Page 58 of Shake the Habit

“What?”

“The key we found,” I reminded Caleb. “Oh, wait.” I started scrabbling in the papers at my feet, the ones I’d designated as “keep.” “You have to pay to rent safety deposit boxes and the fee might show up on her bank statements.”

“How do you know?”

“My nana kept her jewelry in the bank, her engagement ring and a pair of diamond earrings my grandpa had given her. When she died, my mom and I went with the key to get them out and we were allowed to because…I don’t remember exactly, but it was something about us being the next of kin. That would be you, too.” I ran my finger down the page of debits and credits.

“Don’t get too excited about this,” Caleb warned again. “My mother wasn’t the type to value nice jewelry. If there hadbeen family pieces, she would have sold them rather than safeguarding them in a bank.”

He hadn’t known about the candy bars, though. Those weren’t on the same scale as diamonds, but it showed that the woman could keep secrets. “She didn’t care about her house,” I noted. “She wasn’t even interested in ersatz jewelry, and she didn’t have nice clothes.” That was definitely true, because I’d helped Caleb to clean out her closet. There was hardly anything that was in good-enough shape to donate. “She didn’t have a nice car. No offense.” I patted the dashboard of the old truck. “She hardly spent any money, as far as the bank statements show.”

“She paid for me to go to high school. I thought I was on scholarship but I found out that she paid the full tuition.”

“But she didn’t buy the uniform you had to wear,” I noted, and he nodded. “She didn’t give you money to go to college, either.”

“She’s hard to explain. She certainly didn’t care about the same things that you and I do, like eating well. We used to get sick a few times a year and I’m sure it was either from rotten food or something in the water. According to the guys digging the new well, the former one was contaminated by runoff from the chicken coop and probably also from the old septic system.”

I gagged and remembered washing my hands in that water. They’d have gotten cleaner if I’d rubbed them in the dirt.

“She cared a lot about her plants,” Caleb continued. “She cared a lot about her orchard.”

“It doesn’t look very healthy to me. My dad might be able to do something,” I suggested.

“I should get an arborist to come out, somebody who knows about fruit trees. In the years before her death, it seems like she had slowed down a lot compared to when I was a kid. Back then, she spent hours in the orchard and in the barn.”

“Doing what? What would need that much time?” I asked.

“She was working on developing new plants, I think. She never talked about it.”

I remembered all the invoices for grafting tape and fertilizer, and what Aunt Paula had said about Lara-Lee’s botany experiments in high school. Then I made myself stop thinking about Aunt Paula, because it was still too soon. I was still too mad at her. She’d done as I’d asked and hadn’t been trying to contact me, but I figured that she was still trying to get information via Caleb. He and I had spent a lazy Sunday in the back yard together, not working on much except a little weeding but during that time, I’d watched him check his phone a bunch and frown at it behind his fist as he responded.

“My mother was almost obsessed by her trees,” he continued now. “That was how I knew something was really, really wrong with her. I had called and mentioned something about mulching and she didn’t understand me. I flew home that weekend.”

Because that was the kind of person he was: he dropped what he was doing to help the woman who’d told him at age eighteen that there was no room for him in her life anymore. My mom had been right, and Lara-Lee Woodson was a witch who hadn’t deserved her son. I shook my head and scrutinized the bank statement.

“There it is.” I finally tapped my nail on one of the sheets of paper. I’d painted Sir’s and my own for his party, and they looked great. “I found an entry for an automatic debit for a safety deposit box rental. It’s at the same bank where she had the checking account with so much money in it.”

“I gave a lot of that away,” he mentioned.

“What?”

“I didn’t want her money,” Caleb explained. “I gave it to a few different charities in the area.Most went to establish a scholarship in her name for girls interested in science at her former high school.”

“That was very generous of you,” I said. “Very! But what about the cost of all these renovations?” I’d been feeling better about that because I’d thought he was using his inheritance to pay for it all.

“I’m doing ok,” he answered, but then glanced over at me, around Sir’s Olympic swimming pool-sized head. “You don’t need to worry about me running out of money.”

Fine, but I was going to insist that he take rent from me.

“I’m not going to accept any rent,” he told me next, and my jaw dropped when I looked back at him. He saw and started to laugh. “It was obvious what you were going to say.”

“Why do you do that?”

“Read your mind?”

“No, why do you cover up your face?” I demonstrated how he laughed with his fist over his mouth. “I feel like I don’t get to see you smile enough.”

He dropped his hand. “It’s just habit.”

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