There was a check in the stack.
There always is, she’d written.
There always is.
PART 4
Bradley Higgins arrived on Thursday.
Not for the fun*ral — the fun*ral was Saturday — on Thursday, with a real-estate agent in the car.
I watched from my window as he walked up to his mother’s house with the agent, and tried the door, and found it locked, and stood there with his hands on his hips looking at the front of a house he hadn’t been inside in nine years.
Then he saw me at the window.
He came across the lawn — the lawn I’d cut, which was still short, which was the last favor anyone did for his mother — and he knocked on my door.
I opened it because I’ve never in my life been able to not open a door.
“You’re the neighbor.”
“I’m Wren.”
“You have keys to my mother’s house.”
“I do.”
“Give them to me.”
And I said the only sentence I could think of, which came out steadier than I expected.
“Mr. Higgins, your mother’s attorney is Mr. Sandoval on Third Street. He’s expecting you. I’m very sorry about your mom.”
“You’re sorry.” He laughed — one flat sound, no humor in it. “Do you have any idea what that house is worth? Do you know what she did?”
“I know exactly what she did.”
“She was eighty-two years old and confused and some pregnant girl next door—”
“She walked into the sheriff’s office by herself on Tuesday afternoon,” I said. “In ninety-five degrees. She had a notary at her kitchen table at three-fifteen. She signed every page in front of two witnesses and her attorney, and the sheriff has a statement from her, and I have a six-page letter in her handwriting that explains her reasoning in a level of detail that I think is going to be very difficult for anyone to call confused.”
He stared at me.
“What does it say?”
And that’s where I made my decision — the one thing in this whole story that was entirely mine.
“It says she had one son,” I told him. “And that the last thing you asked her, standing next to your father’s gr*ve in March, was what the house was worth.”
His face changed.
Not anger.
Something under it, that had been waiting a long time to be said out loud.
