Six Cats a Slayin' by Miranda James

Author:Miranda James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

I wondered if Melba knew any Halliburtons in the Athena area. I would ask her later. At the moment I was wondering what to do with this information. Should I communicate with Kanesha and tell her what I had discovered? Or was this something she would have checked on herself?

Let’s take it a step or two further.

I opened a genealogy database and searched for Ronni Halliburton. I found many, many more results than I had expected, and I started going through the list. There were variant spellings for the surname: Haliburton and Halyburton. I found Janes, Janas, and even Johns. The exact matches on the name Ronni Halliburton didn’t jibe with what I knew of Gerry Albritton’s age.

That was not an encouraging start. Next, I searched for Geraldine Albritton, and once I narrowed down the results to search for the exact name, I was left with only a few from which to choose. Again, none of the birth dates worked for the woman I had known. She would have had to have been in her seventies or eighties to match these entries, and even if she’d had extensive plastic surgery, as had been suggested, I didn’t think any surgery could take twenty to thirty years off someone’s age.

Who was Ronni Halliburton then?

Was there a third, as-yet-undiscovered name for this woman?

Kanesha could get fingerprints and use those, I supposed, to find out whether the dead woman had a police record. That might yield her real name, but that was information I doubted Kanesha would share readily.

Next, I searched the name Halliburton on the Internet in conjunction with Athena. Turned out there was a Halliburton or two in the county, but not anyone I knew. Melba might know them, of course.

Recalling Gerry’s interest in buying houses in my neighborhood, I went back to the county property site and did a search using Ronni Halliburton as the owner. This search yielded four results: the house across the street, two other houses in my neighborhood, and a house in another part of town.

I set the laptop aside and got up to retrieve a pen and a notebook from my desk. I jotted down the addresses, and when I had done so, I stared at the page. Now that I had this information, what was I going to do with it? I had adjured myself last night to stay out of this investigation, but I had allowed my curiosity to pull me in, at least this far. I revisited the question of whether I should share with Kanesha the information I’d found.

Another possibility occurred to me. What if Ronni Halliburton and Geraldine Albritton were two different people? Maybe Halliburton had the money and Albritton did the buying. That was certainly possible—not the first time the money person chose to stay in the background.

If they were two different people, though, it was odd that I couldn’t find either of them, with any certainty, in the genealogical database. Surely there was a birth certificate—or two—somewhere. Not all birth and death records in Mississippi had yet been digitized.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.