Slow Dollar

“Any witnesses to the time you got there?”

Wrenn shook his head, moving more slowly up the stairs of the building they’d entered, as if it hurt to climb on that ankle.

Nobody lived in the house at the moment, he explained, because it had belonged to his grandfather who died early in the summer. His mother was the old man’s only relative and natural heir, but there was some technicality about the deed. Soon as that was straightened out, the house would be sold. In the meantime, Wrenn used it as a crash pad when he wanted to get away from school.

“Wait a minute, though,” he said as they pulled up at the doorway of his next class. “There’s a nosy old lady lives next door. I think she might’ve still been out on her porch when I got home.”

He gave them her name and address; then the bell rang again and he stepped inside the classroom just as the professor came over to close the door.

          

The pimply faced teenager minding the desk at the Colleton U-Stor didn’t remember Brazos Hartley even though he’d taken the bid on two lockers on the thirty first of August. He was pretty sure that no one had been around about a locker belonging to a Leonard Angelopolus but Caroline Sholten? He couldn’t swear he’d ever met her, but he certainly recalled Mrs. Sholten’s angry middle-aged daughter.

“You know how kids used to say ‘Your mama wears army boots’?” He giggled. “Well, this lady really did. I mean, she was huge. She had on these lace-up boots like a Marine or a paratrooper, and shorts that looked like bib overalls with the pant legs cut off, y’know? And her legs were like tree stumps. Man, she was one tough mama! And going on and on about how it was her furniture and her mother meant for her to have it. I told her if her mother wanted to keep the stuff, she shoulda paid the rent before it got auctioned off. I mean, we sent out the letter, advertised in the Ledger. Posted a notice at the courthouse. It was a legal sale.”

“Did you tell her who’d bought it?” asked Mayleen Richards.

“Yep. Gave her his phone number and e-mail and told her she’d have to find him before he sold it.”

“Did she leave her own name or address?”

The kid shook his head.

“What about the owner’s address?”

He looked at her as if her deck had a few missing cards. “Well, yeah, but she’s dead, remember?”

No point in reminding him that even old ladies have friends and neighbors. “Just give me the address.”

It was only a couple of miles away, a fifties-type brick ranch with empty windows and an air of expectant neglect. The foundation plantings had overgrown their allotted spaces and all the trimwork was in sore need of paint, but help was probably on the way if the real estate agent’s sign in the weedy front yard was any indication. It had a new red SOLD! sticker across it. She took down the agent’s number just in case no one else could help, then knocked on the door of the house across the road.

“Coming, coming, coming!” called a cheerful, if somewhat trembly, voice and the door was eventually opened by a very old, very frail white woman encumbered by an aluminum walker. She seemed delighted to find a female deputy in full uniform on her front porch. Smiling as Richards introduced herself, she invited the younger woman to come in. “I’m Liz. Liz Collins. Isn’t it just wonderful all that we can be and do these days? I’d give anything if I’d been born fifty years later. Not that I didn’t have an interesting time of it”—her gnarled hand gestured to a wall of framed photographs beside the door—“but these days I could have maybe made it into space.”

Mayleen Richards glanced perfunctorily at the photographs, did a double take, then looked more closely at the young woman in the cockpit of a plane, surrounded by other women in flying gear, getting a medal pinned to her jacket by a general, sitting on the wing of an airplane. “You were a pilot? Which war is this?”

“WW Two,” she said proudly. “I was one of the women that ferried planes from the assembly lines over to Europe. They wouldn’t let us join the Air Force or fly combat missions, but at least we got to do that much.”

From the next room came another cracked and trembly voice. “May I get you some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Richards said. She turned, expecting to see another elderly person in the doorway, but no one was there.

“That’s only Billy, my cockatiel.” The woman laughed and seated herself in a high rocking chair, the seat of which was made even higher by a thick cushion so that she didn’t have far to lower herself. “Please make yourself comfortable, Deputy Richards, and are you sure I can’t get you some tea?”

“Some tea?” the bird asked again.

Richards smiled. “No, ma’am, thank you.”

She explained the reason for her visit and Mrs. Collins nodded immediately.

“Carrie Sholten. Lovely woman. We were neighbors more than thirty years. Her husband died about eighteen months ago and her daughter wanted her to come live near her in Atlanta. Carrie wasn’t exactly sure about making it permanent, so she rented the house to his cousin and put her best pieces of furniture in storage while she looked for an apartment. But then, before she could find one, she fell and broke her hip and bless her heart, she never came home from the hospital.”

“What about her daughter?”

“Janice? Yes, she came up last month to put the house on the market and get Carrie’s things, but that shiftless cousin that was supposed to forward her mail never passed on the letter from the storage place that she was behind on her rent, so they sold everything at auction. Janice was mad as fire over that, but it was all legal. Nothing she could do about it. She did go find the high bidder and bought back some of the pieces.”

“Do you have an address or phone number for her?” Richards asked.

“Oh yes.” A telephone and a large businesslike Rolodex stood on the table beside her chair. Mrs. Collins spun the round knob until she found the card she wanted. “Janice Radakovich. She’s a civil engineer with the highway department down there in Georgia. Builds roads and bridges. Isn’t that wonderful? You young women today!”