Mother's Day, Muffins, and Murder

by Sara Rosett

  Now that I thought about it, that was rather strange. There is something about looking through a person’s possessions that is very intimate. By the end of most organizing consultations, I usually knew quite a bit about the person. Analyzing clutter typically led to at least brief mentions of family members and situations. I often knew a potential client’s background and life situation—kid going off to college, or death of a relative who had left them furniture or boxes to shift through, or even mundane things like the hobbies and interests—because it was often stuff related to those very things that the client wanted help with.

  One husband had called me hoping I could settle a dispute between him and his wife about how they should use an extra bedroom. He wanted to store his vintage record collection there. She wanted to turn it into a darkroom for her hobby of taking pictures with vintage cameras and developing the film herself. Those were details that I normally wouldn’t have known about near strangers. But Klea hadn’t been chatty or forthcoming, I realized, now that I thought about it.

  “And that seems odd to you?” Detective Waraday said as he took out a key ring and unlocked a dead bolt on the front door.

  “At the time, I didn’t notice it, but it does now, since I’ve thought about it. Most people chat and tell me about their life. And seeing their belongings, well, you always learn things about people from their stuff.”

  “And what did you learn about Mrs. Burris from your appointment?” Detective Waraday switched to another key and unlocked a second dead bolt.

  “Hardly anything,” I said slowly. “She said she’d bought the house about a month ago and had too much stuff. She was downsizing.” I thought back over the meeting, then shook my head. “No, I think that was it. That was all she said about herself.”

  He nodded. “From what I’ve found out about her, that was typical. She was a loner. Didn’t have any kids. Her parents were both dead. A relative—a sister—lives in Missouri, but she didn’t keep in close touch with her.”

  “What about friends?” I asked, thinking of Vaughn saying that Klea kept to herself.

  “I can’t find anyone she kept in touch with regularly. Except for her work, she didn’t have contact with many people.”

  “That’s so sad,” I said, wishing that I had taken the time to talk to her and gotten to know her a little bit.

  “Some people don’t want lots of social interaction.” Detective Waraday pushed the door open and stepped inside. I followed him in, and he closed the door behind me, but didn’t flip the dead bolts. The air was stale and muggy in the little house. The blinds were drawn, and with the heavy shade from the tree outside, it was so dark inside the house that it almost felt like night.

  Waraday opened the curtains in the front room and crossed to a floor lamp, which he switched on. The front door opened directly into a living area, which was so filled with boxes that I could only see a couple of inches of the golden oak floorboards. A bit of breathing room had been carved out for a couch, a coffee table, and an older television at one end of the room.

  “Look around,” Waraday said as he moved into the dining room directly behind the living area and turned on more lights. As he went into the kitchen at the back of the house, he called out, “Tell me what’s changed.”

  I felt a bit like I was looking at one of those Find the Hidden Item books that the kids liked so much as I scanned the room. “Not much in here . . . I think,” I said. I remembered the room being filled with boxes. I reached for my phone. It had been a while since I’d been there and I couldn’t remember exactly what was in each room, but—like Gabrielle—I often took pictures of rooms to help me jog my memory.

  I found the pictures I’d taken of Klea’s front room and compared them to the room as it was now. “She opened some boxes that were stacked here by the wall,” I said to Waraday as he came back into the room. I showed him my phone. “Look, you can see the fireplace now, and it was totally blocked by boxes when I was here.”

  Detective Waraday nodded. “I’d like a copy of those.” He handed me a business card. “You can text them to this number.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I would have mentioned them yesterday, but I didn’t think about them—that you might be interested in them.” I tapped on my phone as I spoke, sending the images. “I only have this room and a few pictures of the spare bedroom.”

  “Anything will be helpful.” Detective Waraday’s phone dinged, and as he checked it, he pulled at the collar of his polo shirt. “Got them. Thanks. It’s stuffy in here. Let me see if there’s central air.” He walked off down the hall. A low rumble sounded, and he came back with a shake of the head. “Just window coolers. I turned one on, but I doubt it will do much good out here.”

