Chapter 2

Mr. Rudd stood immediately.

“Your Honor, the lighting may have distorted the color.”

Judge Bellamy enlarged another photograph.

“The bathtub is white. The toilet is white. The ceiling is white. The switch plate is white. The wall is yellow.”

He swiped again.

Another yellow wall.

Then another.

Ruth rose.

“Your Honor, my client’s move-in and move-out photographs show gray walls.”

The judge placed my pictures beside Loretta’s tablet.

This time he didn’t complain that mine were dark.

He simply looked.

Then he asked Loretta to open the photograph information and show when the images had been created.

She said she didn’t know how.

The bailiff did.

“August fourteenth,” he read.

He paused.

“Three years ago.”

The courtroom seemed to breathe as one body.

Judge Bellamy looked at Loretta.

“Ten minutes ago, you testified under oath that you took these photographs on May second of this year.”

“I must have opened the wrong folder.”

“Then find the correct folder.”

We waited while she scrolled through her tablet.

After nearly two minutes, she stopped.

“The pictures are on another device at home.”

“Of course they are,” Judge Bellamy said quietly.

He didn’t issue a final ruling. Instead, he ordered her to bring every original photograph and every device containing them to a second hearing in fourteen days. He also ordered her to pause the collection account immediately.

Then he looked straight at her.

“Mrs. Voss, lying under oath is a crime. I suggest you use the next two weeks very carefully.”

Outside, Marin hugged me.

Ruth did not celebrate.

“We stopped losing,” she said. “That’s not the same as winning.”

Across the hallway, Loretta approached me.

“You think paint color is going to save you?” she whispered.

Ruth stepped between us. “Any further communication goes through counsel.”

Loretta walked away.

At a diner across from the courthouse, Ruth stirred coffee without drinking it.

“Those damage photos are real,” she said. “Somebody damaged that apartment. The question is who.”

Two days later, she had the answer.

Loretta had sued four former tenants in three years.

All had lived in my unit.

The oldest case involved a man named Boyd Lasco. He had apparently trashed the apartment and disappeared before court. Yellow walls, broken tile, holes, burned counter, stained carpet.

Loretta won by default.

Then came Lena Hart, a nursing student.

Same photographs.

Then Gus Ambrose, a widowed school custodian.

Same photographs.

Same holes.

Same cracked tile.

Same horseshoe-shaped burn.

Loretta had repaired the apartment after Boyd moved out, repainted the walls gray, and then reused his damage photographs against every later tenant.

Gus answered my phone call with a rough, tired voice.

When I explained who I was, he became silent.

Finally he asked, “Did she do it to you, too?”

Gus was seventy-one. After his wife died, he had sold their house because he couldn’t stand sleeping there alone. He rented Loretta’s apartment because it was close to the cemetery where his wife was buried.

“She was sweet at first,” he told me. “Brought soup when I got the flu.”

Then his kitchen sink leaked. When Loretta wouldn’t fix it, Gus repaired it himself and deducted the cost of the part from his rent.

After that, she began entering his apartment.

When he eventually moved closer to his daughter, Loretta sued him for $6,000.

“I told the judge I never had a dog,” Gus said. “I told him I didn’t burn anything.”

He had no photographs.

Loretta had hundreds.

Judge Bellamy ruled against him.

Gus was still paying $150 every month from his pension.

His voice dropped.

“For a while I thought maybe I was getting old. Maybe I forgot doing something. I started wondering if my memory was going.”

I closed my eyes.

“No, Gus. Your memory is fine.”

Ruth found Lena next.

She was working as a pediatric nurse two states away.

Unlike Gus and me, Lena had made an eleven-minute move-out video.

Gray walls.

Clean floors.

Unmarked countertop.

No holes.

She had shown it in court.

Loretta claimed the video must have been recorded before the damage occurred.

The judge believed Loretta.

Lena lost.

While Ruth chased court records, Marin chased the internet.

One afternoon she called me at work.

“Cal, she rented your apartment.”

She sent me the listing.

UNIT 1 — FRESHLY UPDATED — MOVE-IN READY.

Rent: $1,850.

Four hundred dollars more than I had paid.

The listing date was May third.

The day after Loretta supposedly discovered catastrophic damage requiring three weeks of repairs.

Every listing photograph showed clean gray walls, perfect tile and an undamaged countertop.

Then Marin told me to enlarge the bathroom photograph.

A dark green towel hung from the towel bar.

A white letter C was embroidered in its corner.

My grandmother had made that towel for me when I moved into my first apartment.

I had taken it with me on May first.

Which meant Loretta had photographed the apartment before I moved out.

I remembered her standing in my bedroom with her tablet.

Insurance pictures.

She had lied.

Those weren’t insurance photographs.

They were rental-listing photographs.

She had planned to replace me with a higher-paying tenant before she ever served the owner-move-in notice.

Her nephew Kirby wasn’t moving in at all.

The next day, the online listing disappeared.

Marin had already saved screenshots and archived the page.

Ruth laughed when she heard.

“Your sister terrifies me,” she said. “I like her.”

Then she investigated the contractor Loretta claimed had performed $11,640 in repairs.

V&K Restoration.

The address belonged to a mailbox store.

No contractor by that name was licensed in the state.

Ruth called the phone number printed on the estimate.

A woman answered on voicemail.

“Hi, you’ve reached Loretta. I’m probably out in the garden. Leave me a message, dear.”

Ruth stared at the phone.

“Voss and Kirby,” she said.

We checked Gus’s old court file.

Same contractor.

Same logo.

Same mailbox.

Same phone number.

Loretta had created a fake company using her surname and her nephew’s name.

Every former tenant received an estimate from it.