So on Saturday I was just south of Benton Harbor, Michigan, parked down the street from Amber’s house. It had two stories and an attic, with a tall, thick tree shading a wide front lawn that was carpeted with dandelions. Around the back I could see a big tree and a small wooden structure, like an outhouse, also surrounded by weeds and dandelions
The house’s windows were shuttered; the siding had faded over the years of bright summers and cold winters. The grass hadn’t been mowed lately. The house loomed over the rest of the street, which had a few smaller houses scattered up and down the block.
The day was sunny and warm. The neighborhood was quiet, with just a few houses in either direction. A woman down the street weeded her garden. A young boy rode a bicycle in circles up and down the cracked pavement until a friend joined him and they pedaled off.
Rachel wasn’t with me. “Drive to Michigan with you? Let’s see, I’ve got a paper to write and another lab experiment to design. I can do that in the car while you drive and listen to classic rock, sure. Or, here’s a thought—no.”
Her psychic abilities might have come in handy with the stalker, but her classwork was her priority. I had to hide my irritation, because it was a fight I couldn’t win. I settled for texting her that I’d arrived safely, then waited for Amber and Kris.
I looked around from inside the car. No sign of the stalker. Was he a neighbor? I had a few fuzzy pictures of him from my phone. Maybe someone would recognize him if I started knocking on doors. Or maybe someone would shoot me. You never know.
They showed up at 11:30. Or maybe 12:30, with the time change. I watched them get out, go up to the door, unlock it and go inside while I waited to see if the stalker would show his face.
A minute later Amber called. “Hi. We’re here. Everything looks pretty much the same. What do we do now?”
“Let’s wait a bit to see if—whoops, there he is now.”
The stalker was across the street, standing under a tree. Had he been there the whole time? The lot was empty, just tall grass and weeds and a mound of dirt.
I took a gulp of coffee, steeled my nerves, and got out of the car.
He watched me cross the street. He was wearing the leather jacket and his cap, leaning against the tree, smiling as I approached.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”
He looked over my shoulder at the house, then nodded. “Sure.”
“My name is Tom Jurgen. I’m a private detective. I’m working for the woman in the house over there, Amber Keenan. You’ve been following her.”
He straightened up and looked me over. “I’m Driver. I don’t mean her any harm.”
“You’re scaring her. What are you up to?”
“We—I want to make sure she’s safe. The house is important.”
“Important how? To who?”
He shook his head. “To some of us.”
I looked around. “The neighbors?”
Driver laughed. “No. They’re—not important.”
This wasn’t getting me anywhere. “What’s your full name?”
He looked down. “No. This is none of your business.”
I took a different direction. “What about that woman the other day? Who was she? Was she trying to kill Amber?”
Driver’s eyes flickered. “We’re—I’ll take care of that.”
“Doing what? Is Amber in danger?”
He shook his head again. “Not from us. Not as long as she takes care of the house.”
“What’s important about that house?” I asked again.
“It’s beyond your knowledge. You wouldn’t understand. Or believe.”
The list of things I’ve run into that most people wouldn’t believe is pretty long—vampires, gargoyles, killer fungus. “I’m pretty open minded. Try me.”
He looked at my eyes for a moment, then away. “Sorry.”
I had more questions, or at least variations of the questions I’d already asked, but I got the feeling he was finished talking. “All right.”
I turned, pulling up my phone, and accessed the camera.
Then I turned back and got a picture of him. Nice and close.
I managed another picture before he took a step forward, frowning. I switched hands and reached for the pepper spray in my jacket, but before I could get it out he changed his mind and turned away from me. He started walking, not looking back, not toward any particular house or yard. Just away. Not running, but quick.
I didn’t think following him would work right now. So I let him go, checked the photos, and crossed the street to the house.
“We were watching,” Amber said as she opened the door. “What happened? What’d he say?” Kris was right next to her, staring at me hard.
“His name’s Driver, he said.” I showed them the picture. “First name, last name, code name, I don’t know. He says he only wanted you to be safe, but he—or they—want to make sure you take care of the house. It’s important for some reason.”
“This place?” Amber spread her arms. We were in a big, empty room with a fireplace in one corner and curtains pulled across a wide picture window. “I’m figuring out how to sell it. How is it important?”
“You said ‘they,’” Kris said. “Who’s they?”
“No idea. He seemed to slip up by saying ‘us.’ He said what’s important about the house is beyond our knowledge.”
Kris rolled her eyes. “What does that mean?”
I didn’t answer.
The floor was wood, rough and unpolished, as if the living room’s carpeting had been pulled up recently. The air was dusty, smelling like animal droppings and lingering disinfectant. A dark hall led to the other side of the house, and I could see a kitchen at the far end. “Mind if I look around?”
