“My age.”
“She’s too young for her parents to have passed on.”
“Right,” Anne said, though she wasn’t thinking that clearly. Maybe she was exhausted. Or maybe she just had no idea how families kept in touch with each other. She’d never gotten a birthday card from her mother. She wouldn’t know her father if she ran him over with a car. She followed Bennie through the living room to the back of the house.
The layout was similar to Anne’s, a combination dining room and kitchen fashioned from one room, and she could tell at a glance that it would reveal little, if anything, about Willa’s family. Sketches blanketed the white walls here, too, and the oak table was bare except for a bouquet of dried flowers. The kitchen was perfectly clean, with Kenmore appliances that landlords always installed. The remarkable centerpiece of the room was a beautiful, cinnabar-red spice rack that had been mounted above the stove.
She stepped over to it, reading the hand-lettered names on the spice jars, which were so exotic she’d never heard of them, much less cooked with them: cumin, cardamom, turmeric. Willa must have been a wonderful, creative cook. Anne felt a terrible twinge, stepping into a life that was lost because of her.
“Maybe she has an office upstairs,” Bennie said, turning away. “There has to be a place she paid her bills. We’ll have better luck there.” She left the room, and Anne followed her numbly. Bennie turned on a light over the stairwell and led the way upstairs. Sketches served as wallpaper all the way to the second floor, and Anne marveled at the hours it must have taken to draw all of the scenes.
At the top of the stair was a tiny bathroom that they skipped in favor of the bedroom, another completely unconventional room. A wall that would have typically existed between two bedrooms had evidently been taken out, leaving an L-shaped bedroom-studio. Sketches covered the wall, their subjects similar to the ones downstairs, but much larger here, as if this were the second floor of an exclusive gallery, reserved for private customers.
A pine double bed, whose canopy top had been draped with long, white sashes of silk, sat at an unusual angle against the front windows. Beside it was a plain white IKEA-type dresser and desk, covered with papers in neat stacks. Bennie made a beeline for the desk and when she reached it, turned on a black halogen lamp. Anne went over after her.
“No computer, that’s unusual,” Bennie said, but somehow it seemed to Anne like speaking ill, so she didn’t say anything. “Here’s her bills.” Bennie thumbed through a pile of envelopes as Anne watched. Visa, Philadelphia Electric, and Verizon; Bennie pulled out the Verizon bill, which was already open, and reached inside. “The phone bill. It’ll have a record of her calls. Maybe we can find her family that way. She has to call them, even if they’re not on speed dial.” Bennie slid out the bill, flashing the familiar sky-blue, and they both skimmed the listings.
“Almost nothing beyond the basic charges,” Anne said, recognizing it. The bill could have been a duplicate of Anne’s own; they were even on the same billing plan. “She’s on the plan where you pay by the call. It makes sense if you don’t make a lot of calls.”
But Bennie was already casting around for a telephone. “No phone up here. Jesus!” She slid her cell phone from her pocket, and flipped it open, and called the first number on the bill, which was local. She listened on the line, then hung up. “Taws, the art store, and they’re closed. Read me the next number.” Anne read it off, and Bennie called it on the cell, then listened. “The Philadelphia Horticultural Center, also closed. Wonder why she called them?”
“To sketch it?” Anne guessed, but Bennie was on a tear.
“Try the next.” Bennie called the number as soon as Anne read it off, listened, then flipped the phone closed. “Fresh Fields. Gourmet foods. Shit!” She skimmed the rest of the bill and tossed it aside. “None of the calls are long-distance, to family.”
Anne’s gaze fell on a stack of correspondence on the desktop. Maybe there’d be a letter from Willa’s parents. Obviously, Willa wasn’t a computer jock. Maybe she grew up in a family of artists. Anne picked up the topmost letter, but it had a letterhead from Mether Galleries in Center City. It was dated last week, and she skimmed it:
Anne mulled it over. Mether Galleries was one of the fanciest in the city. Why didn’t Willa want to show her wonderful drawings there? If she had a trust fund, she didn’t need the money. But still. Why hide all this talent under a basket?
“No luck on the other bills,” Bennie said, opening the top file-drawer of the desk. “You finding anything?”
“Not yet.” Anne reached for the next letter in the stack. It was an earlier letter from Mether, and there were two others underneath it from galleries in SoHo. She glanced through the letters, but they were like the ones from Mether Gallery. Why hadn’t Willa at least responded? “All these galleries want her art, but she won’t sell it. From the looks of it, she doesn’t even call them back.”
“Nothing here.” Bennie had opened the upper file-drawer of the desk and was rooting through a stack of correspondence and papers, narrating as she went along. “No family pictures or anything. No birthday cards. Just receipts from Taws and some from Anthropologie. She doesn’t buy much at all. Here’s a transcript from Moore College of Art.” Bennie frowned as she read. “She was doing well, then there’s no courses listed after the first semester. Too bad. She must have dropped out.” Bennie set it down and opened the lower drawer, filled with manila folders. “Now this looks promising.”
“What?” Anne replaced the gallery correspondence.
“Taxes, old check registers, and stuff.” Bennie dug to the bottom of the drawer. “Here’s a copy of her lease, and there’s other legal papers.”
“She mentioned a trust fund.” Anne watched Bennie pull out a sheaf of papers and read through them, her mouth tightening like a rubber band. Anne got a bad feeling. “What’s the matter?”
“She had an inheritance. Willa’s family was evidently from Holland, Michigan, and her parents died there, two years ago. This is their will. It was probated there.”
“No. Really?” Anne felt so sad, for Willa. About Willa. She held out her hand for the papers, and Bennie passed them over without a word. They were so cold and white, the paper stiff and unusually thick, folded in thirds. She skipped the boilerplate to the bequest, to see if Willa had any siblings. But the bequest referred only to “our daughter, Willa.” Willa was an only child, and, with the death of her parents, alone in the world. Anne felt her eyes welling up, and bit her lip, but Bennie was already leafing through another set of stapled papers.
“It looks like the parents had an auto accident, from the executor’s report. Extensive hospital bills were paid by the estate, for both of them. They died within a week of the accident.” Bennie folded up the papers, then dug for more in the folders. “That’s tough, on a girl so young. She must have come here to go to Moore, then her parents were killed and she dropped out. What a shame.”
Anne wiped her eyes when Bennie bent over, rummaging in the drawer. She didn’t want to explain her feelings to Bennie. She couldn’t explain them to herself.
“It was a large estate, almost a million dollars. It’s held in trust, wisely invested. I should give the trustee a call, at some point.” Bennie was reading from something that looked like financial schedules. “If Willa lived carefully, as she obviously did, she’d be set for the rest of her life. That’s why she didn’t sell the drawings. She didn’t have to.”
“Oh, well.” Bennie returned the documents to the drawer and closed it. “I guess, at this point, I’m fairly convinced that nobody wanted to kill Willa Hansen. Given what we learned today and tonight, I think Kevin is the murderer and you the intended victim. I was wrong. Sorry about that, Murphy. You were right.”
