He gave them her name and address; then the bell rang again and he stepped inside the classroom just as the professor came over to close the door.

The pimply faced teenager minding the desk at the Colleton U-Stor didn’t remember Brazos Hartley even though he’d taken the bid on two lockers on the thirty first of August. He was pretty sure that no one had been around about a locker belonging to a Leonard Angelopolus but Caroline Sholten? He couldn’t swear he’d ever met her, but he certainly recalled Mrs. Sholten’s angry middle-aged daughter.

“You know how kids used to say ‘Your mama wears army boots’?” He giggled. “Well, this lady really did. I mean, she was huge. She had on these lace-up boots like a Marine or a paratrooper, and shorts that looked like bib overalls with the pant legs cut off, y’know? And her legs were like tree stumps. Man, she was one tough mama! And going on and on about how it was her furniture and her mother meant for her to have it. I told her if her mother wanted to keep the stuff, she shoulda paid the rent before it got auctioned off. I mean, we sent out the letter, advertised in the Ledger. Posted a notice at the courthouse. It was a legal sale.”

“Did you tell her who’d bought it?” asked Mayleen Richards.

“Yep. Gave her his phone number and e-mail and told her she’d have to find him before he sold it.”

“Did she leave her own name or address?”

The kid shook his head.

“What about the owner’s address?”

He looked at her as if her deck had a few missing cards. “Well, yeah, but she’s dead, remember?”

No point in reminding him that even old ladies have friends and neighbors. “Just give me the address.”

It was only a couple of miles away, a fifties-type brick ranch with empty windows and an air of expectant neglect. The foundation plantings had overgrown their allotted spaces and all the trimwork was in sore need of paint, but help was probably on the way if the real estate agent’s sign in the weedy front yard was any indication. It had a new red SOLD! sticker across it. She took down the agent’s number just in case no one else could help, then knocked on the door of the house across the road.

“Coming, coming, coming!” called a cheerful, if somewhat trembly, voice and the door was eventually opened by a very old, very frail white woman encumbered by an aluminum walker. She seemed delighted to find a female deputy in full uniform on her front porch. Smiling as Richards introduced herself, she invited the younger woman to come in. “I’m Liz. Liz Collins. Isn’t it just wonderful all that we can be and do these days? I’d give anything if I’d been born fifty years later. Not that I didn’t have an interesting time of it”—her gnarled hand gestured to a wall of framed photographs beside the door—“but these days I could have maybe made it into space.”