Tracy went up the walkway with Janya behind her and unlocked the front door.
The house merely smelled the way tropical houses did when they had been closed up too long—a little moldy, a little damp. Tracy waved her hand. “I switched his air conditioner to the fan setting, so it’s going to be hot. It’ll be better once the air starts moving a little.”
They made short work of the windows and left the front door open with the screen door closed. Janya turned on fans, while Tracy propped open the kitchen door for better circulation.
Back in the living room, Tracy looked around. “I thought I’d start with a tour. It’s possible I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. There may not be any papers to go through. I haven’t seen any lying around.”
“There is mail.” Janya sifted through a pile on the coffee table to make her point, letting it drop back on to the glass top.
“There is?”
“You haven’t been bringing it in?”
“I guess it never occurred to me that he’d still be getting mail. That was dumb.”
“How did it get here?”
“Wanda had a key, but I took it. And I locked up after I closed the windows.”
“Was the mail here then?”
“I didn’t pay much attention.”
Janya lifted the pile and sorted through it. “From the cancellation marks, I would say it came last week.”
“Does any of it look personal?”
“Not unless he has a correspondence with the telephone company or the one that provides power.” She held the envelopes out to Tracy.
“You know, if I don’t pay these, they’ll come and turn off his utilities anyway. I’ve got no frigging clue what I ought to do.”
“Perhaps we will find an answer today.”
Tracy dropped the envelopes back on the table. Her expression brightened. “Maybe his family’s been here. Maybe they found out he died and came to clean up, and brought in all his mail.”
“If so, why did they not begin to pack? Or talk to you?”
“You’re spoiling my fantasy. I guess at the least we ought to look around to see if anything else has been moved.” Tracy started in the direction of the kitchen. Janya went the other way.
The house was not as large as Janya’s, which had a second bedroom. Despite that, she found a surprise off the bathroom. She had thought a door beside the shower led to a closet for bed linens; instead, now she found it opened into a room. As small as it was, she wondered if the room had been meant as a nursery, or perhaps, as Herb had clearly used it, an office.
“Tracy, did you know there is another room here?”
Tracy came into the bathroom and stood in the doorway. “I guess I should have figured it out from the footprint of the house, only spatial relations aren’t my thing.”
There was a small desk in one corner, a wooden filing cabinet in the other, and a narrow bookshelf beside it. The center of the room was taken up by the desk chair, and there wasn’t an extra inch of space anywhere.
“You know I’ll bet it was a laundry room,” Tracy said. “Right off the bathroom, where there’s plumbing. Along the way, somebody took out the fixtures and closed it in.”
“This is probably the place to start looking for information.” Janya took a few steps and opened what actually was a closet. Stacked neatly inside were a dozen cartons.
“Oh, I was so much happier a few minutes ago. Look at all that stuff!”
“Did you find any other signs his family might have been here?”
“Nothing. The mail’s the only thing out of place.”
“Yoo-hoo!”
Janya turned to Tracy. “Is somebody calling you?”
They heard shoes clattering across the floor of the living room, and in a moment Wanda walked in. “I saw you heading over. Thought I’d see how you’re doing.”
“You’re looking bright-eyed, considering,” Tracy said. She gestured to Wanda. “Wanda wasn’t feeling very well last night.”
“Wanda was feeling like somebody cancelled her birth certificate, that’s how Wanda was feeling,” Wanda said. “Staying home from work today, just to be sure the green-apple two-step doesn’t come back.”
“Janya offered to help me look for information on Herb’s family. Want to join us?” Tracy asked.
Janya wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She might not know exactly how to regard Tracy, but she was fairly certain how she felt about Wanda. The older woman was patronizing, crude, and convinced that Janya and everybody who had not been born right here in Florida was a step below her. Janya had