  “Yeah, I love the architecture of these homes—they have plenty of charm—but I don’t think I could get by without air-conditioning here in Georgia.”

  Mitch and I had lived in what we’d come to think of as our antique starter home during his last assignment in Washington state. We hadn’t had air-conditioning there. It had been bearable, but only because the summers were so short. I looked toward the window at the front of the house, thinking of all the times I’d opened windows in Washington and set up fans in an effort to get a cross breeze. Except for the windows with the AC units, Klea’s windows were painted shut, and in addition to the old sash locks that had been painted over, all the windows had an extra set of what looked to be brand-new bolt locks. Not a speck of paint marred their shiny silver surface, unlike the rest of the windowsills, which had thick coats of paint on them.

  I moved into the dining room. A large cabinet stocked with antique china and a dining room table with eight chairs filled the small space. “She did a lot of work in here. There were boxes stacked all along that wall, but they’re gone now. The table looks . . . about the same,” I said.

  Klea had been using the dining room table, a huge rectangle of dark wood that was too big for the room, as a desk when I’d come through for the appointment. I remembered that her laptop had been at the head of the table, with piles of papers, folders, notepads, and bank boxes arranged around it. The paper stacks and the boxes remained, but the laptop was gone now. The police had probably taken it to examine it.

  “Can I look in the boxes?” I asked.

  Detective Waraday waved his hand. “Go ahead. We’ve already fingerprinted everything and removed what looked significant.”

  I peered in a few of the bank boxes, which had their lids off. They contained old bills and file folders of tax returns from prior years. “There were boxes on the table that day I was here. Klea and I talked about going through them, throwing away old paperwork, and setting up a filing cabinet to store the records she needed to keep. I recommended using the extra bedroom into an office.”

  I picked up a lid from the seat of a nearby dining room chair and replaced it. I could only suppress my instincts to tidy things for so long. Klea must have used the box lid as a notepad because it had scribbles all over it. The word “dentist,” along with a time and next Tuesday’s date, filled one corner.

  I ran my finger over the indentations the pen had made in the cardboard, thinking how sad it was that her life had been cut off so abruptly and how fragile all our connections were. Klea had been moving through her days, planning for next week and next month with no idea that everything would end so abruptly. I let my finger trail over another jotted note for her to buy a shredder, which had been checked off; then I paused at a list of names.

  “What is it?” Detective Waraday asked.

  “This list of names. I know the first person, Mrs. Harris, and the last four, Ms. McCormick, Mrs. Kirk, Peg, and Marie—they all work at the school—but I don’t know who Alexa Wells is.” Her name was second on the list and bracketed in parentheses. A question mark was written to the side of the names. Did Klea have some question about the whole list or one person in particular? Or was it only a doodle, something she had randomly written while waiting on hold when she was on the
phone? “I wonder why one name is set off from the others in parentheses? Maybe she’s a new teacher, and I just don’t know her.”

  “Or maybe a parent,” Waraday said, looking over my shoulder. “It’s probably nothing.” He seemed more interested in a phone number jotted down across one corner and made a note of it.

  After checking some of the papers on the table and the contents of some of the boxes, I said, “It looks like she was working her way through the boxes, sorting which things to keep and which to get rid of.” I pointed to the different stacks on the table. A paper shredder sat by the table, its bin full of confetti.

  I stepped away from the table, and Detective Waraday gestured for me to go ahead of him through the kitchen door. “Klea said she didn’t like to cook and didn’t need any help with organizing or de-cluttering the kitchen so I didn’t even go in here—”

  I glanced into the tiny galley kitchen, which was old-fashioned and decorated in lime green, but what caught my attention was a piece of wood in the window over the sink, where a pane of glass should have been. “But I would have noticed if that window was broken. It wasn’t like that.”