We glanced into a dining room and a study, both empty except for a few boxes and crumpled wads of newspaper. A door to the basement stood in front of the kitchen, but we went past it for the moment.
In the kitchen I tried the faucets, but only a few drops dribbled into the dirty, stained sink. The cabinets were mostly bare, but cans of spaghetti sauce and beans and vegetables sat in the cupboards.
A back door was locked and bolted from the inside. A screened window looked into the back yard, where grass and weeds had taken over, surrounding the big tree and the outhouse I’d seen from the car.
A wastebasket in the corner held a few fast food bags. “Are these from you?”
“Uh-uh.” Amber shook her head. “I don’t think they were here before. Kris?”
“No.” She looked into the basket. “That was empty.”
The second floor had four bedrooms and two linen closets. In one bedroom, facing the back yard, we found a dirty T-shirt and a long white sock.
“Oh shit,” Amber said. “Someone’s been living here?”
The rest of the bedrooms showed no sign of human habitation. We checked all the doors and windows. Every one was locked securely.
A narrow staircase led up to an attic. Amber had to unlock it with one of the keys the lawyer had turned over to her, and we went through. Under the sloping ceiling we found dust, cobwebs, and mouse droppings. A single shuttered window kept out the sun, so we used our phones as best we could, but only a few empty boxes lay scattered across the creaking floor.
On the ground again we looked at the windows and doors. All of them were secure, with no signs of tampering that I could find.
That left the basement. I led the two women down a set of dark stairs, again using my phone for light. We spread out across the concrete floor, shining our phones at the gray cinder block walls, looking into shadowy corners and cautiously examining ominous shapes that turned out to be the washer and dryer, an empty freezer, and the furnace. Two small windows near the ceiling on one side were too high for any of us to reach, but they were too tight for any intruder to have gotten through.
A tall, heavy wooden door stood in the wall opposite the two windows. Amber fumbled with her keys. “Nope, no, nope—none of them.” She tried each one again, then slid them back into her jeans. “Anyone got an ax?”
We headed back upstairs. Kris looked annoyed with me. Amber just seemed freaked out. I couldn’t blame either one of them.
“What now?” Kris demanded, arms crossed.
“I can use the picture and the name he gave me to try to identify him. I also want to look more into the house’s history. Maybe—I don’t know. Somebody buried treasure here?”
Amber bit her lip. “I just can’t go on like this. I want to burn it to the ground.”
That was one option, though not something I could legally recommend. I knew people who could threaten Driver—not “people,” technically, and I didn’t like to think about what favors I’d owe them if I went there, so I didn’t mention that.
Like I said, stalking cases are complicated.
Kris put an arm around her. “We’ll figure this out. Somehow.” She looked at me. “Right?”
“I’ll do my best.”
We went outside and locked up. I stood on the porch, looking for Driver as they got into their car and drove away. No trace of him. I looked at his picture on my phone, then turned back to the front door of the house, making sure it was locked firmly.
A chill ran up my arm as I touched the doorknob. I’m not psychic like Rachel, but something about the house made me wary. I’ve visited a few haunted houses and met some angry ghosts in them, and this place had the same kind of aura around it—and inside it. Something that made me want to leave and not come back.
Again I wished Rachel was here. But I usually wish Rachel was with me. I sent her a text that I was on my way home and went back to my car.
On Monday morning I followed Amber to work without spotting Driver, then went back to my desk to call the lawyer who’d given her the house. I’d spoken to him once before, after she’d authorized him to talk to me, and he’d been reasonably helpful without going beyond the bare minimum. This time I figured I’d try pushing him a bit.
“Did you keep any keys from the house?” I paused. “Because it looks like someone’s been inside since my client took possession from you.”
The lawyer, James Crowley, cleared his throat. “There are no keys to the house in my possession.”
“Are there any other keys floating around in someone else’s possession?”
“There could be. I was only in contact with Mr. Holroyd. There may have been someone—”
“Do you know if there was anyone else with access to the house?”
“No! There was only—” He stopped.
Gotcha. I felt like I was the lawyer now. “Who? Was there someone else?”
“Someone called asking about the house. If it was for sale. I told her no—”
Her. “A woman? Did you get her name?”
“It was—let me think—Mickey something. Or Nikki, maybe. I don’t remember the last name. I told her the house was passing on to Mr. Holroyd’s next of kin, and she asked who that was, but I—something was off about her, so I just said it was part of the estate.”
“Off about her how?”
“Like—she sounded very anxious. In a hurry. I started to ask her if she wanted me to contact the estate for her, but she just hung up.”
“You haven’t heard from her since?”
