Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,47
drawer? Under the paper in her paper tray?”
“I tried all of those.”
“So then she must have used a password app. In which case, you’re out of luck.”
“But at least she would need a computer password to get into the password app,” Rosalie said. “Am I right?”
“Not if she trusted her memory for that.”
“Are you kidding? She was ancient. She wrote the street address on the back of her hand whenever she had to drive anyplace.”
“Oh,” Micah said.
“Now will you come? Please? What’s your base fee?” she asked, using that wheedling tone again.
“Eighty bucks,” he said.
“Eighty,” she said. “I can swing it.”
“Eighty bucks just to set foot in your house, with no guarantee of success. In fact, practically guaranteed failure.”
“It’s not an issue,” she assured him. “I’m a loan officer.”
“You’re a loan officer?”
“At First Unified Bank. I have vast supplies of wealth at my disposal.”
“You do, do you.”
“If necessary, I can embezzle.”
This made him laugh, finally. He said, “How far away do you live?”
“I’m in Guilford.”
“Well,” he said. Then, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“I know, I know! Consider me warned. You will fail miserably, and I will contain my disappointment and hand over eighty bucks in cold cash.”
He laughed again and said, “Okay, then. Your decision.”
* * *
—
She lived in a brick center-hall colonial with maroon velvet drapes in the downstairs windows, a typical old-person house, but she herself was a slim young blonde in jeans and a wool turtleneck. A ponytail sprouted vertically from the very top of her head, reminding Micah of a pineapple spike, and her lips curved naturally upward at the corners as if she’d been born smiling. “Hermit!” she greeted him merrily.
“Micah Mortimer,” he said.
“Hey, Micah; I’m Rosalie. Let me show you where the beast is.”
He shucked off his rubber parka—the rain was still coming down—and folded it dry-side-out before he followed her through the hall. Persian carpet, flocked maroon wallpaper, stately grandfather clock tick-pause-ticking. They climbed the wide staircase, which was laid with another Persian carpet anchored by clinking brass rods. At the landing, they turned left and passed through what seemed to be the master bedroom. Just beyond that, at one end of a glassed-in sunporch, a gigantic desktop computer stood on a massive desk. “She was well-equipped,” Micah murmured.
“Nothing but the best for Granny,” Rosalie said.
She walked over to the computer, no doubt expecting him to follow, but instead he turned toward a smaller desk at the other end of the sunporch. This was a more ladylike affair, with a leather-framed green blotter and many tiny drawers. He set his parka and his carry-all on the seat of the chair and then lifted the blotter, exposing a few bits of paper underneath. “I know,” Rosalie said, joining him. “Looks promising, doesn’t it? But it’s all just business cards, people’s phone numbers…” She picked up a pale-green receipt and studied it. “I suppose at some point I should collect her dry cleaning,” she said.
“Did you have any idea you were going to inherit all this?” Micah asked her.
“Not a clue. It’s true I was her only grandchild, but I just assumed she’d will everything to my dad. Instead it’s ‘Here you go, Rosalie: house and all the furniture and forty pounds of silverware. Pots and pans in the kitchen, china in the buffet.’ And I had been living in this dinky rented apartment! All I had was thrift-shop stuff! Now I own an electric fondue maker with color-coded forks.”
“It’s like a neutron bomb,” Micah said, mostly to himself.
“A what?”
“Like when they bomb all the humans to smithereens but leave the buildings standing. I think about that, sometimes. How you’d walk into a house and say, ‘Oh, look, somebody’s left their professional-grade sound system. Their vinyl record collection. Their, I don’t know, plasma-screen TV or something.’ And you feel sort of pleased, but then gradually you realize there is no