An Open Book Read Online Free Page A

they’d tell me? Stroke, heart attack—who knows? Of course,
     they didn’t know Edith, and they’re happy to think she was an old lady with dementia
     who took a walk and got lost, and froze to death in a snowdrift, which unfortunately
     does happen. They didn’t seem very worked up about it. I’m supposed to look in the
     house for whatever meds she might have been taking.”
    “Makes sense.”
    Vanessa pulled up in front of Edith’s house and parked on the street. The house was
     a trim bungalow, built in the 1920s, and sat on a small, neatly-tended plot of ground
     studded with big old rhododendrons. In summer it was rich with roses and brightly
     colored annuals. Gardening was one of Edith’s other passions and had also passed as
     exercise, keeping her limber.
    “Looks normal. Path’s been shoveled,” Vanessa noted.
    “I think she hired one of the neighborhood high school kids to do it for her. I can
     ask around, see if whoever it was saw her yesterday when they shoveled.”
    “She didn’t have a car, did she?”
    I shook my head. “She stopped driving a few years ago, I think when she turned eighty.
     She realized her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and besides, she could walk into
     town if she needed anything.”
    “Wish more of our senior citizens thought that way—a lot of them don’t belong behind
     a wheel. You ready?”
    “I am. Did you find her keys?”
    “In her pocket.”
    “No sign of her purse?”
    “Not yet. Keep your eyes peeled for it in the house.”
    I pondered what the absence of her purse might mean as we made our way up the clean
     brick path to the front door. I couldn’t remember seeing her without it, except when
     she was gardening in her yard. If Edith hadn’t taken it with her, she couldn’t have
     expected to go far or spend much time out. Yet she had her keys on her, so she hadn’t
     been dragged out of her house unwillingly. “Have you identified her next of kin?”
    “Nope. Maybe there’ll be some useful information in the house. You know anything about
     any relatives?” Vanessa fitted the key in the lock. There was both a dead bolt and
     a keyed doorknob, I noted, and both were locked. While there was little crime here,
     as a woman living alone, Edith had been careful.
    “She told me once that she was the last of her family. Her husband died a few years
     ago. They never had children. I think she might have had a sister, but she’s gone
     too.”
    Vanessa opened the door, and we both dutifully stomped off what little snow clung
     to our boots on the mat in front of the door before entering. Then we paused to take
     in the space.
    It was a small house, scrupulously neat and clean. We had stepped straight into the
     living room, which had a fireplace in the middle of the end wall. A hallway led off
     to the right, and I could see a kitchen running along the back. A staircase rose along
     the wall to my right. I wondered if Edith had used an upstairs bedroom, or if the
     stairs had proved to be too much for her and her new hip. The furniture I judged to
     come from an earlier generation—her parents’? There were framed prints on the walls,
     and a few photographs on the mantelpiece. The air smelled faintly of lavender. The
     real kind, not the spray kind.
    “Where do we start?” I asked Vanessa.
    “Let’s try the kitchen. We might find out when she last ate.”
    I followed her through the living room into the small kitchen, with a round table
     to the right, and a tall hutch against the wall behind it. The counters were clear,
     and a few clean dishes sat in the drainer next to the sink. Whatever meal it had been,
     Edith—or someone—had tidied up afterwards. “What about the trash? Pickup was yesterday,
     so anything in there would have come after eight o’clock in the morning or so.”
    Vanessa pulled on a pair of latex gloves and handed me a pair. “Be my guest. Use these.”
    “I feel silly,” I said as I put them on. The trash