Bubba Sewell’s BMW pulled up to the curb, and I took a deep breath and walked toward it.

He handed me the keys. My hand closed over them. It felt like a formal investiture. “There’s no problem with you going on and working in this house now, clearing it out or preparing it for sale or whatever you want to do, it belongs to you and no one says different. I’ve advertised for anyone with claims on the estate to come forward, and so far no one has. But of course we can’t spend any of the money,” he admonished me with a wagging finger. “The house bills are still coming to me as executor, and they will until probate is settled.”

This was like being a week away from your birthday when you were six.

“This one,” he said, pointing to one key, “opens the dead bolt on the front door. This one opens the punch lock on the front door. This little one is to Jane’s safe deposit box at Eastern National, there’s a little jewelry and a few papers in it, nothing much.”

I unlocked the door and we stepped in.

“Shit,” said Bubba Sewell in an unlawyerly way.

There was a heap of cushions from the living room chairs thrown around. I could look through the living room into the kitchen and see similar disorder there.

Someone had broken in.

One of the rear windows, the one in the back bedroom, had been broken. It had been a pristine little room with chaste twin beds covered in white chenille. The wallpaper was floral and unobtrusive, and the glass was easy to sweep up on the hardwood floor. The first things I found in my new house were the dustpan and the broom, lying on the floor by the tall broom closet in the kitchen.

“I don’t think anything’s gone,” Sewell said with a good deal of surprise, “but I’ll call the police anyway. These people, they read the obituaries in the paper and go around breaking into the houses that are empty.”

I stood holding a dustpan full of glass. “So why isn’t anything missing?” I asked. “The TV is still in the living room. The clock-radio is still in here, and there’s a microwave in the kitchen.”