The Stranger You Seek: A Novel by Amanda Kyle Williams

Author:Amanda Kyle Williams [Williams, Amanda Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women Detectives, Atlanta (Ga.), Mystery & Detective, General, Serial Murder Investigation, Suspense, Women Sleuths, Thrillers, Suspense Fiction, Mystery Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780553808070
Google: yH8wV9s9PD4C
Amazon: 0553808079
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2011-08-30T07:00:00+00:00

22

How I came to own two thousand square feet on the tenth floor of Atlanta’s Georgian Terrace Hotel is a testament to, well, blind luck. I had done a job for the property owner that required some diplomacy and discretion during a divorce. He had a mistress, a wife, a child, a boyfriend, and lots of property. Fortunately for him, I discovered the wife also had a mistress and a boyfriend. He paid me to negotiate her down privately without the attorneys squabbling over his massive assets. Miraculously, I pulled it off without a hitch. In the course of doing business with him, I discovered his intent to return the private space he kept for himself in the hotel back into hotel suites. The building had been converted to luxury apartments in the eighties, and when my client bought the property, he turned all but one apartment into hotel space. I had fallen in love on my first visit with the white-bricked walls, the hand-carved crown molding, the marble bathrooms, the twelve-foot ceilings, the glistening wood floors, the rows of Palladian windows with their view of Peachtree Street. I offered to waive my fee, all future fees, and promised to surrender to him my firstborn just to have the chance to make a bid. I had some cash at the time. An insurance company had just paid me a percentage of what I’d recovered on an art fraud case. Still, swinging a down payment on a place like this took every penny I had, every penny I could get out of my parents, and nearly everything I owned that could be converted to cash. I mortgaged myself up to my ears and spent the next three years in chaos, knocking down walls, living with carpenters and sawdust and tools. The experience had permanently marked White Trash, but it also turned the apartment into the rambling loft I now call home. It hasn’t been decorated. That’ll happen when I am flush again, maybe in fifty years or so. In the meantime, a bed, a dresser, an enormous couch, a Moroccan-tiled table that I found irresistibly attractive in Piedmont Park during the Dogwood Festival, a television, a CD player, a computer, three rugs, one scraggly white cat, and me. It’s enough for now.

I am the only permanent resident to inhabit the hotel, and I know most of the people employed here by name. I eat dinner downstairs at Livingston Restaurant quite often and sit on the restaurant’s terrace on Peachtree whenever possible, breakfast and dinner a few times a week. I have none of the privileges of a guest, however. Not during the day anyway. The hotel manager seems to resent my presence here. He makes sure the weight room, the media room, and the pool are off-limits to me. The months of workmen stomping in and out of the Georgian’s pristine lobby might have something to do with the manager’s hostility. But the second- and third-shift managers let me have the run of the place.

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