~ A Bone to Pick ~
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 birth- day 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.
~ 33 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
“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 bed- room, 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 ~ 34 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
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 win- dow (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 be- gan. “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 perish- ables 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.
~ 35 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
“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 devo- tion of a friend?
“So,” he was saying briskly, “the little bitty operat- ing 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 heat 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?”
~ 36 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
“They’re yours,” he said simply. “Everything”— and he gave that some emphasis, or was it only my imagination—“everything in this house is yours. Par- nell and Leah know about their five thousand, and Jane herself handed him the keys to her car two days before she died and let him take it from this carport, but, other than that,
whatever
is in this house”—and suddenly I was alert and very nearly scared—“is yours to deal with however you see fit.”
My eyes narrowed with concentration. What was he saying that he wasn’t really saying? Somewhere, somewhere in this house, lurked a problem. For some reason, Jane’s legacy wasn’t en- tirely benevolent.
After calling the police about the break-in and calling the glass people to come to fix the win- dow, Bubba Sewell took his departure.
“I don’t think the police will even show up here since I couldn’t tell them anything was missing. I’ll stop by the station on my way back to the office, though,” he said on his way out the door. I was relieved to hear that. I’d met most of the lo- cal policemen when I dated Arthur; policemen really stick together. “There’s no point in turning on the air ~ 37 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
conditioner until that back bedroom window is fixed,” Sewell added, “but the thermostat is in the hall, when you need it.”
He was being mighty chary with my money. Now that I was so rich, I could fling open the windows and doors and set the thermostat on forty, if I wanted to do something so foolish and wasteful.
“If you have any problems, run into anything you can’t handle, you just call me,” Sewell said again. He’d expressed that sentiment several times, in several different ways. But just once he had said, “Miss Jane had a high opinion of you, that you could tackle any problem that came your way and make a success of it.”
I got the picture. By now I was so apprehensive, I heartily wanted Sewell to leave. Finally he was out the front door, and I knelt on the window seat in the bay window and partially opened the sectioned blinds sur- rounding it to watch his car pull away. When I was sure he was gone, I opened all the blinds and turned around to survey my new territory. The living room was carpeted, the only room in the house that was, and when Jane had had this done she’d run the carpet right up onto the window seat so that it was seamlessly cov- ered, side, top, and all. There were some hand- embroidered pillows arranged on it, and the effect was ~ 38 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
very pretty. The carpet Jane had been so partial to was a muted rose with a tiny blue pattern, and her liv- ing room furniture (a sofa and two armchairs) picked up that shade of blue, while the lamp shades were white or rose. There was a small color television arranged for easy viewing from Jane’s favorite chair. The antique table beside that chair was still stacked with magazines, a strange assortment that summed up Jane—
Southern
Living
,
Mystery Scene
,
Lear’s
, and a publication from
the church.
The walls of this small room were lined with free- standing shelves overflowing with books. My mouth watered when I looked at them. One thing I knew Jane and I had shared: we loved books, we especially loved mysteries, and more than anything we loved books about real murders. Jane’s collection had al- ways been my envy.
At the rear of the living room was a dining area, with a beautiful table and chairs I believed Jane had in- herited from her mother. I knew nothing about antiques and cared less, but the table and chairs were gleaming under a light coating of dust, and, as I straightened the cushions and pushed the couch back to its place against the wall (why would anyone move a couch when he broke into a house?), I was already worried about car- ing for the set.
~ 39 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
At least all the books hadn’t been thrown on the floor. Straightening this room actually took only a few moments.
I moved into the kitchen. I was avoiding Jane’s bedroom. It could wait.
The kitchen had a large double window that looked onto the backyard, and a tiny table with two chairs was set right in front of the window. Here was where Jane and I had had coffee when I’d visited her, if she hadn’t taken me into the living room. The disorder in the kitchen was just as puzzling. The shallow upper cabinets were fine, had not been touched, but the deeper bottom cabinets had been emptied carelessly. Nothing had been poured out of its container or wantonly vandalized, but the contents had been moved as though the cabinet itself were the object of the search, not possible loot that could be taken away. And the broom closet, tall and thin, had received special attention. I flipped on the kitchen light and stared at the wall in the back of the closet. It was marred with “. . . knife gouges, sure as shoot- ing,” I mumbled. While I stooped to reload the cabi- net shelves with pots and pans, I thought about those gouges. The breaker-in had wanted to see if there was something fake about the back of the closet; that was the only interpretation I could put on the holes. And ~ 40 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
only the large bottom cabinets had been disturbed; only the large pieces of furniture in the living room. So, Miss Genius, he was looking for something large. Okay, “he” could be a woman, but I wasn’t go- ing to the trouble of thinking “he or she.” “He” would do very well for now. What large thing could Jane Engle have concealed in her house that anyone could possibly want enough to break in for? Unan- swerable until I knew more, and I definitely had the feeling I would know more.
