need to be well-informed-fidgeted with my makeup, ate a banana, and scrubbed the kitchen sink, and then finally it was time to go.
I couldn’t figure out why I was so excited. The money wasn’t going to be piled in the middle of the floor. I’d have to wait roughly two months to actually be able to spend it, Sewell had said. I’d been in Jane’s little house before, and there was nothing so special about it.
Of course, now I owned it. I’d never owned something that big before.
I was independent of my mother, too. I could’ve made it by myself on my librarian’s salary, though it would have been hard, but having the resident manager’s job and therefore a free place to live and a little extra salary had certainly made a big difference.
I’d woken several times during the night and thought about living in Jane’s house. My house. Or after probate I could sell it and buy elsewhere.
That morning, starting up my car to drive to Honor Street, the world was so full of possibilities it was just plain terrifying, in a happy roller-coaster way.
Jane’s house was in one of the older residential neighborhoods. The streets were named for virtues. One reached Honor by way of Faith. Honor was a dead end, and Jane’s house was the second from the corner on the right side. The houses in this neighborhood tended to be small-two or three bedrooms-with meticulously kept little yards dominated by large trees circled with flower beds. Jane’s front yard was half filled by a live oak on the right side that shaded the bay window in the living room. The driveway ran in on the left, and there was a deep single- car carport attached to the house. A door in the rear of the carport told me there was some kind of storage room there. The kitchen door opened onto the carport, or you could (as I’d done as a visitor) park in the driveway and take the curving sidewalk to the front door. The house was white, like all the others on the street, and there were azalea bushes planted all around the foundation; it would be lovely in spring.
The marigolds Jane had planted around her mailbox had died from lack of water, I saw as I got out of the car. Somehow that little detail sobered me up completely. The hands that had planted those withered yellow flowers were now six feet underground and idle forever.
I was a bit early, so I took the time to look around at my new neighborhood. The corner house, to the right of Jane’s as I faced it, had beautiful big climbing rosebushes round the front porch. The one to the left had had a lot added on, so that the original simple lines of the house were obscured. It had been bricked in, a garage with an apartment on top had been connected to the house by a roofed walk, a deck had been tacked on the back. The result was not happy. The last house on the street was next to that, and I remembered that the newspaper editor, Macon Turner, who had once dated my mother, lived there. The house directly across the street from Jane’s, a pretty little house with canary yellow shutters, had a realtor’s sign up with a big red SOLD slapped across it. The corner house on that side of the street was the one Melanie Clark, another member of the defunct Real Murders club, had rented for a while: now a Big Wheel parked in the driveway indicated children on the premises. One house took up the last two lots on that side, a rather dilapidated place with only one tree in a large yard. It sat blankfaced, the yellowing shades pulled down. A wheelchair ramp had been built on.
At this hour on a summer morning, the quiet was peaceful. But, behind the houses on Jane’s side of the street, there was the large parking lot for the junior high school, with the school’s own high fence keeping trash from being pitched in Jane’s yard and students from using it as a shortcut. I was sure there would be more noise during the school year, but now that parking lot sat empty. By and by, a woman from the corner house on the other side of the street started up a lawn mower and that wonderful summer sound made me feel relaxed.
You planned for this, Jane, I thought. You wanted me to go in your house. You know me and you picked me for this.
Bubba Sewell’s BMW pulled up to the curb, and I took a deep breath and walked toward it.
He handed me the keys. My hand closed over them. It felt like a formal investiture. “There’s no problem with you going on and working in this house now, clearing it out or preparing it for sale or whatever you want to do, it belongs to you and no one says different. I’ve advertised for anyone with claims on the estate to come forward, and so far no one has. But of course we can’t spend any of the money,” he admonished me with a wagging finger. “The house bills are still coming to me as executor, and they will until probate is settled.”
This was like being a week away from your birthday when you were six.
“This one,” he said, pointing to one key, “opens the dead bolt on the front door. This one opens the punch lock on the front door. This little one is to Jane’s safe deposit box at Eastern National, there’s a little jewelry and a few papers in it, nothing much.”
I unlocked the door and we stepped in.
“Shit,” said Bubba Sewell in an unlawyerly way.
There was a heap of cushions from the living room chairs thrown around. I could look through the living room into the kitchen and see similar disorder there.
Someone had broken in.
One of the rear windows, the one in the back bedroom, had been broken. It had been a pristine little room with chaste twin beds covered in white chenille. The wallpaper was floral and unobtrusive, and the glass was easy to sweep up on the hardwood floor. The first things I found in my new house were the dustpan and the broom, lying on the floor by the tall broom closet in the kitchen.
“I don’t think anything’s gone,” Sewell said with a good deal of surprise, “but I’ll call the police anyway. These people, they read the obituaries in the paper and go around breaking into the houses that are empty.”
I stood holding a dustpan full of glass. “So why isn’t anything missing?” I asked. “The TV is still in the living room. The clock-radio is still in here, and there’s a microwave in the kitchen.”
“Maybe you’re just plain lucky,” Sewell said, his eyes resting on me thoughtfully. He polished his glasses on a gleaming white handkerchief. “Or maybe the kids were so young that just breaking in was enough thrill. Maybe they got scared halfway through. Who knows.”
“Tell me a few things.” I sat on one of the white beds and he sat down opposite me. The broken window (the storm this morning had soaked the curtains) made the room anything but intimate. I propped the broom against my knee and put the dustpan on the floor. “What happened with this house after Jane died? Who came in here? Who has keys?”
“Jane died in the hospital, of course,” Sewell began. “When she first went in, she still thought she might come home, so she had me hire a maid to come in and clean… empty the garbage, clear the perishables out of the refrigerator, and so on. Jane’s neighbor to the side, Torrance Rideout-you know him?-he offered to keep her yard mowed for her, so he has a key to the tool and storage room, that’s the door at the back of the carport.”
I nodded.
“But that’s the only key he had,” the lawyer said, getting back on target. “Then a few days later, when Jane learned-she wasn’t coming home…”
“I visited her in the hospital, and she never said a word to me,” I murmured.
“She didn’t like to talk about it. What was there to say? she asked me. I think she was right. But anyway… I kept the electricity and gas-the heat is gas, everything else is electric-hooked up, but I came over here and unplugged everything but the freezer-it’s in the toolroom and it has food in it-and I stopped the papers and started having Jane’s mail kept at the post office, then I’d pick it up and take it to her, it wasn’t any trouble to me, my mail goes to the post office, too…”
Sewell had taken care of everything for Jane. Was this the care of a lawyer for a good client or the devotion of a friend?
“So,” he was saying briskly, “the little bitty operating expenses for this house will come out of the estate, but I trust you won’t mind, we kept it at a minimum. You know when you completely turn off the air or beat into a house, the house just seems to go downhill almost immediately, and there was always the slight chance Jane might make it and come home.”
“No, of course I don’t mind paying the electric bill. Do Parnell and Leah have a key?”
“No, Jane was firm about that. Parnell came to me and offered to go through and get Jane’s clothes and things packed away, but of course I told him no.”
“Oh?”
“They’re yours,” he said simply. “Everything”-and he gave that some emphasis, or was it only my
