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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 blank-faced, 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 park- ing lot sat empty. By and by, a woman from the cor- ner house on the other side of the street started up a lawn mower and that wonderful summer sound made me feel relaxed.
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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.
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    ~ 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 ~
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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