…break in. Saturday, two a.m.”
On the back of the photo, in neat handwriting, it said: “Sat. 2am. Spare key under the blue pot. She sleeps with earplugs.”
The man’s name was Walter. He was seventy-eight, a retired locksmith who still did small jobs from his garage. The day before, a young woman had come to him with this photograph. She said she was my daughter, visiting from out of state. She said I was confused, that I’d lost my keys and had become afraid of locksmiths, and she needed a copy of a key to “my mother’s house” made from an old one she had. She showed him the photo as proof that she lived there.
“Who has a picture of their sleeping mother?” Walter said. “It didn’t sit right.”
He refused the job. After she left, he found that she’d left the photo on his counter by mistake. He turned it over and read the note. He recognized my face from the pharmacy, where we both pick up prescriptions on Thursdays. He’d gone to the pharmacy to warn me. He collapsed from the stress before he could find me.
The detectives asked who might have been inside my bedroom at night with a camera.
There was only one person who had a key. My cleaner, Marisol, came every Wednesday. I’d given her a spare key two years ago. But she would never—
The detectives found out within a day. It wasn’t Marisol. It was her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Bianca, who’d been helping her mother clean for the last few months. Bianca had copied my key, come back late one night and photographed my bedroom, my jewelry box and the safe in my closet. She and her boyfriend planned to break in on Saturday.
On Saturday at two in the morning, two detectives were waiting in my living room. I was at my sister’s. The boyfriend and Bianca came in through the front door with their copied key. They didn’t get past the hallway.
Marisol was devastated. She hadn’t known anything. I didn’t fire her. She’d been the most honest person in my life for two years, and she didn’t deserve to lose her job because of her daughter.
Walter recovered from his heart attack in a week. I visited him in the hospital with flowers and a new set of locks for him to install. He refused to let me pay for them. “Best job I’ve had in years,” he said.
