Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [35]
As I studied the envelopes from Santa Fe, I noticed something different from the first two envelopes Dan had sent to Della. The addresses were different, but that wasn’t it. It was the way he’d written his name that was off somehow.
I put the letters side by side on the desk and looked at the top left corners where Dan had written his return addresses—East Lansing, Detroit, Santa Fe, and Santa Fe again. I studied the first two. Dan had scratchy, short handwriting, and he didn’t make an effort to be legible, but I could tell that he’d written, “D. Sutter” in the corners. On the last two, the ones from Santa Fe, again there was the initial D, but the last name looked odd. I could tell it started with an S, ended with an R, and had roughly six letters, so maybe Dan’s handwriting had simply changed a little. That wasn’t it, though. It was definitely different.
I picked up the last letter and held it close to my face. There was a dot right above the second letter of the name, as if he’d written an I, but there was no slash as there had been through the T’s in the other letters. Instead, the fourth letter dipped down below the word. Was it a J or a Y? I stared some more until the word began to shape. “Singer,” it said. I picked up the other letter from Santa Fe and saw that I was right.
My brother had apparently changed his name to Singer.
10
I locked the room and ran down the stairs, excited about the “Singer” discovery, yet trying to prime my mind for my meeting with Sheriff Manning. This wasn’t just a nice Sunday dinner.
When I got to the front desk, Ty was behind it with a young woman, a friend who helped out occasionally. Ty had instituted a late Sunday checkout of four o’clock, but he said he still didn’t push people to get out on time, so sometimes they had a rush on Sunday afternoons. It looked like one of those days. Both Ty and the woman, who had a cute upturned nose and bobbed brown hair, were leaning over the counter, handing out credit-card slips, taking keys from guests.
“Sorry,” Ty mouthed to me over the head of a man who was signing his slip. “Two seconds.”
I smiled and shook my head, and as I did, I saw that the woman behind the desk had seen our exchange. The woman looked quickly from Ty to me and back again.
When all the guests were gone, Ty waved me over. “Sorry about that,” he said. “This is Molly.” He gestured to the woman.
“Hey,” Molly said, offering me a short smile and reaching over the desk to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Molly is one of my best buddies in the world,” Ty said in a proud voice while he ruffled the back of Molly’s hair.
Molly raised her hand to smooth her hair. As she did so, she shot another glance at me, one that sized me up in a short sweep of her eyes. I knew right then that Molly wasn’t happy to be simply one of Ty’s buddies, and the thought bothered me.
“Well, it was nice to meet you,” I said.
“Same,” Molly said. She turned to Ty then. “If you’re having burgers tonight, tell Chief not to use too much steak sauce. He drowns them every time.”
Ty laughed. “Will do.”
Point taken, I thought. You’ve been to their house for dinner before me. I made myself smile again at Molly and followed Ty to his car, which was parked out front.
It was an old Chevy with green nylon seats and pop cans rattling in the back.
“I keep my house and the inn immaculate,” Ty said as he opened the door for me, “but I can’t seem to get my act together with my car. It’s some teenage-regression thing. I’m getting serious therapy very soon.”
I chuckled, but then my mind flew to Caroline because of the word therapy. What had she been dealing with?