David Bell - Never Come Back

“A doctor did yesterday,” I said. “He said he was writing up a report for the police.”

“Then there you go. I’d expect you’ll know something pretty soon. If you don’t, then call me and we’ll give the police a little goose.” He punctuated the sentence by jabbing upward into the air with his thumb.

“Thanks,” I said.

“In the meantime, I’ll file the will and get it into probate. As the executrix, you should start going through your mother’s things. Bank records, insurance policies, all of that. Find out what she has to divvy up.”

“Is that all I have to do?” I asked.

“You have to make sure it all ends up in the right hands,” he said. “Meaning you have to find this Elizabeth Yarbrough.”

“Do you have her address?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Your mom didn’t leave it. I figured it was a family member or close friend.”

“What if I don’t find her?” I asked. “She could be anywhere.”

“I suspect she’s nearby,” he said. “It’s a bit of conflict of interest, right? You could say to yourself, ‘Hey, let’s not look for her too hard. More for me.’ Right?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“I’m teasing,” he said. “But some people do think that way. Look, take it from me—if your mother put this woman’s name in the will, then she’s probably expecting something. Someone called here asking about your mother’s will. Don’t you think that’s our mystery woman? I suspect she’ll turn up. Go through your mom’s things. Address book. Computer files. You know this woman lives in Reston Point. If all else fails, I’d open up the phone book.”

I drove away from the lawyer’s office with that name tumbling around in my head. Elizabeth Yarbrough. Something about this woman drove my mother to show up at her lawyer’s office just a month earlier and include her in the will. And Mom did this shortly after I refused to give her the promise about Ronnie’s care that she wanted. Were the two events linked somehow?

I wanted to call Paul. I figured there was a good chance he knew who Elizabeth Yarbrough was. If he didn’t know, I wasn’t sure anybody did. And I suppose I wanted to tell him about the changes to the will, the differences between the one we read at Mom’s house and the one she’d updated with Mr. Allison. More than anything, I wanted to hear the sound of his voice again. I couldn’t even say who needed to apologize to whom. I didn’t care. I just wanted things to be back to normal.

Humility and apology didn’t come easy to me. It should stand as a measure of how much I cared for Paul that I dialed his number. While it rang, my heart thumped.

But the call went straight to his voice mail, my uncle’s polite, Midwestern tone asking me to please leave a message. It made me feel weak to experience relief at the sound of the greeting, but I did. I even considered—briefly—not leaving a message. But the cell phone didn’t allow us to hide from people. He’d still receive a missed-call notification with my name attached to it, so I plowed ahead.

“Hi,” I said. Then I was stuck. Apologize? I shook my head. No , I told myself, just be normal . “I’m driving away from the lawyer’s office. I thought you might want to know some of the things we talked about with the will and everything. So… okay. I’ll talk to you soon.”

I hoped he’d call me back.

My mother once cleaned my room for me when I was seven. Admittedly, I liked messes as a child. I threw my clothes and toys on the floor with no regard for a system. I grew to hate messes as I became a teenager and then an adult, but back then—look out. My bedroom resembled a yard sale. So Mom insisted on cleaning it for me. And I suffered for it, in the way only a kid could suffer. Mom developed a simple system: She picked up a toy or an article of clothing and asked me the last time I had used it or worn it. If it had been more than a year, she put the item in a box. I didn’t catch on fast enough because when we were finished—and the room was clean to Mom’s standards—she took the box to the Salvation Army. I cried to my dad about it that night. He was always the softer of the two, the more tolerant of the emotional torrents of a young girl’s life, and he held me in his lap while I soaked his neck with tears.

But when I was finished, when I had cried it out, he asked me a simple question: “Why are you crying over things you really didn’t want anymore and had probably outgrown?”

He stumped my seven-year-old brain back then, but as I got older the wisdom of what he said sank in. He really wanted me to not let the past control me, to not stop forward progress for the sake of looking back. And Mom taught me that as well. When something outlived its usefulness, she let it go without regret. Without emotion. I had even allowed myself, just for a few moments in the lawyer’s office, to think she might have extended that philosophy to me and cut me out of her will.

But I was foolish to think Mom would ever do that to Ronnie or me. She was a great mother, and she loved both of us far too much.

Mom’s house reflected her streamlined, unadorned philosophy of existence. It was almost six, and the route back to my apartment took me right past Mom’s street. I hadn’t planned on going there, but the thought of looking through some of Mom’s things—and maybe, just maybe, getting a clue as to who Elizabeth Yarbrough was—proved to be too tempting. If Mom changed the will just one month earlier, then it stood to reason there might be recent evidence of interactions with this woman. A phone number. Letters. A gift or a card.

I turned down Mom’s quiet little street and pulled into her driveway. I sat in the car for a moment, contemplating the scene. The police told me I could go back inside if I needed but to not spend a great deal of time in there. They had finished with it as a crime scene but could require access to the house for follow-up at any future point in the investigation. I remembered so many things about that house. Mornings being hustled off to school, the smell of pancakes and bacon in the air. The little swing set in the backyard, which was taken down when Ronnie and I became teenagers. I sneaked out the back door more than once in high school, meeting up with friends in the middle of the night, even though we really didn’t have anything to do.

In the wake of Mom’s death, the house looked, for lack of a better word, dead. The blinds were closed, the flowers on the porch wilting and dying of neglect in the early fall. It wasn’t that my mother kept the most vibrant or ostentatious house—quite the opposite in fact—but without anyone living there, without any life inside, the house seemed noticeably deflated. It reeked of absence.

I didn’t know whether I could will myself to go in. I knew officers had checked the house the day before while I sat with Detective Post, and just sitting there in the driveway, with the sun starting to set and the shadows lengthening, I couldn’t see any sign that anything had been disturbed. It seemed fanciful and even childish to think that some kind of boogeyman waited inside, hiding behind a door or inside a closet, eager to spring out at me and club me over the head. Fanciful and childish except for the fact that a boogeyman had already visited this house and killed my mother. At least I hoped it had been a visitor and not someone who already lived there. Add to that the break-in at my own apartment and it started to seem unwise for me to enter the empty house alone.

But just enough daylight remained. I carried my cell phone with me, ready to call for help at the first sign of trouble. If the doors were still locked, if there were no signs of disturbance, why shouldn’t I go in? I remembered what Dan had said the night before: What would your mom want you to do? She’d want the matter resolved, and she wouldn’t want to have a daughter who was afraid of her own shadow. Besides, she had left the gaping mystery right there in her will, and named me the executor of the whole thing. If she didn’t want me to dig around and investigate after her death, she should have told me herself what was going on.