Vintage Advice Girl, part 3

Editors note: Advice Girl is currently out of the country. While she's away, we invite you to enjoy these snippets from her previous incarnation.

Dear Advice Girl,
Whenever I go away for a few days I come home to find that my apartment is cleaner then I left it. My landlady has repeatedly sworn not to have a key and while I like the idea of a magic cleaning fairy (I think they call them Brownies here), I just don't think I can believe it. There's never been anything missing and I like my landlady a lot, but I don't need her organizing my underwear. How do I approach this issue without insinuating she's a liar.
-Curiously Clean.

Dear At Least One of Us Is Clean,
You are wise to want to exercise caution. Good landladies here are rarer than sober middle-age men at a wedding, so you don’t want to burn any bridges unless absolutely necessary. Advice Girl believes a mild ambushing is appropriate. Simply lead your landlady to believe you’ll be away for a few days, then hide out with a good book and some Coca-Cola. When the mysterious key-bearing person with the inner-kelin disorder appears, you’ll have to act surprised, but then you’ll be able to gently but firmly insist they turn over their key. Otherwise, padlocks are cheap in the “stuff” section of your bazaar.