I had no idea what I’d just said, nor did she, but it was enough to make her pull an inch of her bulldog bulk back. Or perhaps she’d merely recognized my superior weight advantage.
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?” she asked.
“About what?”
“About the mess in there,” she said. “I got prospective tenants wanting to rent this place.”
I looked past her, at the empty boxes in the Ford, and knew who’d cleared out the kitchen. It must have been her headlights I’d seen the previous evening. She’d lurked someplace, waiting until I left, then emptied the place of the undamaged canned goods. And who knew what else.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but no one gets in until everything has been inventoried.”
She rolled her eyes. “Inventoried for what?”
“Surely you knew Ms. Thomas was an heir to the great Thomas fortune?” I summoned as straight a face as I could muster.
“The what?” Mrs. Sturrow pressed forward again, suddenly aquiver at the word “fortune.” A foot below my chin, a little gray whisker sprouted from a mole on her cheek.
“Though eccentric, Louise was quite a wealthy woman.” I looked around as if I were making sure no one could hear. “As a court-nominated executor, I can tell you the court will be quite generous to those who have eased our work in this inventory.”
Her small eyes grew wide.
I gestured at the Ford full of empty cartons. “You’ve not taken…?” I made a delicate cough.
“Of course not!”
“No clothes, no personal items, no radio or television?”
She scrunched up her face, trying for indignant, but it only made her look like she was suffering from irregularity.
“As soon as I locate those Krugerrands-little one-ounce gold coins, you know-I can turn over the place to you…” I paused, then added, “Appreciatively.”
She wet her lips. “You mean like a reward?”
“What did she look like, your Louise Thomas?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You mean you don’t know what she looks like?”
“Just verifying we’re talking about the same woman,” I said, as greasy as a griddle cook’s nose.
Mrs. Sturrow pursed her lips. “Can’t quite say. She wore a scarf wrapped around her neck and mouth, even though it was warm that day. She had on a big trench coat, though I had the impression she was skinny.”
“Last May?”
“How much of a reward?”
“What do you remember about Louise’s height, or the color of her eyes?
Mrs. Sturrow’s eyes narrowed further in suspicion.
“In matters of high net worth, especially when there will be substantial rewards for information, it’s vital that I verify each claimant’s information.”
“Five five in height,” she said quickly. “Don’t know about the eyes; she wore sunglasses, even indoors. How big did you say that reward was?”
“Did she pay the rent with a bank check?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Month by month?”
“A year in advance, with utilities.” She shook her head almost mournfully. “When do you pay the reward?”
“As soon as we find the gold.” I expelled the sigh of a true bureaucrat. “Problem is, those little gold coins are so very easy to hide. And like many rich women, Louise was very, very clever. Can you believe I found a can-sealing device? I believe she actually could have hidden the gold in cans of food, if you can imagine. Alas, I’ve not found any sealed canned goods, so I’ll just have to keep searching.”
If she’d had a functioning brain, one not clouded by greed, she would have smelled manure.
“I won’t keep you,” she said, bustling down the two steps. “Take all the time you need.” She strode to the Ford, fired it up, and shot out of the driveway.
I watched her speed away, thinking she’d have all of Louise’s canned goods opened within ten minutes of getting home. Once she realized there was no gold inside, she would eat as much as she could of the filched fruit, rather than let it all go to waste. It was another kind of greed.
“Let us hope her bathroom has wide pipes, Louise,” I said to the porch ceiling.
I began in Louise’s bedroom because there was sun and I didn’t want to be in that room if it turned cloudy. It was her most intimate room, the place where she slept, the place where she was most defenseless. The place, if Reynolds was right, where she was first attacked.
I started by picking up the newspapers. I’d almost filled one garbage bag before I realized I wasn’t picking up whole newspapers, pulled apart, but rather single sheets of different editions, some going back at least a year. All seemed to feature astrological forecasts, crossword puzzles, and advice columns.
Bagging her clothes was quick. What she had would have fit inside one large suitcase, had one been around. Everything was sensible. Her underpants were high and white, her bras serious and small. She had two pairs of black jeans and one pair of khaki slacks, a few knit tops in blacks and beiges, a light fleece jacket, a thick black wool sweater, and a couple of plain sweatshirts, one a faint green, one a faint yellow. Eights and thirty-twos and smalls and petites, the labels from JCPenney and Sears. She’d dressed in dark or muted colors, the frugal Louise, in clothes not meant to be noticed. I put them all in one bag, next to the bag of newspapers.
All that remained in the bedroom now was the old Underwood Number Five, but I wanted nothing to do with that. I carried the two bags to the porch and labeled the clothes with masking tape as donations for the Salvation Army or the Goodwill box. Anonymous clothes from an anonymous woman.
I’d emptied her bedroom, that most intimate room, in less than fifteen minutes. It didn’t seem right, to be able to empty such a room so quickly.
The living room was quick work as well. As in the bedroom, I started with the newspapers. This time I filled two bags with the tabloid-sized sheets. I took them to the porch, then came back in to drop the cushions back onto the sofa, right the red upholstered reading chair, and set the white plastic lamp on the chipped brown end table. Restored, the living room didn’t look much better than when it had been trashed.
In the corner, beneath a fresh-looking nick in the plaster, the pieces of a small green glass ashtray lay on the worn sculpted rug. Mixed in were three cigarette butts and a tablespoon of cigarette ash. I bent to pick up one of the cigarettes. It was a Salem, smoked down to the filter. I dropped it back on the floor for Mrs. Sturrow.
On my way out of the cottage, I grabbed a half dozen newspaper sheets from one of the bags. By now, it was eleven thirty, and I hadn’t had any nutrition since the Wal-Doughnut earlier that morning. I drove to the exposed-brick-and-fern place in West Haven. Again I took a booth against the wall. Again I turned up my nose to the evils of a cheeseburger with French fries, ordering vegetables, though this time I selected a large chicken Caesar salad to accompany the foot of onion rings on a pole.
Five of the newspaper sheets had come from the Southwest Michigan Intelligencer, a shopping advertiser, but one went back over a year and had been pulled from a shopping rag on Windward Island, in Florida. All six contained variations of usual middle-newspaper filler: crossword puzzles, astrology columns, ads for groceries and women’s clothing, some cartoons. All, though, shared one identical item. Each contained an advice column, headlined in capital letters, called “HONESTLY, DEAREST.”
The waitress came then with the salad and the foot of onion rings. I moved the salad out of the way and began eating as I read on.
There was no picture of the advice columnist, nor a name. Each column ran two or three responses to reader letters. “Dear Honestly Dearest,” each began, “I’m a…” Then the letter reported the quandary. The first ones I read were from a fourteen-year-old girl miserable about the breakup with her boyfriend, a midforties man married to a woman who’d lost interest in him sexually, and a twenty-one-year-old woman whose new husband wouldn’t help address the thank-you notes from their wedding.