I smiled. “Rag away.”
Chapter 23
I half expected an article about a dark-street homicide, but when I finally found her obituary, it was an in-column write-up like any other. It was two days after her death and, having read and discarded the obits from each prior day, I’d started to wonder if the police had written me off as a crank caller. I imagined her still sitting, undiscovered, in that alley. But a mention of the West Norwood Women’s Shelter caught my eye. Her age fit. Lucy Edwards was her name. She’d died of pneumonia. It sounded so normal.
I barely noticed Ryan entering the break room, completely absorbed in the paper. The mental image of how we’d found the woman—the alley, the horrible condition of her clothes and belongings—was still so vivid, I guess I’d been looking for that description in her death notice. But of course it wouldn’t be there. They don’t tell you that someone died a terrible, lonely death, filthy and surrounded by squalor.
“What’s wrong?” Ryan said, sliding into the chair across from mine.
I glanced up, frowning. “Nothing. Why?”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re staring at the obits and looking like your best friend died.” He paused. “She didn’t, did she?”
“Of course not.” I looked back at the paper. “It’s just this woman …” I wanted to talk about it even though I knew Ryan was the wrong person. Zander was probably the best choice, though I wasn’t sure he’d really understand either.
“What about her?” He leaned forward, taking hold of the page to turn it so he could read. “This one? Lucy Edwards?”
I nodded and let him take the paper from me, figuring out what I wanted to say—what I could say—while he read.
He handed it back to me, shrugging. “What about her?”
“It just seemed weird to me,” I said slowly, “how she had all this history, this normal life. A job at a bank, a family—daughters, grandkids.” Things I never would have expected that sorry, rag-wrapped woman in the alley to have had. “And yet her last residence was a homeless shelter.”
Ryan looked confused. “So?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just wonder how it came to that. Why didn’t she wind up a happy grandmother, reading or playing with little kids or something instead of dying in a dirty, frozen alley?”
“Did it say that?” Ryan reached for the paper.
Shit. “No.” I pulled the paper away, waving my other hand dismissively. “It’s just an example. You know what I mean: how does someone with all the stuff of a normal life end up in a homeless shelter? Why didn’t her family help her?”
“Maybe she was on drugs. Or was an alcoholic,” he said. “Happens more than you’d think.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“If you’re so curious, go to the wake,” he said, smiling a little. “Spy on the relatives. That’s your thing anyway, right?”
“Ha-ha.”
“You could do it right out in the open,” Ryan said. “See who shows, what they’re like. Tell them you were …” He thought for a minute, then finished triumphantly, “A volunteer at the shelter!”
It wasn’t a bad idea. I’d never been to the actual service of someone I’d seen with the mark. Never felt like I’d be able to handle it. This was the one to go to, though. A test to be sure that what Zander and I had done was really, truly right.
“Listen”—he leaned in conspiratorially—“I’ll even go with you. We’ll say we were both volunteers come to pay our respects.”
“Oh no, you don’t have to do that, Ryan.” But it was too late, he was already swept up in the idea.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “Really.”
Maybe it’d be better to have him along. He might do the talking, letting me concentrate on who was there and what kind of woman Lucy Edwards had been, what had happened to bring her to where I’d found her. And, most important, whether redemption might have been possible if I’d given her another chance.
“Okay,” I told him.
We got there just after five thirty, the start of visiting hours.
“Ready?” he asked as we parked in the lot across from the funeral home’s heavy wooden door.
I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’d seen plenty of dead people and plenty of people with the mark. But I’d never seen a before and after.
“Come on,” he said, nudging my arm gently and smiling. “Don’t tell me you’re nervous? Not the Cassie Renfield who tiptoes around the funeral parlor, catlike, spying on unsuspecting mourners. I don’t believe it.”
“I guess I wouldn’t make much of a secret agent, would I?”
“Terrible,” Ryan agreed, getting out of the car.
I followed him to the front door, both of us walking quickly in the dark winter night. The truth is I was beyond nervous. About talking to her relatives and seeing her, but mostly that I might learn that Zander and I had made the wrong decision.
He’d thought I was ridiculous when I told him about the obituary. “Of course she had family,” he’d said. “What do you think—homeless people’s mothers and fathers and siblings just evaporate when things go south for them? Life is a series of decisions, Cassie. Somewhere along the line, this woman made one—or a bunch—that sent her life in the wrong direction. The other people in her family didn’t. It’s not hard to understand and it certainly doesn’t change the fact that her life was over. Done. Physically, emotionally, potentially.”
I could tell he was getting tired of reassuring me. But it did help. I always felt better in the face of his certainty.
The entry hall of the funeral home—one of the nicest in the city, according to Ryan—had polished wood floors covered with a dark Persian carpet. A brass chandelier glowed overhead. I scanned the mourners as we waited for our coat-check slips. There were about thirty people milling around, surprisingly well dressed in conservative suits and skirts, like any of the visitors I’d seen at Ludwig & Wilton. I tried to pick out the family members, but none resembled the slumped and slovenly woman I’d seen in the alley.
Until we passed the portrait. It was an oil painting, two girls and a boy in their early twenties, a dog, a fireplace. The girls looked so similar they might have been twins. Next to the painting were two smaller photographs. One was a group shot, a bride and groom in the center. The other was the three siblings again, in a similar pose, perhaps thirty years later. I stared at it, hardly able to believe that the dark-haired woman smiling tentatively at the camera was actually Lucy Edwards.