The air was cooler under the trellis, and Daphne could smell roses on the breeze. She wondered how her father was taking the news of his grandmother's death. He and his sister had been toddlers when they lost their parents — their father ran away and their mother died in a car crash soon after — and they had been raised here, by Grammar.
Her father stopped on the step up to the back door, and Daphne saw that one of the vertical windows beside the door was broken; and when her father walked to the door and twisted the knob, the door swung inward. None of the locks here are any good, she thought.
"You've erased fingerprints!" panted Bennett, who was right behind Daphne now. "It was probably a burglar that broke the window."
"A burglar would have reached through and turned the knob inside," Daphne told him. "My dad isn't going to touch that one."
"Daph," said her father. "Wait out here with Bennett."
Her father stepped into the kitchen, and her uncle at least waited with her.
"Probably broke it herself," muttered Bennett. "Marritys."
"'Divil a man can say a word agin them,'" said Daphne. She and her father had recently watched Yankee Doodle Dandy, and her head was full of George M. Cohan lyrics.
Bennett glanced away from the door to give her an irritable look. "All that Shakespeare won't help you get a job. Except—" He shook his head and resumed staring at the kitchen door.
"It'll help me get a job as a literature professor," she said blandly, knowing that that was what his except had referred to. Her father was a literature professor at the University of Redlands. "Best job there is." Her uncle Bennett was a location manager for TV commercials, and apparently made way more money than her father did.
Her uncle opened his mouth and then after a second snapped it shut again, clearly not wanting to get into an argument with a girl. "You absolutely reek of gasoline," he said instead.
She heard footsteps on linoleum in the house, and then her father pulled the kitchen door wide open. "If there was a thief, he's gone," he said. "Let's see if she has any beers in her 'frigerator."
"We shouldn't touch anything," said Bennett, but he stepped in ahead of Daphne. The house was cool, and the kitchen smelled faintly of bacon and onions and cigarettes, as usual.
Daphne couldn't see that anything in the room was different from the way it had looked at Easter — the spotless sink and counter, the garlic-and-dried-rosemary centerpiece on the kitchen table; the broom was upside down in the corner, but the old lady always kept it that way — to scare off nightmares, according to her father.
Bennett picked up a business card from the kitchen counter. "See?" he said. "Bell Cabs. She must have taken a taxi to the airport." He set it back down again.
Her father had lifted the receiver from the yellow telephone on the wall and was using the forefinger of the same hand to spin the dial. With his other hand he pointed at the refrigerator. "Daph, could you see if there's a beer in there?"
Daphne pulled open the door of the big green refrigerator — it was older than her father, who had once said that it looked like a 1950 Buick stood on its nose — and found two cans of Budweiser among the jars of nasty black concoctions.
She put one into her father's hand and waved the other at her uncle.
"Not Budweiser, thank you," he said stiffly.
Daphne put the other can on the counter by her father, and looked at the cork bulletin board on the wall. "Her keys are gone," she noted.
"Probably in her purse," her father said. "Moira?" he said into the telephone. "Did Grammar die? What? This is a lousy connection. Bennett told me — we're at her house. What? At her house, I said." He popped open the beer one-handed. "I don't know. Listen, are you sure?" He took a long sip of the beer. "I mean, could it have been a prank call?" For several seconds he just listened, and he put the beer can down on the tile counter to touch Grammar's electric coffee grinder; he flipped the switch on it, and the little upright cylinder chattered as it ground up some beans that must still have been in it. He switched it off again. "When did the hospital call you? Talk slower. Uh-huh. And when you called them back, what was the number?"
He lifted a pencil from a vase full of pens and pencils and wrote the number on the back of the Bell Cabs card.
"What were the last two numbers? Okay, got it." He put the card in his shirt pocket. "Yeah, me too kid. Okay, thanks." He held the receiver out to Bennett. "She wants to talk to you. Bad connection — it keeps getting screechy or silent."
Bennett nodded impatiently and took the phone, and he was saying, "I just wanted to see if — are you there? — if there was anything here we'd need to bring along, birth certificate…" as Frank Marrity led Daphne into the dark living room.
Grammar's violin and bow were hanging in their usual place between two framed parchments with Jewish writing on them, and in spite of having been scared of the old woman, Daphne suddenly felt like crying at the thought that Grammar would never play it anymore. Daphne remembered her bow skating over the strings in the first four notes of one of her favorite Mozart violin concertos.
A moment later her father softly whistled the next six notes.
Daphne blinked. "And!" she whispered, "you're sad about Grammar, and mad at her too — and you're very freaked about her coffee grinder! I… can't see why."
After a pause, he nodded. "That's right." He looked at her with one eyebrow raised. "This is the first time you and I have both had it at the same time."
"Like turn blinkers on a couple of cars," she said quietly. "It was bound to match up eventually." She looked up at him. "What's so weird about her coffee grinder?"
"I'll tell you later." In a normal tone he said, over her shoulder, "I don't think my grandmother ever had a birth certificate."
Daphne turned and saw that Bennett had entered the living room and was frowning at the drawn curtains.
"I suppose they don't give birth certificates in Oz," he said. "We should fix that window."
"I can use her Makita to screw a piece of plywood over it from the inside. You think we should call the police?" Her father waved at the violin on the wall. "If there was a thief, he didn't take her Stradivarius."
Bennett blinked and started forward. "Is that a Stradivarius?"
"I was kidding. No. I don't think anything's been taken."
"Very funny. I don't think we need to call the police. But fix the window now — we should all leave together, and only come here all together." He rubbed his mustache. "I wonder if she left a will."
"Moira and I are on the deed already. I can't imagine there's much besides the house."
"Her car, her books. Some of this… artwork might be valuable to some people."
To some weirdos, you mean, thought Daphne. She was suddenly defensive about the old woman's crystals and copper bells and paintings of unicorns and eyes in pyramids and sleepy-looking bearded guys wearing robes.
"We'll want to inventory it all, get an appraiser," Bennett went on. "She was a collector, and she might have happened to pick up some valuable items, amid all the crap. Even a broken clock is right twice a day."
Daphne could feel that the mention of broken clocks, in this house, jarred her father. There were a lot of things she wanted to remember to ask him about, once they were in their truck again.
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