  A faint smile crossed Detective Waraday’s face. “That’s another reason I asked you to look around. We found the window broken when we checked the house yesterday. It must have happened Thursday, after she was killed. I doubt she would have gone off to work without putting something in the window or making a call on her cell phone or a search on her computer for glass repair. Someone’s been in here. It looks as if they tried the back door, but couldn’t get in that way—there are scrapes and scratches around the frame—but these old houses are pretty solid.”

  I studied the back door, which opened onto the carport and driveway, for a second. It looked as if it was more than the craftsmanship of the home that had kept the intruder out. Like the front door, the back door also had two thick dead bolts.

  Someone had swept up the big pieces of the glass from the counter and sink, but tiny shards speckled the Formica. Two partial prints from the sole of a shoe marred the clean surface of the white sink. The treads were bumpy and patterned like the sole of a tennis shoe.

  “They only came in for a look around, it seems,” Detective Waraday said. “No fingerprints, nothing identifiable, except those shoe prints. The only thing I can figure is that someone wanted something from this house.” Waraday put his hands on his hips and looked back toward the living room. “The question is, what? Nothing obvious is missing—no jewelry, no valuable electronics—the laptop was still here—and the neighbors didn’t notice anyone coming or going. I thought you might be able to tell us more about Mrs. Burris’s possessions. Did she mention any sort of collection or anything valuable at all?”

  “No. Nothing like that came up.” I heard a faint ringing, and recognized the school bell. I checked the time, but saw it wasn’t the last bell of the day. I still had some time before I had to get back to pick up the kids. I wasn’t surprised that you could hear the school bells from inside Klea’s house. Since she was right across the street, she probably got so used to them that she just tuned them out.

  Detective Waraday didn’t seem to notice the school bell and went on. “It was a long shot. She didn’t seem the type of woman to own jewelry or valuable decorative things. Why don’t you take a look in the bedrooms?”

  “Okay,” I said, doubtfully. “But I was only in those rooms for a few minutes.” Now that I knew why I was here, I felt overwhelmed. It had been weeks since I was in this house, and I hadn’t been looking at and memorizing each individual thing. I’d focused on the big picture, the clutter, and tried to figure out how to help Klea get it under control. I retraced my steps through the dining room and the living room, and down the short hallway that branched off the living room to the two bedrooms.

  The first bedroom was Klea’s. The window unit was pumping out cool air. I shivered as I walked into the room, but it wasn’t because of the temperature. A pair of flats was discarded in front of the closet, and a jumble of earrings, lipstick, and a phone-charging cord covered the dresser. It looked as if Klea had stepped out and would be back at any moment.

  I swallowed and moved to the closet. “Nothing’s changed in here that I can see. Klea showed it to me so I could see how much storage she had in this room and the other room, but I told her she was better off using this for clothes and converting the extra bedroom to an office with storage in there.” As I glanced around the room a final time, I noticed that in addition to the regular sash locks, each window had shiny new metal locks.

  Detective Waraday nodded and stepped back from the doorway, where he was waiting. I moved by him to the last room. It was still a mishmash of extraneous stuff that Klea hadn’t known where to put: packing boxes, unhung pictures, a coat rack, folded lawn chairs, and a treadmill filled the room. I looked from the pictures on my phone to the room and sighed. “I don’t think anything’s changed in here, but I’m not sure at all. I measured the room and tried to help Klea imagine what it would look like without all the clutter.” After a quick survey of the room, my gaze stopped at the window. It, too, had the new, extra locks installed.

  Detective Waraday noticed what I was looking at. “Security seemed to be a high priority for her,” he said.

  “Yes. Now that I think about it, I do remember that it was a nice day—unusually cool—when I was here, and I said something about how it was pleasant enough that I’d opened some windows at my house to enjoy the cool air. She said she never did that, and when I came inside, she locked both dead bolts on the front door. At the time, I thought it was a bit strange. The multiple locks seemed like something out of a television show—you know, something you’d see on a show set in a rough, downtown area, but I didn’t think about it again until now,” I said as I followed Detective Waraday back down the hall to the living room.

