Death by Foreclosure

By Virginia Bryan

Blakeney Heath had a successful real estate business until the real estate market tanked. Now she is showing a foreclosure property for the second time to prospective buyers,hoping this time they will buy.Unfortunately, she finds the decaying body of a murder victim in the basement. A large sum of money was seen in the home the first time Bee showed it and it has now disappeared. As a result of these two tragic events, her life spirals out of control and it appears that even her own husband may be involved. Now, her own life is in danger, and she must use all her wits to save herself while working through the deceit of the man she once loved so passionately.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Virginia Bryan
• Release date: Jun 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466022577

Virginia Bryan

In the past, I did a lot of writing and got a lot of rejection slips. Then I divorced my first husband and went back to school to earn two computer degrees. Those qualifications led to a job in computer technical support for 12 years, but that work ended when the major company I worked for started sending all their help desk support to India.For years, I had been licensed to sell real estate, and decided it was time to switch careers once again. My business was steadily growing until the unfortunate collapse of the economy caused the housing market to tank. Business turned bad for everyone, not just me; but there was a silver lining. My current husband insisted this was my mandate to get back to writing.I was born in Burke County, located smack in the middle of the ancient and storied Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. My family moved away; but a vast number of my kin people still live there, many on Mineral Springs Mountain – the setting for many of my tales of betrayal, deceit, death, ghosts and hidden portals to other worlds.Burke County is also the site of the Brown Mountain Lights, mysterious, colorful balls of light that have been seen for hundreds of years and yet manage to defy scientific attempts to prove they do not exist. There is no doubt they are real; but to this date, no one has deciphered their true origin or meaning. Furthermore, locals swear to seeing ghosts on a daily basis, and not only at night. Gain their confidence, and they will share stories of ghost sightings even in the bright sunlight.I know that forbidding landscape all too well, having grown up steeped in the culture, privy to ancient tales of love and loss and hidden – and at times irresistible – forces. In my books, I share tales based on that mountain background, and the stories told to me.My favorite hobby is reading. There is nothing like the excitement of cracking open a new book, and I would read 24 hours a day if I could. However, even I cannot read enough, fast enough. So many books, so little time! I also do crafts, make jewelry, do art projects and paint (also have a degree in Commercial Art).Writing is my all-time favorite idea for a career. In the meantime, I still sell real estate as bills have to be paid!

Book preview

Death by Foreclosure

By Virginia Bryan

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Copyright 2011 Virginia Bryan

Smashwords Edition

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Dedication

For my husband, Jerry, without whose

Encouragement and faith I could never

Have completed this book.

And for my two favorite BICs

Sabra Romeo

And

Elaine Price

Whose understanding and patience

Taught me everything I know

About Real Estate

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Princes and Other Fables

When we were little girls, our mothers

Read to us bold tales of derring-do,

Of dragons, castles and other fables,

And promised us handsome princes, too.

At first my prince seemed fine and perfect,

Handsome knight in shining armor golden --

Arms hard and strong; eyes soft and blue

And flaxen locks worn loose and flowing.

I was to be his lady Guinevere,

Happy in a shining castle by the sea;

With him my prince – no, my king,

We’d feast on fruit from that fabled tree.

We hope to live life as in a fairy tale,

Far from worry and misery and pain,

Adrift in sunlit fields of love pure and true,

And never to struggle, feel grief or strain.

Now we know life is real – the castle’s a dump;

His manners are crass; the fruit is rotten;

His armor is rusty and needs a polish;

This ‘perfect union’ was misbegotten!

From Secrets of a Lost Child

2011

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Death by Foreclosure

By Virginia Bryan

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Chapter 1

The odor seemed alive. It rose and swirled around us with tentacles of poison, snaking through the rooms, assaulting our nostrils.

The scent of death.

Once you get a whiff of it, you never forget it. There is nothing like it, nothing else matches it.

I have heard that scent called sweet and often wondered how in the name of all that is good anyone could possibly call it ‘sweet?’ It’s a nasty, over-powering odor that makes your stomach turn over in disgust. Once that cloying smell gets on you, or your clothes, or in your car, you can seldom get rid of it, or even neutralize it.

‘Sweet’ is the flowery scent of honeysuckle. ‘Sweet’ is a newborn baby freshly bathed and powdered. ‘Sweet’ is a tiny, fuzzy kitten purring in your lap.

Death is never ‘sweet.’

