Baby steps, Becca liked to remind their clients. The first ones were the hardest. But they were still waiting for Mrs. Arnoldy to call them to come back and help her tackle the rest of the house. Emily was surprised that she’d recommended them to her friend.

Fifteen minutes later Becca pulled up in front of Ruth Murphy’s split-level home. Dandelions thrived in the front lawn, and the yews under her front window needed clipping. Ferocious clumps of black-eyed Susans bloomed on either side of the front steps. Emily put on her cap, threading her ponytail through the opening in the back. Then she got out of the car and followed Becca up the walk.

Becca rang the bell. Young or old? This was a game Emily used to play, going back to when she’d sold Girl Scout cookies door to door, trying to imagine the person who was about to greet her. Short, stout, and elderly, she decided.

Emily was two-for-three. With a white dandelion puff of hair, Mrs. Murphy had to be well past seventy and she came up to Emily’s chin. But she was slender as a reed. She shook Emily’s hand with a steely grip, then ushered them into a tidy living room filled with stuffy Victorian-style furniture—an upholstered settee and matching side chairs. The scalloped wood valances over the windows were pure 1950s, like the ones in the house that Emily’s parents had sold before they moved to the Cape. It smelled as if the cookies laid out on a cut-glass platter on the coffee table were fresh-baked.

Emily looked around. This seemed like a house with a place for everything and everything in its place—what you’d expect of someone who made her living balancing accounts and keeping ledgers. What was there to organize?

She took a clipboard and pen from her bag and shot Becca a questioning look. Becca tipped her head toward a large leather recliner in the corner that was leaning back, its footrest raised as if someone were still sitting in it. On the floor beside it sat a pair of men’s bedroom slippers and a drift of newspapers. On a nearby end table sat an empty cut-glass tumbler and an ashtray with a cigar stub. Emily sniffed. No cigar smell in the room.