Chapter 23: Auction Eve

I pulled Shayla's lease out of the red folder before the detective hung up.

"Hold on," I said. "He filled in every line of this. Every single one."

There it was, near the bottom, in his neat slanted capitals.

EMERGENCY CONTACT. MOTHER. MURFREESBORO.

A phone number, with a little hook on the seven.

"He knew where her mother lives," I said. "He wrote it down himself."

"Give me the number," the detective said.

She called it. A woman answered, said she hadn't seen her daughter since summer, and hung up.

The detective called back twice. Nobody picked up.

For sixteen days the tenant of Unit 114 didn't exist.

On Friday afternoon, the day before the sale, Wilma came to my office door with the cordless phone against her chest.

"It's a woman," she said. "She says she's Shayla's mama, and she'll only talk to you."

I took it.

The voice on the line was low and fast.

"There's a man in a ball cap in my driveway," she said. "He just gave my girl an envelope. She's packing the car for Pensacola."

"Why are you calling me?"

"Because you're the only one who's asked for her who isn't him."

Forty minutes later I was standing on a cracked concrete porch in Murfreesboro.

It was a little brick ranch house with a carport and a wind chime made of spoons.

Shayla's mother opened the door before I knocked.

She was small and tired, with Shayla's gray eyes and none of her polish.

"She's in the den," she said. "She knows you're coming. I told her an hour ago, so she couldn't run."

Shayla sat on a plaid couch in sweatpants and an old college sweatshirt.

No makeup. Her platinum hair in a knot. Her nails bitten down to nothing.

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