Free Tangled Roots by Angela Henry Page B

suddenly spooked. I felt something cold touch my hand and I jumped. But it was just Cecil Hathaway pressing the key into my palm.
    “You be careful down there, young lady,” he said, and made his way slowly back towards the front door. I heard the screen door creak open and shut as I headed down the steps to Inez’s apartment. I paused and pressed my ear to the door. I still didn’t hear anything. Feeling more than a little foolish, I unlocked the door and walked in.
    I felt around on the wall for a light switch, bumped into something and almost screamed. But once I got the lights on, I could see it was just a wooden coatrack with a denim jacket and an old black sweater hanging on it. The apartment itself was one large room that was divided into two sections: a living room, which probably doubled as a bedroom, and a kitchen area. I ventured farther into the living room. It was hot and stuffy inside the apartment and it smelled like spoiled milk and garbage. If Inez’s spirit had come back to her apartment, it was probably to open a window and empty the overflowing trash basket I spotted across the room in the kitchen.
    The apartment was sparsely decorated with expensive-looking furniture that didn’t match. In fact, it looked like two different people had decorated the place. The floral print chintz sofa clashed with the black lacquer Oriental coffee table. There was a small, round, chrome-and-glass table next to the couch, with a neon purple ceramic lamp perched on it. A small television set sat on a red wooden TV stand with a VCR sitting on top of it and a CD player on the shelf below it. There was a picture of an attractive, middle-aged black woman in a fabric frame sitting in the middle of the coffee table. I guessed it to be her mother. There weren’t any other pictures that I could see. The apartment was very neat.
    I pulled one of the bags off of the roll of trash bags, tossed the rest on the couch, and headed into the kitchen area. A large square table with a long, flowing, white embroidered tablecloth that could have been an heirloom dominated the space. A look in the sink revealed a bowl filled with mushy cereal and curdled milk. I held my breath and emptied the bowl and rinsed it out. I looked in Inez’s refrigerator and found a carton of spoiled milk, which I also poured down the sink; a pack of hamburger; a wilted head of lettuce; half a dozen eggs; a lemon; a bottle of wine; and some Chinese takeout containers from the Red Dragon. There were some frozen dinners and a half gallon of rocky road ice cream in the freezer. I bagged up the reeking garbage to take out when I left so Mr. Hathaway wouldn’t get suspicious. I found some canned vegetables, a box of instant rice, several boxes of cereal, and some soup in the cabinets. There was a set of green tin canisters on the kitchen counter by the sink. All of them were empty except the smallest one, which held a small bag of weed and some rolling papers. The lower cabinets held pots and pans.
    There was one closet in the apartment that was jam-packed full of clothes and shoes. The tiny bathroom had a tub, a sink, a toilet, and very little room for much else. The bathroom cabinet held birth control pills, aspirin, Band-Aids, toothpaste, mouthwash, and an almost empty tube of KY jelly. A set of wicker shelves on the wall above the toilet held towels and washcloths. A makeup bag sat on the tank behind the toilet and a toothbrush sat in a cup on the sink alongside a bar of dried-out soap.
    I was getting frustrated. Inez certainly didn’t believe in any kind of clutter. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but it didn’t appear that anything that could help Timmy would be found in this apartment. So far, the only things I’d found out about Inez were that she loved her mama, liked to get high, had no talent for interior decorating, and experienced vaginal dryness. There was no note on the wall from her ghost, scrawled in blood, declaring, “Timmy didn’t