She begins by organizing the suits first—a couple of them have dust on the shoulders. Then a long lines of slacks and jeans. With the pants, she starts checking the pockets and she goes back and checks the suit jacket pockets as well. Nothing. She starts on the blazers. Nothing. She notices some discarded clothes on the floor, roughly tossed toward the laundry hamper, and those will need to be washed or dry-cleaned before they’re donated. She organizes them and then starts to work through the clothes already in the closed hamper. She picks up one—a navy blazer—and a phone falls out from its inner pocket, onto the floor.

Julia kneels by it.

Hadn’t Ned said he lost a phone and Marland told her he wanted Ned’s burner?

Danielle had it. And had hidden it. Tucked in a jacket down in a hamper.

She turns it on. It still holds a charge, a slight one. There is one number in the phone.

It’s the same number she’s seen before. Marland’s number.

This burner was what Marland wanted in exchange for that video of her father walking at night with Danielle.

Julia remembers to breathe. She goes to the text app and looks through them. Ned had been using Critterscape to communicate with his customers, but not with Marland. She opens the text app and reads the last and final text:

Listen to me, you punk. You are going to leave Ned alone and never contact him again or I’ll have the police on your ass so fast your head will spin.

There is only one person who could have written a text like that—a parent. It screams parent who found my son’s burner phone he used to communicate with a drug dealer and rather than turn over my son to the police I’ll just break off the business relationship how do you like that?

There was one response: bitch don’t threaten me

Julia stares at the message. She hears Ned calling for her, and she shoves the phone into her boot, smooths the hem of her jeans over it.

“Yeah, what?” She steps out of his mom’s closet.

“I don’t know that I can do this right now. It’s all too soon.”

“You have to deal with it eventually,” she says.

Ned holds up a document. “I found this in her files.”

“What?”

He looks guilty for a moment, and she feels the weight of the phone against her ankle. The text would kill Ned, the idea that this so-called harmless prescription pill dealing he’d engaged in had led to his mother’s death, that Danielle had threatened Marland and he’d killed her to ensure her silence.

Ned holds a folder with more papers in it. “I wondered…well, Papa asked me if she had a will.”