I turned to my clients, a couple planning to retire to the area. Joe Cooper was a distinguished, wiry, lean man, with a full head of bushy white hair and a moustache to match. Polly was a tiny, cute little lady with matching white hair and an oxygen tube around her neck. She had serious health problems and the location of a new home would be predicated on the availability of medical resources. She looked fragile and I wasn’t sure how finding something really disturbing would affect her.

Maybe you folks shouldn’t go in, I said. You can wait outside. I’ll check it out. I knew I had to take a look and find out for sure the cause of the stench. I couldn’t just leave; there could possibly even be legal consequences if I did.

If nothing else, the listing agent had to be told. It might be nothing. Maybe a mouse crawled between the walls and perished from mouse bait put out long ago by the original owners. One dead rodent can create a horrible odor that assaults the senses.

I could see the look of horror on their faces. Their lips curled in repugnance; their eyes showed just a little fear and trepidation. But there was also curiosity, and the feeling they might miss something they could talk about later over dinner with friends. Maybe they might even get their names in the newspaper. I knew there was no discouraging them – they had to see for themselves.

I am a realtor. I show a lot of homes. My name is Blakeney Heath, but everyone calls me Bee because I am small and buzz around like a tiny little energetic bee (or so they say).

And I am certainly energetic, running eight to nine miles a day, always busy. There is so much to do, so many books to read, so little time. The days are much too short for me.

I was the only girl among five boys and got my somewhat manly name because my parents wanted only male offspring. My coming along was quite a surprise for them and I suspect they never quite recovered from the shock.

Perhaps they tried to raise me to be a girl, but it didn’t work out too well. With five brothers, I inevitably became a tomboy, growing up with more masculine way of thinking than I did on the feminine side. I think it was nice in certain ways, because I perhaps understand the male side of the world a lot better than most females. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to learn some of the more feminine characteristics, like instinctively knowing how to cajole and charm males into doing what I want them to do. In other words, to be my slaves. Or, like being able to run and dance in high heels the way I see the women doing on the TV dance shows. I kind of envy them.

I work in Charlotte for one of the largest real estate companies in the country, out of an office located in the Ballantyne area. In the past, real estate agents have gotten a bad name and a worse reputation. In fact, we are regarded by much of the general public as being valued only a little higher than used car salesman.

Fighting that image was one of the basic reasons our company was established. We are a faith based company and we believe in God first, our family second and our business third, because if you have the first two in tune, then the last will naturally be successful.

We also believe that everyone in a real estate deal should feel that they have been treated fairly and without bias. Therefore, we are held to a very high standard and are expected to follow these firm guidelines of fairness, honesty and integrity.

Not only that, the North Carolina Real Estate Commission also insists that we should be held to the same high standards of conduct. In order to be licensed, we must submit a background check and, of course, the commission wants it to be excellent. Each application is decided on an individual basis, so I can’t speak for others, but my background checks have always been good. Also, if we should have the misfortune to get in trouble, we must report it within 60 days of the final judgment or board action. I have never had to do that and try to keep my nose clean.

I do get a lot of kidding because a nearby subdivision is also named Blakeney Heath. Although I had the name first, it was somewhat of a surprise to see it on a neighborhood and a Charlotte street. Kind of nice, though; almost like seeing your name up in lights.

With nearly a million people living here now, Charlotte is the largest city in North Carolina. If you figure in the five counties that are said to make up The Greater Charlotte Area, population is estimated at a million and three-quarters. That makes Charlotte the largest city between Washington and Atlanta; but nevertheless, it does seem to suffer from an identity crisis.

People confuse us with Charleston, West Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina, which mightily vexes our city leaders. Much like the venerable Rodney Dangerfield, Charlotte gets no respect. We have been informed that we are now hosting the Democratic National Convention, so perhaps one day we will be recognized after all.

In the meantime, Charlotte struggles mightily to be considered a world-class city and some of those travails are not always pretty. A somewhat friendly rivalry seems to continue between Charlotte and Raleigh, the capital city of North Carolina.

Charlotte is not at all a bad place to live. It is known as the City of Trees because we have countless numbers, although not nearly as prevalent as before Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989 and took down so many. I remember that disaster well as I spent over a week in darkness due to trees dropping so many power lines. At the time, chain saws seemed to be the predominant music heard, replacing even the venerable cicadas.

Charlotte also has thousands of azaleas, Bradford pears and forsythia, making springtime a world of beauty. Our city is not without its problems, but it has a ton of charm and it can be an adventure living and working here.

