Free Monster in Miniature by Margaret Grace Page B

about two dozen boxes were at my feet or on my small worktable.
    “Thanks a lot, Henry,” I said. “I’m sorry about all the dust.”
    “I’ve had worse Saturdays,” he said, brushing off his khakis. He waved his arm toward the stacks of boxes. “I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need anything. I’m a phone call away.”
    I watched him drive off, feeling lucky that I’d met him. The timing could not have been better.
    I turned back to the piles of boxes. Cartons that had once held printer paper or books now presumably held financial records, log books, building plans, and whatever else Artie, Ken’s partner, and Esther, their secretary, had found when they cleaned out Ken’s office. They’d both driven to my house with the boxes once it was clear that Ken would never recover and return to work. If I closed my eyes, I thought, I’d be able to feel Esther’s tears on my cheeks when she hugged me that day.
    Though I couldn’t throw the material away even after Ken died, I’d never taken the covers off the boxes. Skip had helped me put them at the highest points of the garage, and there they had been until now.
    I took a deep breath and cut through the first strip of sealing tape. My shoulders ached as I lifted the top of the box nearest me. I felt as exhausted as if the simple piece of cardboard weighed more than all my dollhouses combined.
    My body relaxed as I saw that the first box was filled with nothing I should worry about. I pawed through dozens of books of the same size—long, narrow telephone message books, like the kind used in the ALHS office and probably a large majority of offices around the world. All that were left in the books were stubs with dates, times, and callers’ names.
    I thought of Ken, the busy, russet-haired architect, showing up at work in the morning, picking up the right-hand sections of the message slips, making all these calls throughout the day, and still finding time to say hello to me on my breaks from class.
    The tears came and stayed for a while. It wasn’t a very good start. If I couldn’t handle a box of old telephone message stubs without breaking down, how was I going to get through the rest of the material that surrounded me?
    I needed a cup of tea. At this rate, it would be well past Halloween before I got through everything, but I needed to indulge myself nevertheless.
    I stepped into my kitchen through the door between the house and the garage. From its spot on the counter, the answering machine showed a blinking light. I immediately remembered Beverly’s call as Maddie and I were leaving this morning. Henry and I had entered the garage directly from the driveway and had had no reason to go into the house. I decided to let the message wait until I’d at least had my tea.
    Besides the blinking light, something else attracted my attention as I made my way to the pantry. A white envelope was leaning against a wastebasket I kept near a small desk in the family room. It looked as though someone had aimed to throw the envelope away but missed by a bit. I couldn’t remember doing any such thing. I picked up the envelope. It was empty, unmarked, from a box of stationery I recognized as one of my own.
    I stepped back from the desk and looked it over. The top drawer wasn’t fully closed. I pulled it open all the way and found the box of stationery the envelope belonged to, in the place where it always was. I wasn’t the neatest person in Lincoln Point, but I never left my desk drawers partly open. I checked the slots on the desktop where I placed correspondence that needed attention and extracted a stack of letters and flyers. Nothing was missing as far as I could tell, but still the arrangement was curious. I usually left tidier edges on the stack.
    I thought briefly of Maddie, but she never used the desk.
    “Nuh-uh,” she’d said when I’d told her she was welcome to do her homework there. “My dad told me not to touch that desk or I’d get yelled at if