“So will I,” Isabella said. “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Ragsdale, I need to get started on organizing her things.”
“She said you’d probably give everything to charity except for the pictures, of course.”
“Probably.”
Mrs. Ragsdale cleared her throat. “I could take that old microwave of hers off your hands, if you like.”
“I won’t be able to make any final decisions today,” Isabella said. “I just came to pick up her personal papers.”
“And the pictures,” Mrs. Ragsdale said. “She said that’s all she had that would be important to you. She really wanted you to have the pictures. Told me to remind you when you turned up.”
“I’ll be sure to take them,” Isabella said.
“I cleaned out her refrigerator and emptied her garbage,” Mrs. Ragsdale said. “Didn’t want things to spoil and stink up the place.”
“That was very thoughtful of you,” Isabella said.
Fallon looked at her with veiled interest. “You have a key?”
“Oh, yes, Bernice gave it to me a couple of weeks before she passed. She said she was having some chest pains and was getting concerned. I told her to go to the doctor, but she refused. Said it was just a bad stomach.”
“Did anyone else stop by after she died?” Fallon asked.
“Nope.” Mrs. Ragsdale paused. “Well, except the manager, of course. He comes by occasionally to check on things. Told me the only reason he hadn’t sold Bernice’s trailer and her things was because she had promised him that if anything happened to her, Elly, here, would pay him whatever was owed.”
“Was the manager the only person who went inside the trailer besides you?” Fallon asked.
Mrs. Ragsdale snorted disapprovingly. “Nosy, aren’t you, young man?”
To Isabella’s amusement, Fallon gave the elderly woman his rare, wickedly charming smile, the one that should have been registered as a dangerous weapon.
“Been a while since anyone called me a young man,” he said.
Mrs. Ragsdale responded right on cue. Her faded eyes sparkled, and she suddenly glowed.
“It’s all a matter of perspective,” she said gruffly. “Trust me, at my age, you look young. In your prime, as they say.” She gave Fallon a head-to-toe perusal. “Yep, in your prime and a mighty fine prime it is, too.”
Isabella coughed discreetly.
Mrs. Ragsdale seemed to realize that she had gone off topic. She smiled warmly at Fallon. “To answer your question, the only other person I’ve seen go inside was the new man on the maintenance crew. He checked Bernice’s trailer after it rained. Said he wanted to make sure there wasn’t any water damage. Old trailers leak like sieves, you know.”
“So, to the best of your knowledge, no one except you, the manager and the guy from maintenance has entered the trailer,” Fallon concluded.
“Nope.” Mrs. Ragsdale snorted. “Trust me, someone would have noticed straight off if an outsider got within fifty yards of that trailer. Everyone in the Court pays attention to everyone else’s business. It’s about all the entertainment we get. Some days it’s more interesting around here than one of those reality TV shows.”
“Thank you for looking after things,” Isabella said.
“No trouble at all, dear. And I’m real sorry your grandmother is gone. She was a live wire. Kept up with all the latest news on her computer. Always seemed to know what was going on behind the scenes. Bridge won’t be nearly as interesting without her. Let me know if you need anything. And don’t forget about that microwave.”
“I won’t,” Isabella promised.
She got the door of the trailer open. Stale, musty air spilled out. She took a breath and stepped inside. Fallon moved in behind her and shut the door.
Isabella looked around. The interior of the trailer lay in shadow, but it looked very much as it had the last time she had visited three months earlier. The small space was neat and carefully organized.
“Grandma always says that living in a trailer is like living on a boat,” she said. “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
“She was the methodical, organized type?”
“Oh, yes. To a fault.”
“That makes it easy then. We just look for whatever seems wrong or out of place.”
“Easy for you to say. Grandma may have been organized but she had a lot of stuff.”
Fallon took in the tiny kitchen, the dining nook, the bed and the miniature bathroom in a single sweeping glance.
“Where’s her computer?” he said.
Startled, Isabella turned toward the dining nook. It took her a second or two to register what was wrong.