Charlaine Harris - A Bone To Pick

I’d had my fill of my inheritance for one day. Just as I locked the front door, I heard footsteps rustling through the grass and turned to see a barrel-chested man of about forty-five coming from the house to my left.

“Hi,” he said quickly. “You’re our new neighbor, I take it.”

“You must be Torrance Rideout. Thanks for taking such good care of the lawn.”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to ask about.” Close up, Torrance Rideout looked like a man who’d once been handsome and still wasn’t without the old sex appeal. His hair was muddy brown and only a few flecks of gray, and he looked like his beard would be heavy enough to shave twice a day. He had a craggy face, brown eyes surrounded by what I thought of as sun wrinkles, a dark tan, and he was wearing a green golf shirt and navy shorts. “My wife, Marcia, and I were real sorry about Jane. She was a real good neighbor and we were sure sorry about her passing.”

I didn’t feel like I was the right person to accept condolences, but I wasn’t about to explain I’d inherited Jane’s house not because we were the best of friends but because Jane wanted someone who could remember her for a good long while. So I just nodded, and hoped that would do.

Torrance Rideout seemed to accept that. “Well, I’ve been mowing the yard, and I was wondering if you wanted me to do it one more week until you get your own yardman or mow it yourself, or just whatever you want to do. I’ll be glad to do it.”

“You’ve already been to so much trouble…”

“Nope, no trouble. I told Jane when she went in the hospital not to worry about the yard, I’d take care of it. I’ve got a riding mower, I just ride it on over when I do my yard, and there ain’t that much weed eating to do, just around a couple of flower beds. I did get Jane’s mower out to do the tight places the riding mower can’t get. But what I did want to tell you, someone dug a little in the backyard.”

We’d walked over to my car while Torrance talked, and I’d pulled out my keys. Now I stopped with my fingers on the car door handle. “Dug up the backyard?” I echoed incredulously. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so surprising. I thought about it for a moment. Okay, something that could be kept in a bole in the ground as well as hidden in a house.

“I filled the holes back in,” Torrance went on, “and Marcia’s been keeping a special lookout since she’s home during the day.”

I told Torrance someone had entered the house, and he expressed the expected astonishment and disgust. He hadn’t seen the broken window when he’d last mowed the backyard two days before, he told me.

“I do thank you,” I said again. “You’ve done so much.”

“No, no,” he protested quickly. “We were kind of wondering if you were going to put the house on the market, or live in it yourself…Jane was our neighbor for so long, we kind of worry about breaking in a new one!”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” I said, and left it at that, which seemed to stump Torrance Rideout.

“Well, see, we rent out that room over our garage,” he explained, “and we have for a good long while. This area is not exactly zoned for rental units, but Jane never minded and our neighbor on the other side, Macon Turner, runs the paper, you know him? Macon never has cared. But new people in Jane’s house, well, we didn’t know…”

“I’ll tell you the minute I make up my mind,” I said in as agreeable a way as I could.

“Well, well. We appreciate it, and if you need anything, just come ask me or Marcia. I’m out of town off and on most weeks, selling office supplies believe it or not, but then I’m home every weekend and some afternoons, and, like I said, Marcia’s home and she’d love to help if she could.”

“Thank you for offering,” I said. “And I’m sure I’ll be talking to you soon. Thanks for all you’ve done with the yard.”

And finally I got to leave. I stopped at Burger King for lunch, regretting that I hadn’t grabbed one of Jane’s books to read while I ate. But I had plenty to think about: the emptied closets, the holes in the backyard, the hint Bubba Sewell had given me that Jane had left me a problem to solve. The sheer physical task of clearing the house of what I didn’t want, and then the decision about what to do with the house itself. At least all these thoughts were preferable to thinking of myself yet again as the jilted lover, brooding over the upcoming Smith baby… feeling somehow cheated by Lynn’s pregnancy. It was much nicer to have decisions within my power to make, instead of having them made for me.

Now! I told myself briskly, to ward off the melancholy, as I dumped my cup and wrapper in the trash bin and left the restaurant. Now to work, then home, then out on a real date, and tomorrow get out early in the morning to find those boxes!

I should have remembered that my plans seldom work out.

Work that afternoon more or less drifted by. I was on the checkout/check-in desk for three hours, making idle conversation with the patrons. I knew most of them by name, and had known them all my life. I could have made their day by telling each and every one of them, including my fellow librarians, about my good fortune, but somehow it seemed immodest. And it wasn’t like my mother had died, which would have been an understandable transfer of fortune. Jane’s legacy, which was beginning to make me (almost) more anxious than glad, was so inexplicable that it embarrassed me to talk about it. Everyone would find out about it sooner or later…mentioning it now would be much more understandable than keeping silent. The other librarians were talking about Jane anyway; she had substituted here after her retirement from the school system and had been a great reader for years. I’d seen several of my co-workers at the funeral.

But I couldn’t think of any casual way to drop Jane’s legacy into the conversation. I could already picture the eyebrows flying up, the looks that would pass when my back was turned. In ways not yet realized, Jane had made my life much easier. In ways I was just beginning to perceive, Jane had made my life extremely complicated. I decided, in the end, just to keep my mouth shut and take what the local gossip mill had to dish out.

Lillian Schmidt almost shook my resolution when she observed that she’d seen Bubba Sewell, the lawyer, call to me at the cemetery.

“What did he want?” Lillian asked directly, as she pulled the front of her blouse together to make the gap between the buttons temporarily disappear.

I just smiled.

“Oh! Well, he is single- now -but you know Bubba’s been married twice,” she told me with relish. The buttons were already straining again.

“Who to?” I asked ungrammatically, to steer her off my own conversation with the lawyer.

“First to Carey Osland. I don’t know if you know her, she lives right by Jane… you remember what happened to Carey later on, her second husband? Mike Osland? Went out for diapers one night right after Carey’d had that little girl, and never came back? Carey had them search everywhere for that man, she just could not believe he would walk out on her like that, but he must have.”

“But before Mike Osland, Carey was married to Bubba Sewell?”

“Oh, right. Yes, for a little while, no children. Then after a year, Bubba married some girl from Atlanta, her daddy was some big lawyer, everyone thought it would be a good thing for his career.” Lillian did not bother to remember the name since the girl was not a Lawrenceton native and the marriage had not lasted. “But that didn’t work out, she cheated on him.”

I made vague regretful noises so that Lillian would continue.

“Then-hope you enjoy these, Miz Darwell, have a nice day-he started dating your friend Lizanne Buckley.”