The Search
Chapter 06 - The Search
Margaret waited until Elena's Honda turned onto Broughton Street.
From a parked sedan across from Bellweather Pharmacy, a man in a tan cap watched the brake lights disappear. He sent one text, then folded his newspaper without reading the last page.
Clear for at least an hour.
Margaret received the message while sitting in the Palmetto's accounting office.
The room had no windows. A ceiling vent clicked every forty seconds, and the old carpet smelled faintly of mildew beneath the hotel perfume pumped through the lobby.
She read the text twice.
Then she stood.
"I'm going out," she told the assistant at the front desk.
"Will you be back for the lender call?"
"Move it to four."
"Mr. Pruitt said they wouldn't move again."
Margaret buttoned her jacket.
"Then Mr. Pruitt can explain why their paperwork arrived late."
Her husband had not been part of the hotel for years, except when a signature or a family photograph was useful. Still, she kept his surname and his place on official letters.
Appearances were cheaper than repairs.
---
Bellweather's owner, Cecil Bell, gave Margaret the spare apartment key after she told him Elena had left medication upstairs that belonged to David's estate.
"She's at the hospital?" he asked.
"She asked me to retrieve it."
"Well, all right. She did say family might help with the boxes."
Margaret smiled.
"We're trying."
The apartment door opened with a stiff scrape.
Inside, the yellow table held a half-eaten apple and a stack of county records. A cardigan hung over one chair. The air smelled of toast, menthol, and the cheap lavender cleaner used on the stairs.
Margaret locked the door behind her.
She moved quickly.
Kitchen drawers first. Then the bedroom dresser, where Elena's clothes were folded with irritating precision.
No ledger.
The closet held one suitcase, three boxes, and David's charcoal overcoat inside a dry-cleaning bag.
Margaret touched the sleeve.
For a moment, she remembered him at seventeen, too thin for the formal coat their father had ordered, rolling his eyes while she pinned the cuff.
"Stop fussing," he had said.
"Stand still and I will."
He never stood still.
Margaret withdrew her hand.
Grief was private. Work was not.
She opened the boxes.
Photographs. Books. Hospital shoes. A folder of prenatal vitamins.
Margaret paused.
The bottle was unopened, the label recent.
She read it once, then replaced it exactly where it had been.
Pregnancy did not automatically mean anything. Pharmacists kept samples. Elena worked in a hospital.
Still, Margaret photographed the label.
The second box contained David's pens and a framed program from a preservation gala. Beneath it, she found the book about Savannah hotels.
Empty.
The rear cover had a narrow indentation where something rectangular had rested for years.
Margaret ran her finger over the mark.
So Elena had found it.
A floorboard creaked in the hall.
Margaret closed the box and stood.
The sound passed toward the back stairs.
She checked beneath the bed, inside the oven, behind the loose bathroom access panel. Nothing.
No ledger. No photographs. No copy of the red-circled number David had confronted her with two months before his death.
He had looked exhausted that afternoon, one hand pressed against his ribs.
"Tell me where it came from," he said.
"I kept the hotel open."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer that matters."
He had stared at her as though she were a stranger.
Margaret had hated him for that look.
She had hated herself more.
A key turned in the apartment lock.
Margaret's head snapped toward the door.
Cecil stepped in carrying a toolbox.
"Oh. You're still here."
"I found what I needed."
His eyes moved over the open closet.
"Miss Elena said family might help with boxes, but she didn't say anybody could go through them."
Margaret lifted her purse.
"My brother's medical property was mixed in."
"Right."
Cecil scratched his cheek.
"She pays on time. I'd rather not have trouble upstairs."
"There won't be trouble."
Margaret walked past him.
On the stairs, she pressed a hand to the rail until her breathing steadied.
The ledger was elsewhere.
That meant Elena understood its value.
Worse, she understood enough to hide it.
---
At the Palmetto, Margaret called a private investigator from the locked accounting office.
Leon Voss had handled background checks for hotel executives and one discreet inquiry during Tommy's brief engagement to a woman with three unpaid tax liens.
"I need a full history on Elena Reyes-Whitfield," Margaret said.
"Financial, personal, employment?"
"Everything."
"Legal purpose?"
"Estate litigation."
Leon made a small sound that could have meant skepticism or boredom.
"Any particular direction?"
"Debt. Complaints at work. Prior relationships. Family connections to the Whitfields."
"She married one."
Margaret ignored that.
"Look before the marriage."
"How far?"
"As far as necessary."
She hung up before he could discuss rates.
Then she opened the hotel's operating account.
The balance was lower than the lender required by $612,400.
Eleven days had become ten.
Margaret moved her cursor over the dormant reserve account bearing Corinne Ashby's name.
The password field waited.
She entered it from memory.
For one second, Corinne's old profile photograph appeared in the corner of the banking portal. Gray hair. Careful smile. A woman already dead when the last eighteen transfers were made.
Margaret looked away.
She approved one more.
---
Elena returned to the apartment just after six.
She noticed the closet first.
David's overcoat faced left. Elena had hung it facing right because the zipper on the dry-cleaning bag caught against the wall.
The prenatal bottle sat in the box with its label outward.
She always stored labels inward when visitors might see them.
The indentation in the hotel book had been touched; dust streaked along the edge.
Elena stood in the center of the bedroom and pressed her thumbnail into her palm.
No panic.
Inventory.
Nothing missing. At least nothing obvious.
She called Cecil.
He admitted Margaret had used the spare key.
"She said you asked her," he said. "I'm sorry, honey. I should've called."
"Change the lock tonight."
"Already bought the cylinder."
"And don't give anyone access again."
"Understood."
Afterward, Elena photographed every drawer and box. She moved the ultrasound pictures into her hospital locker and changed the passwords on her cloud account.
Then she called Dana.
"She searched the apartment."
Dana's voice sharpened.
"Did she take anything?"
"No. She found the prenatal vitamins."
"Does she know?"
"Not from that alone."
"Where's the ledger?"
"Hospital pharmacy safe. Access logged."
"Good."
Elena looked at David's overcoat.
"She knew where it had been hidden."
"Meaning she knew the ledger existed."
"Yes."
Dana went quiet.
"We document the entry. We don't confront her yet."
"Agreed."
"You sound too calm."
"That's because I know she found nothing."
---
Three days later, Leon Voss called Margaret.
She took the call in the Palmetto ballroom, where staff were setting tables for a wedding reception beneath chandeliers missing six bulbs.
"I found a connection," he said.
"To what?"
"Your hotel. Long before the marriage."
Margaret turned away from the workers.
"Explain."
"Elena's father, Mateo Reyes, did contract painting work at the Whitfield Palmetto in the late nineties. Interior restoration. Ballrooms, service corridors, upper floors."
Margaret looked toward the peeling gold trim near the balcony.
"That name isn't in our vendor records."
"It is in a workers' compensation filing. He was injured on-site."
"How badly?"
"Bad enough to file. Not badly enough to win. The claim disappeared after mediation."
Margaret tightened her hold on the phone.
"Who handled it?"
"Your father signed the settlement response. Corinne Ashby witnessed it."
Across the ballroom, a painter brushed fresh gold over a water stain.
May you like
Elena's father had been inside the Palmetto decades before Elena ever met David.
Keep reading Part 7 — because Tommy remembers the one woman Margaret made disappear when the hotel's numbers first stopped making sense.
