The young man stayed until Gordon’s casket was covered. He knelt and patted the mound of dirt. Then he got in his Subaru and drove off. I followed him.
He wound through downtown-having the same trouble with the one-way streets that all strangers have-then sped out West Tuckman. At one traffic light I got close enough to see that the Subaru had West Virginia plates. We reached Meriwether Square and then the campus. He took a sudden wide turn onto Sunflower Court, a narrow brick street lined with wonderful old Arts and Crafts bungalows. I did not make the turn. I was afraid the man in the Subaru might rightfully think I was following him. Instead I zigzagged aimlessly through the campus for ten minutes or so. Finally I drove back to Sunflower Court. I stopped one house away from the gray clabbered house Gordon Sweet bought the same year he returned to Hemphill College with his Ph. D. The Subaru was in the driveway. I mustered all the fortitude I could, which didn’t feel like much, and shuffled up the walk to the door.
I only had to knock once.
The young man raked the hair out of his eyes and made sure he was smiling. “Ah,” he said, “the mysterious woman in the Dodge Shadow.”
I made sure there was a smile on my face, too. “You saw me, did you?”
He motioned me inside. “At the cemetery and in my rearview mirror.”
I stuck out my hand. “I’m Maddy Sprowls. I’m an old friend of your-you are Gordon’s nephew, aren’t you? The one from Harper’s Ferry?”
He grimaced. “Yup. Mickey Gitlin.”
With all that hair in his face, and that stubble on his chin, it was hard to tell if Mickey shared many of Gordon’s features. He did have brown eyes like Gordon. And I guess the same nose. But unlike Gordon, who was always a little on the pasty side, Mickey had outdoorsy pink skin.
He led me into the living room. We looked for a good place to sit and decided on the swayback, 1960s-style sofa under the picture window. “I didn’t know the burial was going to be private,” I said. “So I kept my distance. But I did want to express my sympathy to the family.”
The need to explain tightened his face. “I couldn’t make it to the memorial service. And my mother’s not too mobile these days.”
“The obituary said she lives in Florida.”
“Captiva Island. She has MS.”
I bobbed my chin sympathetically. “I knew your uncle since college, but I don’t think I ever met any of his family.”
“There never was much,” he said. “And there’s only Mom and me now.”
I couldn’t exactly ask him if he was Gordon’s heir. But that’s exactly what I wanted to know. “So I guess all the legal stuff has fallen on your shoulders.”
He was surprisingly candid. “It’s all a little weird. I really never knew the man. Saw him a few of times when I was a kid, funerals and things, but that’s about it. Then I get a call that he’s dead and I’ve inherited everything.”
Boy, did I want to know what everything meant. “I guess you’ve got your hands full.”
He chuckled wearily. “What I’ve got is an old house full of junk.”
I found a way to ask him if he had a wife, or children.
“I guess that’s the other thing I inherited from him,” he said. He heard what he’d said and laughed. “I don’t mean his gay gene. I mean his loner gene.”
I assured him I knew what he meant. “So what exactly do you do in Harper’s Ferry?”
“At the moment I’m going broke teaching people how to kayak.”
“The funny little Eskimo boats?”
“Yup. The funny little Eskimo boats.”
I maneuvered the conversation back to Gordon’s estate. “I guess you’ll have to sell the house.”
“It’s a great little house,” he said. “I wished there was some way I could zap it down there-or zap the Potomac River up here.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll have trouble finding a buyer.”
He nodded with his eyebrows arched high and happy. Clearly he figured to make a pretty penny on Gordon’s house. “Getting rid of his stuff is the problem,” he said. “He’s got ten tons of rubble that could be worth a lot or nothing.”
“I wouldn’t give you a dime for this old couch,” I said. “But some of this other stuff looks like it might be worth something.”
“I’m not talking about his furniture. I’m talking about all that stuff from his archeological digs.”
I finagled a tour of the house. It was indeed filled with, well, junk: old bottles and cans and boxes, tools and toys, kitchen gadgets, kitschy wall plaques and dime store paintings. “I suppose you could hold a tag sale.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Mickey said. “But not up here.”
“You’re hauling all this stuff down to Harper’s Ferry?”
“Summer’s coming fast. I’ve got a barn full of kayaks to get ready. And Harper’s Ferry is pretty much the flea market capital of the world.”
“I think the Hannawa Chamber of Commerce would challenge you on that,” I said.
We squeezed into Gordon’s small downstairs office. There were bookshelves on all four walls. “Boy, I bet our old friend Effie would love these for her shop,” I said.
“She’s been bugging me since the funeral,” he said.
“Since the funeral? You were there?”
He shook his head, sourly. “She called me down in Harper’s Ferry. About six times. A very persistent woman.”
“Yes, she is-you’re going to sell them to her?”
“At some point maybe,” he said. “But I’m going to take them back to Harper’s Ferry with everything else. I need to evaluate what I’ve got. Think things through.”
“That’s wise,” I said.
Effie’s eagerness to buy Gordon’s books didn’t surprise me at all. Effie had known Gordon forever. She’d undoubtedly rummaged through his library a thousand times. And she was a businesswoman. Collections like that didn’t come on the market every day.
We snooped around the kitchen then headed down the basement steps. I spread my fingers across my face. “Oh, my!” The basement walls were lined with crudely constructed shelves, all stuffed with junkyard treasure.
“It’ll be a bitch hauling this stuff out of here,” he said. “But it’ll make my creditors happy. One or two of them anyway.”
I circled the basement like a visiting head of state reviewing the troops on the White House lawn. I stopped in front of the shelves next to the furnace. I studied the rows of cocoa cans. I struggled to remember my conversation with Andrew Holloway, and the catchy little question Gordon always asked his students at the dig: “Anything interesting today, boys and girls?” he’d ask. “Old soda pop bottles? Betsy Wetsy Dolls? Perhaps an old cocoa can or two?”
Without appearing too nosy, I scanned the other shelves in the basement for old bottles or dolls. There weren’t any. I motioned for Mickey to join me. “You wouldn’t want to sell me these old cocoa cans, would you?”
He did want to sell them to me. For five dollars a can. There were twenty-two of them.
So I wrote Mickey a check for $110.00 and felt like an absolute fool carrying them out to my car.
I drove away with more than a back seat full of cocoa cans. I also had a brain full of unanswered questions: Did Gordon save those cocoa cans for a reason? Did they have a story to tell?
Was Mickey really surprised to learn that he was Gordon’s heir? And just how far in debt was his kayak business in Harper’s Ferry? Why hadn’t he come to Gordon’s memorial service? Harper’s Ferry isn’t that far from Hannawa. And why did he sneak into town to bury him now? The minute the coroner released his body? Without a minister for a graveside prayer? Without inviting any of Gordon’s friends?
And what was that crack about his not inheriting Gordon’s gay gene?
I drove home for what I planned to be the most boring evening of my life. I was going to eat popcorn and suck on peppermint swirls, and watch six or seven hours of old sitcoms on Nickelodeon, until Gordon’s murder, and David Delarosa’s murder, were no more a bother to me than the dust bunnies under my bed.