“No. Sometimes you get random people trying to find out if a house is good to rob, stuff like that, but we’d already cleared out the house, at Ms. Keenan’s request. Not that there was much there. I went in once after Holroyd died, and it was just furniture, a few pots and pans, a bed upstairs, empty basement—nothing.”
After we hung up, I started digging into real estate records.
The house had been in the same family for close to 150 years, starting with a guy named J.P. Holroyd in 1872. He’d died shortly after building the house, leaving it to his wife and two sons.
Since then, it had passed between generations, father to son, or sometimes father to nephew, staying in the same family without much dispute. One man emerged in 1901 claiming to be the illegitimate son of Silas Holroyd, but the family apparently bought him off, and he disappeared. Two sons battled for control of the property in the 1950s until the older died in a car accident.
Other family members had died tragically too. One drowned in the river between Benton Harbor and its sister city St. Joseph, Michigan, in 1879; another had died in the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, and his son was shot by a robber in 1923; one of them shot himself in the head when the stock market crashed in 1929, and so forth.
The family had done well for more than 100 years, establishing a series of department stores that thrived until the 1980s or so, then apparently living off real estate investments in the area until, one by one, everything got sold off until only the house was left. And then Jacob Holroyd’s parents had killed themselves.
The parents, Brad and Annabelle, had been in their 50s. Brad had owned a bank in St. Joseph that failed 12 years before his death. Annabelle, as far as I could determine, simply devoted herself to raising Jake.
That brought us up to the present day. I wasn’t sure it helped, but it gave me some context to the story.
A reverse image search of Driver’s face didn’t get me anywhere. The few possible matches were obviously wrong, and there were too many other results for me to check each one. A social media search only found a lot of Adam Driver fans, and this guy was no Force-wielding Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequels. I scanned the town records for anything that remotely matched “driver” as a name or nickname. Again, zero. Some detective I was.
I emailed my client and confirmed that I’d follow her home from her office again. Rachel came back from a morning class, kissed me, then ignored me for the rest of the day to work on a web page redesign for a client of hers. I spent the day dealing with other cases—internet searches, calling people with questions, writing and sending emails, and all the stuff of a P.I.’s life they don’t show you on TV.
I quit at 4:30, kissed Rachel, and headed downtown to Amber’s office building. Once again I waited with my phone in hand, pretending to talk, my eyes darting everywhere for Driver’s face. I thought I saw him once, but the face turned out to belong to a man using GPS to find an address.
Amber emerged at 5:25, walked to the nearest bus stop, and rode the bus up LaSalle and a few other streets until we reached her stop, a two-block walk from home.
She didn’t stop at the grocery store today. I stayed half a block behind her as she made her way down the sidewalk, glancing around and back nervously a few times, but otherwise she was just like any other pedestrian on their way home on a Monday afternoon.
Then the woman came out.
She’d been standing in the doorway to Amber’s apartment building. She wore the same green coat and skirt and boots, her hair pulled back, her eyes hidden behind round sunglasses. One of her hands was buried inside a big leather purse slung over her shoulder.
Amber jumped back. The woman pulled something from her purse—I expected a knife or a handgun, but it was a file folder. She shoved it into Amber’s face.
“Look at this!” she shouted. “Just look!”
I was running forward, but then Driver was behind her, arms reaching. He grabbed her wrist, and she twisted halfway around, yelling at him.
I had pepper spray in my hand as I reached Amber’s side. “You okay?”
Before Amber could answer, the woman kicked Driver in the leg. With her boots, it hurt, and he grunted, letting go of her and staggering back. “Stop, Nicole,” he told her. “Just wait a—”
She swung a fist and punched him in the chest. He sank to his knees, gasping, and the woman—Nicole?—darted past him.
She ran down the sidewalk. Her elbow hit a woman walking a dog, who yelled, but she kept going, and in a moment she was around the corner and out of sight.
Driver lurched to his feet, breathing hard. “I told you,” he gasped. “I told you, I’m just watching out for her—”
“Who are you?” Amber screamed. “What do you want? Why are you following me?”
“Keep the house,” he said, backing away. “Don’t let her scare you. Just keep the house.”
Then he turned and ran.
I looked at Amber. “Do you want me to go after him? I might be able—”
“No.” She shook her head. “Forget him. I just want to get inside.”
Good. I probably couldn’t have caught Driver, which would have been embarrassing, but I had to make the offer.
People were staring at us, and the woman with the dog asked if we wanted her to call 911, but Amber only wanted to go home. The woman held the door for her.
I looked down the street, trying to see if Driver had a car, when I noticed something on the sidewalk at my feet. Just then, a man locking up his bike pointed down. “Hey, you dropped something.”
Nicole’s folder. I bent down. “Thanks.”
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