(LB2) Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

can do is clean,” I said.
    “Well, let’s do that,” Alvah said shakily. “We might as well.”
    For three hours, we worked in the small apartment, cleaning things that had never been dirty and straightening things that had never been messy. Alvah likes her life streamlined—she would live well on a boat, I’ve always thought. Everything superfluous was thrown away ruthlessly; everything else was arranged logically and compactly. I admire this, having tendencies that way myself, though I’m not as extreme as Alvah. For one thing, I reflected as I wiped the cabinets in the bathroom, Alvah has such limited interests that cleaning is one of her few outlets for self-expression. Alvah does a little embroidery of an uninspired kind, but she doesn’t read or sew and is not particularly interested in cooking or television. So she cleans.
    Alvah is a warning to me.
    “What about the camper?” I asked when I thought we were almost through with the apartment.
    “What?” Alvah said.
    “We usually do the camper, too,” I reminded her. The Yorks have a camper they pull behind their pickup truck, and when they visit their daughter, they park in her driveway and live in the camper. They can make their own coffee in the morning, go to bed when they feel like it, they’ve often told me. I’d been remembering while I worked how may times the Yorks had mentioned their granddaughter Sarah; youngest of their daughter’s children, Sarah had been spoiled and had just last year made a bad marriage to a boy as young as she. But the Yorks have always doted on Sarah.
    “You remember all the arguments Pardon gave us about that camper?” Alvah asked unexpectedly.
    I did indeed. At each end of the residents’ parking garage is a space about car width between the wall of the garage and the surrounding fence. The Yorks had asked permission to park their camper in the north space, and initially Pardon had agreed. But later, he’d reneged, insisting it stuck out and inconvenienced the other residents.
    It had never been my business, so I’d paid little attention to the whole brouhaha. But I’d heard the Yorks carry on about it, and I’d seen Pardon standing out in the parking area, shaking his head at the camper as if it were a difficult child, puttering around it with a yardstick. Pardon Albee had been a fusser, a man apparently unable to let anything be.
    He would never let a sleeping dog lie.
    Now Alvah was weeping again. “You’d better go, Lily,” she said. “This whole thing has just got me where I don’t know if I’m going or coming. These past few days, when we were there for the trial, they have just been like hell. I’ll do better next week.”
    “Sure, Alvah,” I said. “Call me when you want to get your curtains back up, or if you want to clean the camper.”
    “I’ll call you,” Alvah promised. I didn’t remind her that I hadn’t been paid; that was an indicator, too, since Alvah is always scrupulous about paying me on the dot.
    I can always drop back by tomorrow, I thought. By then, perhaps some of the shock of Murrell’s trial would have worn off.
    Of course, Sarah’s suffering would continue, for weeks and months and years….
    I realized it for sure wasn’t my day as I was leaving the building. Deedra Dean came in the front door before I could get out of it.
    I can’t stand Deedra, especially since our conversation last week. We’d been standing right inside Deedra’s upstairs apartment door. Deedra had come home for lunch and was ready to return to Shakespeare City Hall, where she almost earns a living as an office clerk.
    “Hi, housekeeper!” Deedra had said chirpily. “Listen, I been meaning to tell you…last week I think you forgot to lock the door behind you when you left.”
    “No,” I had said very firmly. Reliability is very important in my work, maybe even more important than doing an impeccable cleaning job. “I never forget. Maybe you did, but I didn’t.”
    “But last Friday,