezra heaved a sigh, “Maybe? Most people don’t think about deleting cookies and shit, so if she’s left herself logged in or she’s saved the data, we’re good. But it’s much harder for me to get into her account without something to start from, like personal information she might base a password on.”
“Here’s to hoping her false sense of security extends to banking information.”
It turned out, Charlotte Fellowes was not only deeply in debt, she was so in debt the bank had closed her account and had several very stern, red-lettered notices when Ezra tried to log in. “That… is not good.”
“Do you think Nadine knows? Maybe she’s been hiding it and is hoping her daughter won’t find out.”
Ezra wrinkled his nose at that. “When we first met, I had no idea you had such a soft heart,” he noted lightly. “Shit this big? It’s not going to flush away easy.”
“One, ew. Two, decent analogy. I’d give you at least a C for that one if you were in my class.”
He smirked. “The point is that Charlotte wouldn’t be able to hide this. It’s huge. And”—he tapped back over to the emails—“Nadine’s gone to ground recently. The last exchange between them was a few days before we got here. Now it’s possible they’re chatting via text or phone, but I doubt it.”
I stared at nothing, my brain turning all the mismatched pieces over and over. “There’s not enough here to put it together,” I muttered. “What’s missing? There are three problems and one solution. What is it?”
“I was pants at maths, but it seems to me the common denominators are Charlotte and Oscar.”
* * *
We returnedthe study to as near original condition as we could. The drawer was a total loss, but, unless you were looking for it, it seemed fine. Charlotte would definitely know if she opened it any time soon, though.
Hopefully, we’d be gone by night. Ezra and I had both decided to convince Oscar things had gone from weird to actively unsafe—just in case Ezra’s goose egg hadn’t been enough of a motivator.
We did a sweep of the hallways and the bedrooms we had access to but came up with nothing on Ezra’s little bug-finder app. However, it was the cellar that drew us up short. “This,” Ezra said, pointing to a small doorbell camera-type device tucked into the corner of the hallway, opposite the door, “wasn’t there yesterday.”
“Is it working?” I asked quietly. “Those things have sound, right?”
