Someone to watch over me

and pointed to a doorway. “In there.”
    It was the main bedroom. The furniture was once good, but was shabby now. There was a large bed between the two windows facing the hill behind, covered by a lightweight summer quilt in tiny squares of yellow and green. It was neatly made. A yellow gathered fabric hung to the floor beneath the quilt. A rocking chair in the corner of the room had the same quilting and ruffle on the cushion.
    Walker leaned down carefully and lifted the ruffle, shining a flashlight under the bed. It was dusty, but there was a partially clear area where Ralph had dragged out the satchel on the far side. Another baby doll had found its way there, as well, and a dusty little wooden truck with a string to pull it.
    He realized that the surfaces of the house that would be seen by visitors had been cleaned, but the other parts hadn’t. That’s what happened, he supposed, when good housewives had to work so much harder than they had had to before 1929.
    He carefully examined the rest of the room. He checked drawers in the tall chest, respect- fully lifting neat piles of clothing to see if something was hidden under them. Mrs. Anderson’s nightwear was old-fashioned and carefully patched. So were Donald’s underwear and the freshly laundered and rather stiffly ironed dresses in the looming wardrobe. Two outworn old men’s suits hung at the other end of the rod. Some plaid shirts and work trousers of Donald’s were laid across the top of a treadle sewing machine in the corner. Apparently Roxanne, now a widow, was planning to use the fabric to make clothes for her children out of them. A few framed ancestors, stony-faced and grim, stared down from the top of the wardrobe with disapproval.
    The center of the room had a blue hooked rug, thin and flat from long wear, but Walker still pulled it up around all the edges. He found nothing but a brass hairpin.
    Ralph had stood the whole time in the doorway, rocking gently back and forth and only moving his eyes to watch his boss. “Nothing else, huh?”
    Walker didn’t answer. He just brushed past Ralph to look over the other two bedrooms. One was a tiny guest room, apparently occupied by Eugene and his child: a single high bed and a smaller one on rollers that apparently could be put under the high one. A washstand and a towel bar matched a pitcher for water at the edge of the sink, with a small yellow bar of soap and a small square mirror for shaving. There wasn’t even room for a rug on the floor.
    At the other end of the hallway was another large bedroom with three beds very close together and a toy box, bookshelf, and single night-stand with a lamp shared by two of the beds. A very small bathroom had been recently installed between the two larger bedrooms, probably the last improvement to the house before money and jobs were in short supply.
    Walker went back downstairs and thoroughly examined the kitchen as well. A big badly dented table filled the center of the room, and half a dozen mismatched wooden chairs were around it. A small icebox. A fairly new range, spotlessly clean. A pantry behind a wide white door. Walker looked through everything and found nothing unusual. The pantry was sparsely supplied with flour in colorful cotton bags, home-canned vegetables, and baskets of fresh vegetables from Roxanne’s garden. A canning steamer and empty bottles were on a top shelf, along with the necessary tongs, funnels, and dishcloths. An old telephone was on the wall of the kitchen. He picked up the handset; there was no sound. Mrs. Anderson had told them the service had been cut off.
    He went to the back door and looked out the window. Mrs. Anderson was standing next to it. He tapped lightly. She opened the door.
    “We need to look in the garage and shed.“
    “I’ll take the children out front. I presume you didn’t find anything.“
    “Your husband’s satchel,“ Walker said. Roxanne, who had been half turned away, spun around to face him. “Where?“
    “Under your bed.“
    “What? No!“
    “We’ll talk about it later,“ Walker said. Mrs. Anderson’s face had become so white he was half afraid she was going to faint. But she pulled herself together and herded the children away.
    There was an old Ford on blocks in the garage, probably because the Andersons could no longer afford gas. Oily rags and a length of thin rope to hang clothes to dry were on hooks on the wall. Enormous tin buckets to wash and rinse the clothes were against the far