My cousin was a lonely and sick woman who lived in a small village not far from the big city where I lived and worked. Whenever possible, I would visit her and bring her food and medicine. We didn’t have a particularly warm relationship, but she had only me, because her parents were long gone. I didn’t think about who would get her house later, we didn’t talk about it, but when she was gone, I took over her small possessions.
It took a long time to organize the funeral and inheritance, and although my sister left us in early spring, my girlfriend and I at her former house came in the summer. We had a general cleaning to do. My sister had some antique services at home, which she had inherited from her grandmother, and a large book library, but Alice threw out everything, without sparing. She didn’t think anything that couldn’t be sold for a lot of money now was worth our attention, and she didn’t want to bring that junk into town, either.
I did more cleaning outside and on the veranda, and Alice took over the bedrooms. She went through the closets, and in one of them, on the top shelf, she saw a casket. Since she wasn’t expecting such a find, she called me. The box was quite large and heavy, and inside was a variety of jewelry and money tied up with a rubber band – my sister’s modest savings. Legally, it was all mine now, and I thought about going through the jewelry, for there must have been something from her mother and our grandmother… But Alice wouldn’t let me do that. She immediately lit up the idea to go home and take it to a jeweler or a pawnshop to be checked. She was in such a hurry that I let her go alone, and I wanted to finish with the cleaning in two days and come too.
When I got back to town the next day, my girlfriend was long gone. She didn’t answer the phone, her things weren’t at home, and neither was the box. I don’t know if it was the heat of the moment or if the appraiser’s estimate was too high, but she had stolen from me, and that was a fact.
At first I was very angry and tried to go to the police, but my mother talked me out of it.
“All your stuff will come back to you, and you don’t need your stuff,” she said.
I started putting the house in order, getting ready to put it up for sale. I spent a lot of time in the village because of that, and slept in one of my sister’s bedrooms. It was nice there, quiet, quiet, until one evening I was frightened by an intruder – a neighbor from the house across the street. It turned out that no one sleeps in the village, because a woman’s body was caught in the river nearby. And the drowned woman clutched to her chest a box with jewelry and money. The neighbor recognized the box, he had seen one at my sister’s house. He wanted to ask me if it was missing, so I played dumb and said I didn’t know anything about the box.
I don’t know if I did the right thing, but his words made my hair stand on end and I felt as if I didn’t want that box back. I suspected that Alice had been caught in the river, but I was afraid I would be accused of something else. If they come to me with questions, then I will tell them what happened, but I will not take back the box. Maybe it’s all silly superstition and scaremongering, and I’m winding myself up, but what if it’s for a reason? Alice had nothing to do in that village after she ran away from me, so why was she going?