  “Did she have a security system, too?” I asked.

  “No.” His gaze went from lock to lock on the windows in the front room. “It looks as if she wanted one—there was a search on her computer for home security companies—but I think she probably couldn’t afford to have one installed. Her finances were . . . um, tight after purchasing the house.”

  “I know that feeling,” I said, thinking of all the unexpected expenses that pop up after buying a house.

  “It looks like the locks were her cost-effective alternative to installing a whole house-monitoring system,” Detective Waraday said. “So nothing stands out to you?”

  “Except for the locks?” I frowned and looked around the small rooms with their thick trim, coved ceilings, and freshly painted white walls. “No. The only thing I’m sure of is that some boxes in here and in the dining room are gone.”

  Detective Waraday said, “I doubt the person who broke in here did it to steal cardboard boxes, but I’ll check. There is a stack of flattened cardboard boxes in the carport—probably boxes that Mrs. Burris had gone through, as you indicated. I’ll have my team compare your pictures to the boxes out there. I have a feeling that they’ll be a match. Well, thank you for taking a look, Mrs. Avery,” he said as he walked me to the door. “I won’t keep you any longer. I have to turn everything off and lock up, but you don’t need to stay.”

  He thanked me again for my help, which was a rather odd thing for me—I was used to Detective Waraday warning me off or even accusing me, not thanking me. I walked down the street and back to the school parking lot, wondering why Klea had needed so many locks.

  * * *

  Despite being packed with activities, the weekend was uneventful. Soccer games for Livvy on Saturday took up most of the day, and Sunday, after church, we had a birthday party for one of Nathan’s friends, which left enough time to run home and prep lunches, wash clothes, do the bath and bedtime routine. Then I called the parents who had signed up to bring food on Monday for Teacher Appreciation Week and remind them of their commitment to bring a breakfast-type food. The rest of the week was planned, and each day had a menu. Tuesday was
snacks and desserts, Wednesday was catered sub rolls for lunch, Thursday was breakfast again, and then on Friday we had a catered barbecue buffet scheduled for lunch.

  Another mom, Mia, and I had coordinated the whole thing, but her twins had gotten into poison ivy. She’d said, “My life is all about calamine lotion and oatmeal baths. Can you handle this week on your own? They’re both very sensitive to it and taking prescriptions to help, but the doctor says it could be a week before we’re back to normal.”

  I told her not to worry, that the hard part—getting parents to sign up to bring food or donate money—was done. All I had to do was make reminder calls and make sure the food was put out and later cleared away each day. It would actually be a great way to unobtrusively check in at the school every day.

  With the kids in bed, I settled into my favorite overstuffed chair for some downtime. Rex was sprawled on the floor, snoring so loudly that I wondered if he’d keep the kids awake. I had the television on more for company than because I was interested in the sitcom rerun. Without Mitch around, the house always seemed a little empty, so I liked the low murmur of the television show in the background.

  I read the first chapter of the novel for the book club, which the back cover described as “hauntingly evocative and moving,” but I couldn’t get into it, so I put it aside. I’d try it again later when I wasn’t so . . . what? Edgy. Despite being tired from doing the parenting thing solo for several days, I felt twitchy and unsettled. I knew it was Klea’s death and the questions around it that had me feeling off. This was the first time I’d slowed down all weekend, and of course my mind went directly to Klea.

  I thought of her stuffy, deserted house and its abandoned air. I shifted in the chair, reaching for the list of parents who had signed up to bring food this week for Teacher Appreciation. I scanned down the list of names. The unfamiliar name of Alexa Wells tugged at me. I didn’t remember seeing that name on the list, but I had been more focused on getting the calls made than concentrating on names. I ran my finger down the lists for each day of the week, but there was no Alexa Wells.