She hadn’t been attacked.
Nobody thought I had killed her.
But the sheriff wasn’t finished.
“Her note beside the bed instructed whoever found her to make sure this envelope reached you unopened.
That’s unusual enough that we needed to verify it.”
I looked down at the paper again.
The document was a copy of a beneficiary designation.
Most of the legal language meant nothing to me, but one line did.
My name was on it.
Below Mrs.
Higgins’s signature was a date from the previous Friday.
Four days before I mowed her lawn.
I stared at the date.
“She already signed this?”
“Looks that way.”
That mattered more than I realized at the time.
It meant she had not made some confused decision in the heat after watching a pregnant woman push a lawnmower.
It meant yesterday hadn’t created the gift.
It had only convinced her to hand me the proof.
The business card belonged to an estate attorney.
My hands started shaking again.
“How much money are we talking about?”
The sheriff shook his head.
“That’s not something I’m able to tell you.
You need to call the attorney.”
I almost laughed from the absurdity of it.
Twenty-four hours earlier, I had been standing in my kitchen begging a bank employee for more time before they took my house.
Now a sheriff was standing beside my mailbox telling me my dead neighbor might have named me beneficiary of a bank account.
I looked toward Mrs.
Higgins’s house.
Her lawn was clean and even in the morning light.
The mower I had fought with for three hours was still parked beneath her porch.
And she was gone.
That was when the money stopped mattering for a minute.
I sat on my front step and cried.
Not quietly.
The sheriff waited.
When I finally pulled myself together enough to finish the letter, Mrs.
Higgins had written that she did not want me to feel indebted to her.
She said she had spent too much of her life believing kindness had to be balanced like a checkbook.
A favor for a favor.
A debt for a debt.
Age had taught her otherwise.
Sometimes, she wrote, the only way to repay kindness is to pass it forward when you are able.
At the bottom, just above her signature, she had written the words she said to me the day before.
You’re a good girl.
Remember that.
I pressed the letter against my chest.
The sheriff cleared his throat.
“There’s one more thing.”
My heart immediately started pounding again.
“What now?”
“We need the original envelope and copies of everything inside photographed for the report.
You’ll get them back.”
I handed them over.
For the next half hour, the morning became painfully procedural.
