Thicker than Water by Rett MacPherson Read Free Book Online Page A

see you enough, anyway.”
    I smiled. “I’ll be upstairs. I’m going to start going through the bedrooms.”
    I couldn’t help but think how morbid it was to go through a dead person’s belongings. At the top of the stairs, I looked back over the balcony at the room below me. I had looked down at this view a thousand and one times, but never from the point of view of it being mine.
    I was uncomfortable having to go through this woman’s things, even though I’m nosy by nature. The personal and private collection of Sylvia’s life was laid bare to me, and I could do with it as I chose. Rather disturbing, I thought. You can’t take any of it with you, of that there is no doubt, but there was something eerie about leaving your life for somebody else to decipher, decode, dismantle, and disperse. And I wasn’t even a relative.
    When I reached the top of the stairs, my heart was heavy, and not from the climb. The first bedroom I came to was the first bedroom I tackled. The brown room, as I had often called it. I opened the closet door and there, hanging, ready to be worn, were Sylvia’s clothes. I took them out and laid them on the bed. All of them would go to charity.
    It was unbelievable what a person would find in somebody else’s closets. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done this sort of thing before. I catalogued an estate once for Colin, but that woman, Catherine Finch, had not been my lifelong friend. It’s different when you know the person. For example, I knew that the Louisville Slugger I pulled out of the closet at that moment was not, as some would suspect, for protection. No, it had come from a charity softball game we had one year, when I was only about seventeen. Sylvia had hit a home run in that game—the game-winning home run. She had been at least eighty at the time. This was the bat she had used. She had written the date with a Magic Marker on the end. It had obviously meant a lot to her. Those were things I would never have known if I’d been cataloguing the estate of a stranger.
    I decided I would keep the bat for Matthew.
    Farther back in the dark recesses of the closet, I found a few mousetraps—none with mice in them, thank God—and an old tripod for a camera that looked like something John Huston would have used on African Queen . A box of … shoes. A box of … baby shoes? They must have been hers and her sister Wilma’s. They looked like miniature Mary Poppins shoes, with the hooks and the laces meandering up the ankles.
    I set those on the bed. Those I would keep.
    And so it went for hours. In the top of the closet I found boxes of old photographs. Now, normally this would send me into fits of excitement. Old photographs are like gold to me. In fact, I would rather relatives leave me pictures than money. Rudy laughs and jokes that if I was buried alive in a pile of old photographs, I’d die with a smile on my face. But these pictures would be frustrating for me to go through, because I knew from looking at some of Sylvia’s pictures before that she probably hadn’t labeled them, and the only person who could tell me who was in these photographs was now gone. So there was something else to drive me crazy. Maybe she did this on purpose.
    I picked up a handful of photographs and looked at them. When I flipped them over I was stunned. Sylvia had written on the backs of most of them, and she had done it recently. The ink was new, not faded, the handwriting shakier and more unsure than a youthful hand would have been.
    I flashed back to a scene of me talking to Sylvia about a year ago, when a 1920s shipwreck had been visible in the Mississippi thanks to a low water level. I had expressed my outrage over photographs she had shown me then without writing on the backs. I suppose she had realized that these photographs would go into the ranks of the unidentified, so she sat down and labeled them.
    The woman