Regarding Anna by Florence Osmund

dear?”
    “You have no idea.”
    Minnie got up to answer a ringing phone.
    “Bob says your car should be fine now. Something about your idle. If you still can’t start it, he said to call him back.”
    “Minnie, can we keep in touch?”
    “You think I’d spend this much time with you if—”
    “Do you think the winterberry bush will make it?”
    “I doubt it, but it won’t be because I didn’t try everything to save it.”
    Probably best that I didn’t further that thread of conversation—too much opportunity for it going downhill.

NINE
    Ties to Mexico
    “This is stupid,” he said. “I didn’t see anything.”
    The man was not happy to see us at his door on an early Monday morning, especially after I told him he was being called as a witness in a mugging case. I had brought Danny with me to serve him the subpoena, since the address was in a sketchy neighborhood on the West Side.
    “Then your testimony won’t take very long,” I explained.
    He raised his voice. “You’re taking me from my work, lady. I have a family to feed.”
    The reason for being subpoenaed usually didn’t matter—most people were not happy to be served, so I was always ready for a bad reaction.
    Danny took a step closer to him. “Just who do you think you’re talking to...sir?”
    “Give me the damn paper,” the man said. He signed it and thrust it back to me.
    Had Danny not been there, I would have had to have put up with that man’s rant for a lot longer, and then he still might not have signed.
    After dropping Danny off at a bus stop, I returned to my office to prepare a list of things to check out at City Hall where I planned to go a little later in the day. But before I knew it, it was noon, and I had six new subpoenas, three skip traces, and another runaway teen. I decided to defer my trip to City Hall.
    At six o’clock, I called it a day. Before I went upstairs to my apartment, I grabbed several items from the Attic Finds evidence table thinking maybe something would strike me as important in light of what Minnie had recently told me.
    Once upstairs, I ate an overdone Swanson TV dinner, tuned in the radio to a jazz station, and sorted the documents I had found in my parents’ attic into three piles: receipts, bank statements, and contacts.
    There were roughly fifty receipts bundled together with a thick rubber band—all related to the house on Belle Plaine Avenue, now Minnie’s house. I sorted them by type and date and ended up with three piles—home improvements, rent, and purchases. The home-improvement receipts went all the way back to 1939, and some of them were so vague it was hard to tell what they were for. Like the one that said “basement build-out” under Description of Work. What did that mean? How did one build out a basement? Weren’t basements built when the house was built? You either had one or you didn’t.
    I was even more confused upon noticing that the basement build-out receipt had my parents’ Ferdinand Street address on it and not Anna’s. I fanned through all the receipts—only that one had the Ferdinand address. It was dated July 14, 1943. I had just seen my first birthday.
    I moved on to the rent receipts, which were just scraps of paper, but they included dates—for every month in 1942 and January of 1943. Anna died on January 23, 1943. There were no names on the receipts, just initials.
    MS   I assumed this was Mark Smith. Thirteen receipts, one for each month, each one dated the first day of the month.
    HS   Henry Sikes, aka Mouse-face. Ten receipts between March 1942 and January 1943, each one dated between the first of the month and the tenth. On one was written late again.
    DR   Dorian Ross, the cross-dresser. Six receipts between July and December 1942, each one dated toward the end of the month.
    The initials matched the names of the boarders Minnie had given me and supported her statement that they all lived there when she bought the house. This was important—I