I finished picking up the kitchen and returned to the guest bedroom. The only disturbance there, now I’d cleared up the glass, was to the two single closets, which had been opened and emptied. There again, no attempt had been made to destroy or mutilate the items that had been taken from the closets; they’d just been emptied swiftly and thoroughly. Jane had stored her luggage in one closet, and the larger suitcases had been opened. Out-of-season clothes, boxes of pictures and mementos, a portable sewing machine, two boxes of Christmas decorations . . . all things I had to check through and decide on, but for now it was enough to shovel them all back in. As I hung up a heavy coat, I noticed the walls in these closets had been treated the same way as the broom closet in the kitchen. The attic stairs pulled down in the little hall that ~ 41 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
had a bedroom door at each end and the bathroom door in the middle. A broad archway led from this hall back into the living room. This house actually was smaller than my town house by quite a few square feet, I realized. If I moved I would have less room but more independence.
It was going to be hot up in the attic, but it would certainly be much hotter by the afternoon. I gripped the cord and pulled down. I unfolded the stairs and stared at them doubtfully. They didn’t look any too sturdy.
Jane hadn’t liked to use them either, I found, after I’d eased my way up the creaking wooden stairs. There was very little in the attic but dust and dis- turbed insulation; the searcher had been up here, too, and an itchy time he must have had of it. A leftover strip of the living room carpet had been unrolled, a chest had its drawers halfway pulled out. I closed up the attic with some relief and washed my dusty hands and face in the bathroom sink. The bathroom was a good size, with a large linen cabinet below which was a half door that opened onto a wide space suitable for a laundry basket to hold dirty clothes. This half closet had received the same attention as the ones in the kitchen and guest bedroom.
The searcher was trying to find a secret hiding ~ 42 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
place for something that could be put in a drawer but not hidden behind books . . . something that couldn’t be hidden between sheets and towels but could be hidden in a large pot. I tried to imagine Jane hiding— a suitcase full of money? What else? A box of— documents revealing a terrible secret? I opened the top half of the closet to look at Jane’s neatly folded sheets and towels without actually seeing them. I should be grateful those hadn’t been dumped out, too, I mused with half of my brain, since Jane had been a cham- pion folder; the towels were neater than I’d ever get them, and the sheets appeared to have been ironed, something I hadn’t seen since I was a child. Not money or documents; those could have been divided to fit into the spaces that the searcher had ignored.
The doorbell rang, making me jump a foot. It was only the glass repair people, a husband and wife team I’d called when window problems arose at my mother’s apartments. They accepted me being at this address without any questions, and the woman commented when she saw the back window that lots of houses were getting broken into these days, though it had been a rarity when she’d been “a kid.” “Those people coming out from the city,” she told me seriously, raising her heavily penciled eyebrows. ~ 43 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
“Reckon so?” I asked, to establish my goodwill. “Oh sure, honey. They come out here to get away from the city, but they bring their city habits with ’em.”
Lawrenceton loved the commuters’ money without actually trusting or loving the commuters. While they tackled removing the broken glass and replacing it, I went into Jane’s front bedroom. Some- how entering it was easier with someone else in the house. I am not superstitious, at least not consciously, but it seemed to me that Jane’s presence was strongest in her bedroom, and having people busy in another room in the house made my entering her room less . . . personal.
It was a large bedroom, and Jane had a queen-sized four-poster with one bed table, a substantial chest of drawers, and a vanity table with a large mirror com- fortably arranged. In the now-familiar way, the dou- ble closet was open and the contents tossed out simply to get them out of the way. There were built-in shelves on either side of the closet, and the shoes and purses had been swept from these, too.
There’s not much as depressing as someone else’s old shoes, when you have the job of disposing of them. Jane had not cared to put her money into her clothes and personal accessories. I could not ever recall ~ 44 ~