As a realtor, I have encountered many weird things. Once before, I had walked with buyers into a vacant home being foreclosed and encountered such an odor. Then, we were afraid we would find a body in a closet.

Turned out, that pungent scent was caused by meat left in the fridge. It had been rented; the older renter moved out and left her grandson in residence. When the home was foreclosed, the power was cut off. The sheriff put the grandson out into the street. He was allowed to take only what he could carry. The grandson conveniently forgot to mention the fridge was full.

May just be leftover food in the fridge, I said. It’s happened before. I walked to the fridge, a huge stainless steel model with a freezer on one side and cold refrigeration on the other and eased open the door. Shining white shelves gleamed back at me. Empty.

Why don’t you wait in the yard, I suggested once more, but I could see that was a waste of a suggestion. They definitely wanted to look. They had to look.

It wasn’t like it was the first time they had seen the home. We had been there just about a month before, when the sellers were still trying to sell it as a short sale and were not desperate. A short sale is generally always problematic, and it is never completely easy or simple. The lender has to agree to take less than what it would like. With the real estate market in chaos with too many foreclosures, the processor handling the short sale is quite often overwhelmed and sometimes has problems keeping up with the process. So, things can start to fall apart quickly and the short sale can drag on interminably with no end in sight. A short sale can be very time consuming and aggravating for all parties.

And, as so often happens in these cases, the lender can get tired of waiting on the sale to close and suddenly decide to foreclose, without preamble and without much notice. And that is what seems to have happened with this home.

And because there are so many foreclosures, no one is really checking on the home. Sometimes the homes are full of belongings, furniture and televisions and clothes piled about – all items the sheriff did not allow the owners to take with them when they got kicked out.

So far, from what I could see of the home, it was empty of belongings– one plus for me. Except for that huge refrigerator, there were none of the expensive appliances and lavish antiques we had seen before.

My clients were really nice people, but they were driving me just a little crazy. They wanted something with acreage in Union County or in York County SC. But they had a long list of particular wants that had to be matched. I showed them homes from Rock Hill to Monroe to Ansonville to Matthews to Marshville and every possibility had some little something wrong with it. Nothing suited them. I pointed out that no home was going to have 100 per cent of the things they wanted, but they remained adamant and unapologetic.

They had sort of liked this home when I first showed it to them, but it too had a serious drawback. It set back off a long gravel driveway far off the main road and they were afraid they would not be able to get out easily in the event of an emergency. I explained to them that this was the South; there wouldn’t be too many times when they would not be able to leave. But we did have that occasional winter snowstorm that made travel difficult. And Monroe was not New York City – we just didn’t have the necessary equipment to clear roads easily. The interstates, yes; but not these back roads.

Upon the first viewing, they had rejected the home, but then later came back to it because it had been reduced for the foreclosure, had 20 acres of land and was located near Marshville where they had relatives and wished to live.

So here we were back again. I had been hoping this time would be the magical one – they would finally decide to buy. But instead, it looked like coming back to this particular home was a terrible mistake.

As a group, we crossed the kitchen together, my clients right on my heels like they thought something was going to jump out and attack them. We walked as a unit into the hallway. I tried to get a direction on the odor, to know where to go, but it was like some gigantic miasma that filled the rooms. Too bad there’s no GPS for dead bodies.

Try not to touch anything, I told my clients. I was becoming afraid of what we might find.

We walked into the master bedroom and faced a huge double sized closet. As a body, we crossed the room. I gingerly opened the doors. Nothing. It too was bare of any possessions.

We explored each room in turn, becoming more jumpy as we progressed. It was a big two story house, built with huge rooms. The upper floor was only partly finished and still had a lot of building materials in the two unfinished rooms.

We walked carefully, looking behind anything that might conceal what we were afraid to find and certainly did not want to see. And there was nothing.

It could be a rat in the walls, I said. But I was not convinced. A rat could stink violently; make no mistake about it. But this smell was too strong even for a rat. By this time, we were at the point of gagging and I could see my clients were almost ready to give it up.

There was only one place we had not looked – the basement. Basements are not common in the South. Most builders do not build homes with basements because much of the land in the south is not suitable, too much shale, too rocky, ground not compact enough. Basements leak. They get cracks. The house settles and puts too much stress on an area that is too open and does not have proper support. Basements can be unstable and cause instability in the home. A basement is often not a good idea because an unsafe basement can mean a structural hazard for the home. But still there are a few. Sometimes people will custom-build a home and decide they just have to have a basement. This was obviously a custom home.

