She’d removed a drawer and placed it on the counter, where she’d unloaded the contents. She’d been sorting the miscellany and tossing the discards in a wastebasket. She’d bought drawer dividers to organize the salvageable items.

“I’ll put some coffee on,” she said. “Don’t mind the mess. I decided to tackle some of Pete’s crapola.”

“A good idea,” I said. “Mind if I go ahead and look around?”

“Please.”

I dropped my shoulder bag on a chair and shoved my flashlight in my back pocket while I made a circuit of the first floor, checking window latches, locks, and door hardware. Ruthie had made the same search the night before and she’d sworn the house was secure, which did seem to be the case.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor, peering out of windows as I moved through a small guest bedroom with an adjoining bathroom, a hallway, and a second bedroom currently used for storage. This must be the junk room. Ruth had relegated miscellaneous furniture, hanging clothes, and seasonal items to the ten-by-twelve-foot space. There were also short stacks of assorted cardboard boxes with scarcely room to walk in between. The wallpaper was pink and blue, with tiny floral bouquets tied with ribbons, which suggested this might have been a nursery once upon a time. Now it was essentially a closet jammed wall to wall with articles better suited to a charity donation box. We’d both faulted Pete for being disorganized when, in truth, this wasn’t much of an improvement. Looking out the window, I couldn’t see any trees growing close enough to allow an intruder to shinny up and enter a second-story window.

I returned to the first floor. The smell of fresh coffee was strong in the downstairs hall, but I didn’t want to interrupt the search for a coffee break. The front door was solid wood, not one of the flimsy hollow-core doors so popular in residential construction these days. The back door was also solid wood, with mullions in the upper third separating four small panes of glass. The side door was fashioned along similar lines, with solid wood below and the top half made up of six equal-size six-by-eight-inch panes of glass. The knob was sturdy and the lock was a double-keyed dead bolt. In the interests of fire safety, the key had been left in the lock on the inside should a hasty exit be required.

I unlocked the door and went outside. No tool marks to suggest that someone had forced the lock. A dense twenty-foot hedge along the walk separated Ruth’s house from her neighbor’s. I turned to my right and toured the exterior, looking for signs of a breach. Like many California homes of this era, there was a crawl space below the house, but no basement. A scrim of trellising had been affixed to the framing to shield the space from urban wildlife, but sections had been chewed away. A tuft of coarse hair was caught in the splintered wood where a beast had squeezed through the gap.