We stacked the dinner plates and moved everything to the sideboard to make room.Dottie disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a peach cobbler she and Deidre had thrown together that afternoon with the peaches from the farmer’s market, the crust golden and the filling still bubbling at the edges.I put on a fresh pot of coffee.
Hank sat up straighter.
“I’ve been smelling that for two hours,” he said.“I was starting to think it was a cruel joke.”
“I know,” Dottie said, and set it in front of him first.
“Any progress on the handkerchief?”Dash asked, wrapping his hands around his coffee cup.
Walt shook his head.“Two boxes left.”
“Well,” Dottie said, once the cobbler was served, “the dishes can wait.”
Walt brought the last two boxes in from the stack along the wall and set them on the table.Dash pulled one toward him and I sat beside him.Dottie and Deidre took the other end.Hank claimed the corner.Bea topped off her wine and stayed where she was.
The first box was quiet accumulation— the stuff that builds up in the corners of a man’s life without him noticing.Medical conference programs going back to 1989, rubber-banded by year.Three pairs of reading glasses, two of them broken.
“He must have sat on them,” Deidre said, examining a pair.
“Or thrown them,” Hank said.“I throw mine.”
We kept digging.Christmas cards bundled and labeled in Josephine’s handwriting going back decades.A pocket Bible with a cracked spine and so many paper bookmarks bristling out of it that Deidre made a small pained sound and set it carefully aside.Golf scorecards going back years, the scores in Henry’s terrible left-handed scrawl.
“Twelve handicap,” Hank said, holding one up.
“That’s respectable,” Dash said.
“Better than mine ever was,” Hank said.“I quit after Eleanor told me I was more pleasant to be around when I didn’t go.”
“Was she right?”I asked.
“Probably.I wasn’t going to tell her that.”
Walt paged through a leather-bound journal, slow and careful, then set it aside.Sermon notes and personal reflections, he said.Nothing for us.There was a spare set of house keys on a ring with no label and a checkbook that Deidre logged without comment.
Then an envelope of photographs.
Deidre passed them around one at a time.Henry at a foundation gala, black tie, laughing at something off camera.Henry at someone’s wedding.And then one that stopped its own passing— Henry and James Everett twenty years younger, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, grinning at whoever held the camera.Two men who’d built something together from nothing.
The second box was mostly files and correspondence.Walt upended it onto the table and we spread everything out so everyone could have a look.
Deidre was the one who spotted it— tucked between two folders near the bottom of the pile, soft and folded, easy to miss.She picked it up by the very edges without a word.
“Sheriff,” she said.
Dash took it from her carefully and slipped it into an evidence bag, then laid it flat on the table.It was a white square of fabric, folded, with an embroidered corner.
I reached out and turned it so the monogram faced up through the plastic.
A single letter.Blue thread on white linen.
J.
“Well,” Bea said, and for once she didn’t follow it with anything.
“That’s what Lila Mae saw,” I said.“On the floor just inside the study door.She left it exactly where she found it.”
“Someone dropped it,” Walt said.