The basement had a separate entrance at the rear of the home, and you had to walk outside and to the back to get to it. Personally, I don’t understand that logic. If you want a basement, why not have the entrance inside the home where it’s easy to reach? Seems to me, a separate, outside entrance could mean any number of problems – someone could break in and do all sorts of things there or set a fire or otherwise cause problems. Someone could conceivably even live there; think of having a resident you didn’t know you had! A basement could be the stuff of nightmare – the dark at the bottom of the stairs.

The backyard was lower than the front and there were steps that led downward, around the back to a terrace in the rear of that home. The basement door opened off that terrace.

I jingled the key ring that had been in the lockbox and selected the key that did not fit the front door, almost hoping it wouldn’t fit the basement door either.

I slid that key into the lock, turned it. It opened immediately.

The basement was a daylight basement and not below ground, which is what most of us think makes it a basement. It had been built up against a hill so the back wall (which was really the front wall) was against the earth and the other side was facing the outside. However, there were only small windows on that wall and that made the basement look dark and dank. The basement had not been finished and there were black, moldy-looking spots on the back wall where water was seeping from the earth behind. There might well have been mold. If so, that odor was indistinguishable over the rotten, foul burst of air that poured forth when I pushed open the door. I knew we had found the source.

My clients could stand it no longer. Faces green and sick, they backed out of the door and stood under a large pecan tree in the backyard. The owners had created a serene refuge under that tree. Two black wrought iron benches had been placed facing each other, flanked by small flower beds full of bright pink impatiens. A small wrought iron table was in between the benches, topped by a small Buddha statue.

Joe and Polly seemed reluctant to sit, as if relaxing in the face of imminent tragedy might invite some terrible retribution. They stood there, not looking at each other.

The sun was shining brightly, flowers were blooming by the back door, the day was warm and a mockingbird was trilling its endless songs in the tree above them.

Death did not fit into the picture.

Alone at last, I peered into the basement. There were cobwebs in the corners and remnants of life piled everywhere. Cleaning out the house obviously did not extend to the basement. Stacks of old magazines, a Captain’s chair with a broken leg, a glass and brass coffee table missing its glass, an old floor lamp with a missing shade, cardboard boxes full of memorabilia. On one side of the basement, several tables lined the wall, looking as if something had once been manufactured there. Stacks of 2x4s lay at the back of the basement, in front of several sheets of chipped and peeling plywood leaning against the wall.

Huge green and blue blowflies, red-eyed, gossamer wings, loud and obnoxious, buzzed around me, getting in my face, angry I had invaded their space, jealous of the treat they had found. I looked around, surveyed the basement and decided the most likely area would be those plywood sheets against the wall.

As I approached, the odor grew stronger, over-powering, over-whelming. I took a tissue from my jacket pocket and covered my nose. Strange substances, glaring green and yellow, leaked from underneath the plywood. I used another tissue to grasp the corners of the plywood sheets. I haven’t watched all those CSI programs for nothing. Not going to leave my prints behind! I pulled it forward, risked a peek in behind.

It was not a rat. At least, not in the rodent sense. I could hardly believe my eyes.

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Chapter 2

It possibly could have been a woman, but because of the size, I was pretty sure it was a man. A big dude, maybe 6’5, 300 pounds. But hard to tell gender, really. Most of the face was gone, and there were no eyes in the eye sockets, just gaping holes where eyes used to be. Fat maggots wiggled and squirmed through the rotting flesh, some dropping to the floor as they got rooted out by their more aggressive brethren. The body was clothed in jeans and a tee shirt, but huge holes had been gnawed in the fabric (those rats again!), exposing suppurating, oozing flesh with more maggots drilling their way through the softening muscles of the body. One hand lay splayed out from the body. Most of the flesh on the fingers had been eaten away, exposing small bones.

A large butcher knife was sticking prominently out of the front of his chest, the ornate handle covered in red gore now turning black with age. A blowfly landed on the handle, walked down to the blade protruding from the ghastly body and began sipping on the noxious fluids.

I gently pushed the plywood sheets back against the wall, turned and walked quickly out of the basement. I stood in the sun, gulping huge breaths of fresh air, trying to rid that smell from my lungs. I knew I would have to go home and shower for an hour to get that horrible, reeking odor off my body and out of my hair. And my favorite jacket? Forget about it, it was going in the trash. No way would I ever get that noxious scent out of it.

What did you find? Joe called out to me.

His wife Polly chimed in with Was it really just a rat?

I shook my head