The humidity down in Bayou La Batre in late July has this heavy, greasy way of sticking to your skin the second you step off the porch. I was standing by the kitchen sink with a wet dish towel in my hand, trying to scrub thirty years of grease off the porcelain basin, when the mail carrier dropped three circulars and a thick white envelope into the metal box by the driveway. That envelope had the letterhead of Miller and Vance Attorneys at Law right across the top left corner in neat navy blue ink.

My aunt Clara had been gone for two weeks. I figured it was just another tax form or some bill for her plot down at St. Jude’s.

Instead, it was the keys to her old place on Cedar Street and a cashier’s check stub for $118,450.32 drawn on the Merchants and Planters Bank.

I remember staring at the numbers while the kitchen faucet leaked a slow, heavy drop right into the aluminum pot I was washing. Clink. Clink. Clara had lived alone in that swamp-side house since my uncle Earl passed away back in ninety-four, growing tomatoes that always tasted a little too much of sulfur and keeping the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun. Nobody visited her much. I went out there twice a month with groceries and stayed just long enough to listen to her complain about her knees and the state of the county roads.

The next morning, I drove out to the office of Mr. Vance.

He was an old man with yellow teeth and a desk made of cherry wood that had a circle burned into the varnish from a thousand coffee cups. He didn’t offer me a seat right away. He just slid a manila folder across the blotter and told me to read the codicil on page four.

“You take the house, the car, and the savings,” Vance said, his voice dry as corn husks. “Every last cent. But there’s a rider.”

I looked down at the paper. The words were typed on an old manual typewriter with an ‘e’ that sat a little crooked above the baseline. The condition was right there in black and white. I had to occupy the premises and could not sell, rent, or transfer the deed for exactly one year from the date of her passing. If I tried to put it on the market before then, the entire estate reverted to the diocesan orphanage in Mobile.

“Why?” I asked, looking up from the page. “The roof leaks into the pantry. The plumbing sounds like an animal dying in the walls. Why would she trap me out there?”

Vance just shrugged and pulled a tin of mints out of his vest pocket. “Clara was a precise woman. She left instructions explaining the condition. She said you needed to learn how the floorboards felt before you tried to walk away from them. That’s all she told me.”

I almost told him to keep the whole mess. I had a two-bedroom apartment over in Tillman’s Corner, a steady job at the marine supply yard down by the docks, and a girlfriend named Brenda who didn’t want anything to do with a swamp shack surrounded by cypress knees and mosquitoes the size of horseflies. But $118,450 was more money than I had ever seen in one place in my life.

It was a used truck. It was dental work I’d put off for four years. It was breathing room.

So I packed two suitcases into my trunk, told Brenda I’d see her on the weekends, and moved into Cedar Street by Friday night.

The first few weeks were just hot and quiet. I spent my days ripping up the stained gold carpet in the front parlor and hauling heavy bags of wet insulation out to the curb. The air inside the house always smelled of old damp wool and stale peppermint. Clara had left the place just as she used it, right down to the jars of pickled okra sitting in the pantry with handwritten labels from 1989. I kept waiting for something to happen, for a ghost or a hidden safe to jump out at me, but nothing did. Just the cicadas screaming in the oak trees and the brown water running out of the rusty pipes every time I turned on the shower.

Then came the second Tuesday in August.

It was raining hard enough to rattle the tin roof like someone throwing handfuls of gravel against the glass. I was looking for a roll of electrical tape in the kitchen, down by the base cabinets where Clara kept her cans of lye and old rags. I had to get down on my knees on the linoleum because my shoulder was acting up and I couldn’t reach far back into the dark corner under the sink.

My hand brushed against something taped to the underside of the bottom shelf.

It was a square piece of gray duct tape holding a small brass key against the particle board. When I pulled it down, the tape made a loud tearing sound that echoed in the empty kitchen. I didn’t even have to look far for the lock. There was a narrow drawer right beside the flour bin that I had tried to pull open twice before, only to find it sealed shut with a coat of yellowed varnish.

I slid the brass key into the small vertical slot. It turned with a dry, heavy snap.

Inside that drawer, there wasn’t much. Just a ledger book with a black oilcloth cover and a single sheet of lined notebook paper folded into four squares. The ink was faded, written in Clara’s cramped, pointy hand.

*If you are reading this, you stayed the thirty days like I knew you would,* the note said. *You think you’re smart for taking the money. You think the house is just wood and nails. Call Arthur. He’s been waiting since the summer of eighty-six. Don’t tell him where you found the number.*

Underneath the note was a list of six names. Five of them had lines drawn through them in thick red grease pencil. The sixth name was at the bottom, accompanied by a local phone number with the old 251 area code and an address out on the Dog River road.

I sat there on the kitchen floor for a long time with the rain beating down on the gutters. My knees hurt from the hard wood. The house felt suddenly very large and very empty around me, like the walls were leaning inward just an inch or two. I didn’t want to make the call. I wanted to burn the paper in the woodstove and pretend I never looked under the shelf. But my thumb kept tracing the edge of the grease pencil mark on the fifth name.

I went into the front room where the landline still sat on an old milk crate because I hadn’t set up my cell service out in the hollow yet. The plastic receiver felt greasy in my palm. I dialed the seven digits very slowly, listening to the clicks of the rotary mechanism even though the phone was push-button.

It rang four times. On the fifth ring, a click came through, followed by the sound of a heavy television playing in the background somewhere, maybe an old game show or the evening news.

“Hello?” a man’s voice said. It was thin and cracked, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who hadn’t used it much that day.

My throat felt tight. I swallowed hard before I could get the words out.

“I’m calling about Clara,” I said. “Her name was Clara Vance. My name is Toby. I’m her nephew.”

There was no intake of breath. There was no sound at all from the other end of the line, not even the television anymore, just a low, hollow hiss like wind blowing through an empty pipe. The silence stretched out for so long I pulled the receiver away from my ear to check if the call had dropped.

Then the old man spoke again. He didn’t sound mad. He didn’t sound surprised. He just sounded like a man who had been sitting in a dark room for thirty years waiting for a clock to strike.

“Did she finally give you the house?” he asked.