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I head back to the kitchen area to ask for the key, but Mrs. C isn’t anywhere to be found. There’s a whole rack of keys under a calendar near the door though, so I dig through them to find what I’m looking for.
One at a time, because the elevator is small, we head into the attic loft space.
Stepping into this space feels like going back in time. If she wasn’t downstairs mingling with guests and fixing things, this was where my mother spent the majority of her time. It still smells faintly of her perfume despite the layers of time and dust. It doesn’t seem like anyone has been up here since we boxed up her possessions and closed down.
I turn on the lights and start pulling out boxes to go through as Luis arrives next, helping me pull them all out into an open space. I specify an area for “keep” and “discard”. My plan is to push each box to the opposite side of the room as they are searched.
Bennet starts with the old desktop computer, finding a list of passwords under the keyboard. He looks appalled.
“I think we should clarify what any of us might be looking for specifically so that nothing is overlooked. It’s important that we are all on the same page and on each other’s sides,” Bennet says pointedly, looking at Luis, who doesn’t look convinced.
“Well, that’s easy on my part, I’m mostly here to sort and clean. I appreciate the help even if there are ulterior motives, I would have probably put this off until I sell the place.”
“You’re selling?” Asks Bennet, momentarily distracted from his mission.
“Probably. It’s the reason I came home. I’m not cut out to run a swanky B&B, and there are too many ghosts here for me. I can’t just let it rot. I feel guilty about it, but I don’t know what else to do.”
“Put a pin in that,” he says. “I’d like to talk more about it later.”
Ooookay.
Once it’s clear that Luis isn’t going to speak up next, Bennet decides to get real honest with us.
“I’m looking for anything that connects your mother to my father, including anything that might have tied him to her death.”
That gets Luis’ attention.
I shake my head. “My mother killed herself,” I explain. “There were witnesses, no one pushed her or anything like that.”
“What about the pills?” Luis cuts in.
Again, with the pills. Bennet and I wait for him to explain.
He takes a deep breath. “My mother was a junkie, but she never had a job to pay rent or buy drugs. Somehow, she had a drawer full of pills- from TAC Pharmacy. You said that your mother swallowed a bottle of pills before she jumped, I thought it could be a connection.”
“TAC Pharmacy?” Asks Bennet, and Luis confirms with a curt nod. They make hard eye contact for a full minute, but I’m still in the dark here.
Bennet thankfully explains. “My father’s company is huge and most of their business is in pharmaceuticals. They have their own cafeteria, gym, health clinic, and pharmacy where employees can get their prescriptions filled. TAC Pharmacy is the on-campus pharmacy for The Adley Corporation.”
“We should also check bank records,” suggests Luis. “I haven’t been able to confirm it, but someone, I’m guessing Jackson Adley, was paying my mom’s bills on top of providing her with a steady stream of drugs. I tracked the rent payments back to the same bank you were at the other day, but they wouldn’t give me any information.”
“Do you have the account number?” Bennet asks him. Luis nods and Bennet tells him that he will cross reference the accounts and find out if they are indeed belonging to or connected to Jackson Adley or any of his business holdings.
For now though, we have an idea of what we’re looking for and can start to wade through all of this mess.
An hour into it, Bennet finds some interesting financial documents. It seems that the estate has been, or at least was, receiving regular payments from an unidentified bank account. These payments stopped when my mother died. The account wasn’t used much. From what we can tell, this is the money that my mother used to purchase and renovate the B&B, and then was dipped into one other time for the bathroom upgrades. Other than that, it has remained untouched and has a truly absurd amount of money in it, sitting there collecting interest for years. I’m apparently listed as a guarantor on the account. Since my mother didn’t leave a will, no one even knew this account existed.
Bennet takes notes on the account information so he can cross-check this account as well as Luis’ mother’s account when he gets back down to his own computer.
After two hours, Luis and I don’t find anything else of interest in the boxes, other than some old photos and insurance paperwork for the estate. The rest of the boxes we pack into the elevator to take downstairs, intending to start a burn pile.
With the boxes gone, we spend another half an hour looking around the room for anything else. I decide to keep her old vinyl record player and music collection, and any pictures I find.
We are almost done when I notice a black metal box mounted under the frame of the ornate daybed. I was running my arm under the bed to check if there was anything under there and it caught on the sleeve of my t-shirt.
Pulling it out, I fiddle with the combination lock before entering my own birthday, the lock pops open. Too easy, Mom. Inside the box I find the proof we are looking for. Pictures of my mother, young and vibrant and happy, next to a man that looks exactly like me. There’s a handful of letters addressed to Jackson Adley, marked “return to sender”, and also some hospital records.
“Jackpot.”
