I explain that they’ve gone to the beach for the day, but I pass along their cell phone numbers. “They didn’t know Mitzi well, but I’m sure they’ll help if they can.”
She turns to leave—then thinks better of it and stops. “This last question is a little off-topic but I have to know: Who’s the ghost you were trying to reach?”
“Her name was Annie Barrett. Supposedly she lived in my cottage. Back in the 1940s. People say—”
Briggs starts nodding. “Oh, I know all about Annie Barrett. I’m a local girl, I grew up in Corrigan, on the other side of these woods. But my daddy always said that story was a fish tale. That was his way of describing a trumped-up story, like a whopper.”
“Annie Barrett was real. I have a book of her paintings. Everyone in Spring Brook knows about her.”
Detective Briggs seems inclined to disagree but instead she holds her tongue. “I’m not going to spoil a good story. Especially when there’s an even bigger mystery out in those woods right now.” She hands me a business card. “If you think of anything else, call me.”
* * *
Adrian and I spend the next hour or so sitting out by the pool, watching the circus in Mitzi’s backyard and waiting for new developments. It’s clearly a huge deal for Spring Brook because the backyard is teeming with cops, firefighters, EMTs, and a man whom Adrian identifies as the mayor. No one seems to be doing very much; it’s just a lot of people talking and standing around. But eventually four somber-faced EMTs emerge from the forest carrying a zippered polyvinyl bag on a stretcher, and soon after that the crowd starts to thin.
Caroline calls from the shore to see how I’m doing. She says she’s already heard from Detective Briggs and she is absolutely “wrecked” by the news. “I mean obviously I didn’t like the woman very much. But I wouldn’t wish this kind of death on anyone. Have they figured out what happened?”
“They think it might be a medication error.”
“Do you want to know the strangest thing? We actually heard Mitzi yelling Thursday night. Ted and I were sitting out by the pool. We were having a bit of an argument, which I guess you already know. Then all of a sudden we heard Mitzi shouting at someone in her house. Telling them to get out, saying the person wasn’t welcome. We could hear everything she was saying.”
“What did you do?”
“I was all set to call the police. I had actually called 911 and the phone was ringing. But then Mitzi came outside. She was dressed in her nightgown, and her voice had totally changed. She was calling after the person, asking the person to wait for her. ‘I want to come with you,’ she said. And it seemed like things were fine again, so I hung up the phone and forgot about it.”
“Did you see the other person?”
“No, I just assumed it was a customer.”
This seems unlikely to me. I don’t think Mitzi welcomed customers into her home after dark. The first time I went to see her, it was only seven o’clock at night, and she asked why I was banging on her door so late.
“Look, Mallory, do you want us to come home early? I feel bad that you’re alone, that you’re dealing with this by yourself.”
I decide not to mention that Adrian is seated poolside with me, studying the notes we collected from Mitzi’s house, still determined to decode them.
“I’m fine,” I tell her.
“Are you sure?”
“Stay as long as you want. Is Teddy having fun?”
“He’s sad you’re leaving, but the ocean is a nice distraction.” I can hear Teddy in the background, very excited, shrieking about something he’s captured in his sand pail. “Hang on, sweetie, I’m talking to Mallory—”
I tell her to go have fun and not worry about me and I hang up the phone. Then I relay the whole conversation to Adrian—particularly the part about Mitzi’s mysterious late-night visitor.
I can tell from his reaction that we are both circling the same conclusion, and we’re too nervous to say it out loud.
“You think it was Anya?” he asks.
“Mitzi would never see a customer in her nightgown. Without her jewelry. She was way too vain about her appearance.”
Adrian looks to all the cops and EMTs still milling around the woods. “So what do you think happened?”
“I have no idea. I’ve been telling myself that Anya is nonviolent, that she’s some kind of benevolent spirit, but that’s just a guess. All I really know is that she was brutally murdered. Someone dragged her body through a forest and dumped her in a ditch. Maybe she’s pissed off and wants revenge against everybody who lives in Spring Brook. And Mitzi’s the first person she went after.”
“Okay, but why now? Mitzi’s lived here seventy years. Why did Anya wait all this time to go on her rampage?”
It’s a fair question. I have no idea. Adrian chews on the tip of his pencil and returns his attention to the jumble of letters, like they might have answers to all our questions. At the house next door, the circus is slowly winding down. The fire department is gone and all the neighbors have wandered away. There are just a few cops left, and the last thing they do is seal the back door with two long strips of yellow DO NOT CROSS tape. They intersect in the middle, forming a giant X, a barrier between the house and the outside world.
Then I glance down at Mitzi’s notes, and the solution is suddenly obvious.
“The Xs,” I tell Adrian. “They’re not Xs.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Anya knew we didn’t speak her language. So she put Xs between the words. Like barriers. They’re spaces, not letters.”
“Where?”
I take the pencil from him and recopy the letters, placing each word on its own line.
“Now that looks like a language,” I tell him. “Something Slavic. Russian? Maybe Polish?”
Adrian opens his phone and inputs the first word into Google Translate. The results are instantaneous: Igen is the Hungarian word for “yes.” From there, it’s easy to translate the entire message: YES X BEWARE X THIEF X HELP X FLOWER.
“Help Flower?” Adrian asks. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” I think back to the drawings that I pulled from the recycling bin—wasn’t there a page of flowers in bloom? “But this definitely explains why she’s using pictures. Her native language is Hungarian.”
Adrian opens his phone and takes a snapshot. “You need to text this to Caroline. It’s proof you’re not making things up.”
I wish I had his confidence. “This doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a bunch of letters that anyone could have written on paper. She’ll accuse me of buying a Hungarian dictionary.”
But Adrian is undaunted. He keeps rereading the words, like he’s hoping to find some deeper secondary meaning to them. “You need to be careful, you need to beware of the thief. But who’s the thief? What did he steal?”
There are so many pieces to the puzzle, my head is starting to hurt. I feel like we’re trying to jam a square peg into a round hole—or to force a very easy solution on a very complicated problem. I’m trying so hard to focus and think, I’m annoyed when my cell phone starts to ring, shattering my concentration.
But then I see the name on the caller ID.
The Rest Haven Retirement Community in Akron, Ohio.