The Last Package
The signal was moving.
I was standing at my kitchen window with my grandson’s phone in my hand, watching a little blue dot on a map. For twenty minutes, it had sat perfectly still inside the beige ranch house next door. Inside Linda’s house.
Now it was moving.
Not toward her front door.
Toward her backyard.
Michael leaned over my shoulder. He frowned.
“Grandma,” he said. “She’s taking it somewhere.”
I set down my coffee cup. My hands were shaking. I’m eighty years old. My hands shake sometimes anyway. But this was different.
“Come on,” I said.
We hurried outside.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At eighty, I thought I’d seen every kind of dishonesty there was.
I was a school nurse for thirty-four years. At Mission Avenue Elementary in Carmichael, California. I’ve seen children lie about stomachaches to get out of spelling tests. I’ve seen parents lie about bruises. I’ve seen a principal lie about a budget to a school board while I sat in the third row knowing exactly where the money went.
I was married for fifty-one years to a man who never told me a single lie, as far as I know. Howard. He drove a city bus for thirty years. He died three years ago in his recliner during the seventh inning of a Giants game. They were losing. He’d have hated that.
I thought I’d seen it all.
Then my new neighbor, Linda, moved in.
She moved into the beige ranch house next door in March.
The Okafor family had lived there for twenty-two years. Lovely people. Their kids grew up in my backyard. When Dr. Okafor retired, they moved to Sacramento to be near their grandchildren, and the house sat empty for four months.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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