June leaned forward. “Who’s Leo?”
Laurie shook her head. “I don’t have any idea. She was well into her retirement by then, and I know she traveled all over with all kinds of people. I have no idea who Leo might have been, but clearly, they were having a lot of fun together seeing the dirty puppet musical.”
The rest of the box held a combination of travel pictures, pictures from birthday parties and a couple of weddings and what seemed to be a football game at the high school, and pictures of people Laurie only occasionally recognized. There was one of her mother and father, and a few that had been taken at her brother Patrick’s wedding. She only vaguely remembered Dot walking around with an instant camera, stopping at every table to grab a couple of shots.
“Why do you think she packed her cameras with a box of pictures from 2007?” June asked as she went back to sorting books into boxes by type and condition.
“Maybe these are the most recent ones she had,” Laurie said as she put them back into the box and picked up one of the older cameras. “I know they stopped making instant film for a while, so maybe she stopped when she got a digital camera.”
“Maybe all the newer ones were naughty.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they were, but I would be surprised if she left those around for people to find. I do think there are probably more pictures somewhere.” She turned the camera over in her hands. “Like, a lot more pictures.”
Chapter Two
Not long after they found the cameras, there was a knock. “That will be the Grim Reaper,” Laurie said, heading for the door. She opened it to find a guy in a Decemberists concert shirt and jeans looking down at an iPad. He looked up and smiled. “Hi, I’m Matt, I’m from Save the Best, I think we talked on the phone?”
Save the Best was a service that would come and inspect the house of a person who was either dead or downsizing to determine whether any of their stuff was worth selling and haul away the rest. They called this particular service “bereavement decluttering.” Which, Laurie supposed, was better than calling it Almost Literally a Flock of Vultures Circling Your Dead Relatives.
He didn’t look like a vulture, though. He looked like a philosophy professor as you might encounter him buying granola at a Whole Foods. She suspected he actually went to that concert to buy that shirt. He’d bought the ticket, he’d put on the orange wristband, he’d had the overpriced beer, he’d stood near the back out of consideration for shorter people. （Probably.） His eyes were gray but also blue, and he had a little bit of a tattoo poking out from under his sleeve. Maybe something vaguely Celtic. Maybe something pretentious like a platitude in Latin.
She gathered herself. “Hi, I’m Laurie Sassalyn, thanks for coming.” He followed her in and sat on the couch while June and Laurie settled in the wing chairs. “So where do we start?” Laurie said.
“Tell me about you, and tell me about your aunt.” He left his iPad sitting at his hip for now.
“Well, I’m Laurie—I said that—and this is my friend June Devon. Dot was actually my great-aunt. My mother’s father’s sister. She was ninety-three.”
“Wow, ninety-three, what a run.” He looked like maybe he used to be an athlete. Soccer or rugby, but now his knee was blown out and his doctor didn’t want him to play, but he still showed up for beer league because all his friends were there, and he wasn’t the player he had been, but he was always the one who paid for the first round after—
“Laurie.” June was looking at her with her eyebrows raised. “Are you with us?”
“Yes, sorry. It’s just a lot.” Laurie resettled herself. “Anyway. This whole house was hers.”
“Was she widowed? Any kids?”
“No, she was a one-woman show. She worked for the school system, in the business office, until she retired. Then she was…well, I guess you can see how she was. The place is packed to the gills with her things. We’ve been going through as much as we can, saving some personal stuff, but I don’t have any other family up here anymore, and most of this, we just…we don’t have a place for it. I mean, she has college textbooks and a vinyl record collection and enough books to open a library. If I use my rental car to move everything out, I’ll still be working on it a year from now.”
“So you’re not from around here?”
“I grew up here, we both did. Junie lives here, but I live in Seattle. I haven’t been back in ages, that’s why I didn’t know how full the house was.”