“Oh, Christ.” Serrano sighed and stood up. “Come on. I’ll go with you.”
When we got outside, he slipped the front wheel off my bike and installed it in the trunk of his Dodge Challenger. “This is becoming a habit, me driving Ms. Daisy around.”
“Hey, I have good intentions.”
I clung to the armrest as he drove, even faster now he was in his own car. “I know why Harriet helped Chip, even though she despised him. It was so she could look for that missing will. Cross your fingers she kept something else that will help.”
We swung through the gates of Meadow Farms a few minutes later.
Angus’s pickup truck was parked outside the house, and a large van was backed up to the garage.
“What are you doing here, Daisy?” Angus asked as he came out onto the driveway.
I ran past him into the garage.
It was completely clean. Just a cavernous, bare concrete space. My heart sank down into the tips of my well-worn cowboy boots. As I stood there in despair, Angus and Serrano came up behind me.
“I was hoping that Harriet might have kept some stuff from Sophie’s house. Like an insulin pump?”
Angus shook his snowy head. “Don’t know as I saw anything like that in here.”
“Well, we didn’t touch the basement yet.” Birch Kunes walked into the garage, more rumpled than ever in his jeans and a pale blue pullover with a moth-eaten hole on the chest. “We had to clean out the garage first to be able to carry things through, but there’s still a bunch of stuff downstairs. Go take a look if you like.”
I hurried into the foyer, but paused for a moment, hardly recognizing the place. The staircase was bare, and across the foyer, all that was left in the study were two armchairs by the fireplace, an oriental rug, and a floor lamp.
“Marybeth said it would be better to leave some furniture here for staging purposes.” Birch’s voice echoed around the foyer.
Ardine appeared at the top of the stairs, carrying a cardboard box packed with tissue paper. “Hi, Daisy. I’m helping pack the rest of the collectibles, now that the dolls are all sold.”
I mumbled hello and rushed toward the basement door. I clattered down the long flight of stairs into a vast unfinished space that ran the length of the house. I cheered inwardly to see rows and rows of cardboard boxes and totes lining the far wall. There was still hope.
Birch switched on a couple more lights and everyone came down into the basement. We began inspecting the first row of boxes, one by one. Christmas decorations, Tupperware, boxes of letters and postcards, heavy plastic crates full of hardcover books.
“Oh, this one says, ‘Mill Creek Road,’” Birch said, looking at the writing on the outside of one cardboard box. “She must have never unpacked from our last move.”
I glanced quickly at him, but all I could read was a wistful remembrance of better days gone by. He opened the box and began slowly inspecting each photo that he pulled out, one by one.
I gritted my teeth. Birch was not operating at the necessary speed.
“Working with Angus is so much more fun than my regular job,” Ardine whispered to me, as we waited for Angus and Serrano to pull the boxes down off the top of the next row. “I have about six weeks of vacation time coming to me, so when he asked for my help, I didn’t think twice.”
I had to smile at her in spite of my anxiety. I recognized a fellow busybody when I saw one. “Plus it’s fun looking around other people’s houses, too, right?”