I remembered the lockbox immediately. Ray had given the code to three people when hospice started: our son, the nurse, and his brother. The deputy wrote all three names down and asked me whether any of them still had a reason to come by after Ray died. I said no. He asked me to check the box. The code still worked. Inside were copies of Ray’s medication list, an old house key, and a folded piece of paper with four numbers written on it. Those four numbers weren’t the code I remembered, but they matched the time on every single doorbell recording. The deputy looked at the screen again and asked me whether Ray had ever kept a second key somewhere else.
I told him about the little drawer in Ray’s desk. There was a key inside it that I’d never seen before, taped to a receipt from a storage company. The receipt was dated three weeks before Ray died, and the storage unit was in a town almost an hour away. My son drove me there the next morning. The manager pulled the account and said Ray had rented it for six months, paid in cash, and listed someone else as an authorized person. I asked who. She read the name and I recognized it immediately — it was the woman who had been standing outside my door every nine days. I had never met her, but Ray’s funeral guest book had her handwriting in it.
We asked the manager to open the unit with us present. There weren’t boxes of valuables or anything that made sense at first. There were filing cabinets, envelopes, and photographs of my house taken from the street. The newest photograph was from two days after Ray’s funeral. My son asked why Ray would have been documenting our own house. Then I found a folder with my name on it. Inside were copies of my driver’s license, our deed, insurance papers, and a handwritten list of dates — every date the woman had come to my porch. At the bottom Ray had written one sentence: “If she comes back after I’m gone, don’t let her inside. She knows where I put the original.”
