TWELVE

Frannie screamed. I set Rocky on the chair opposite the desk and put my hands on the senior law partner’s shoulders. It took both Frannie and me, but we pulled Mr. Stanley back into an upright, sitting position. His skin was cold to the touch. His eyes stared forward. A round hole was in the middle of his forehead. I didn’t need to check his pulse to know he was dead.

I did anyway.

It’s not a good feeling to recognize that in a situation like this, you’re the more experienced one. I turned to Frannie, who had lost all color from her face. “Go out to the front desk and call 911,” I instructed. “Tell them your name and where we are. Tell them what we found.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I need this job. I support three kids, and I can’t afford to be fired. I have to get out of here.”

“You can’t leave. Neither of us can. Nobody is going to fire you because of this.”

She pressed the master keys into my hand. “I can’t take that chance.” She turned around and ran out of the building.

Where I’d been too worried about Frannie to leave her alone, she apparently had none of the same compunctions about me. I didn’t like it here in the offices of Stanley & Abbott. I didn’t want to stay here. I wanted to leave as badly as she did, but I had a responsibility now.

I picked up the receiver to the phone on Mr. Stanley’s desk. There was no dial tone. I followed the cord to the jack. It had been ripped out of the wall.

Mr. Stanley was beyond the need for protection. I wasn’t. I scooped up Rocky and went down the hall to the front desk. This phone worked. I called emergency and reported the body. They instructed me to wait where I was. I looked out the front doors and saw Frannie huddled in the front seat of her car. I admired her for staying despite what she feared about her job security.

While I waited for the arrival of the first officer on the scene, I stayed in the front lobby of the law firm. The offices were silent, but that did little to remove my fears. I didn’t know enough about rigor mortis to guestimate how long Mr. Stanley had been dead. His office had been cold, colder than the rest of the building. Residual chills from the experience ran down my spine. I wrapped my arms around my body and rubbed my arms to make the gooseflesh go away. More than anything else I wanted to go outside and stand in a patch of sunlight to warm myself up.

The master keys that Frannie had gotten from Mr. Stanley’s office sat on the desk in front of me. They were already covered in my fingerprints from having carried them this far. If the keys with my name on them were inside the desk drawer, I wanted them out. I’d tell Tex and take whatever lecture or punishment came my way, but I wasn’t going to become collateral damage in whatever was happening around me. I unlocked the drawer. There were two smaller sets of keys inside the drawer. Madison Night was written on a small disc that hung from the silver keyring on one set. I picked both sets up and dropped them into my handbag. I locked the drawer with the master keys and waited with Rocky on my lap.

The first officers and paramedics arrived a few minutes apart from each other. I pointed down the hall and told the paramedics where they’d find Mr. Stanley. Officer Sirokin waited with me in the lobby. He didn’t ask me any questions, and I didn’t volunteer any information. Aside from the grunting and small talk of the paramedics down the hall, the building was silent.

Tex was the last person to arrive. He walked in and scanned the interior. I waited for him to look at me, but he didn’t. I knew he’d get to me in time, and I was on edge until that happened. He consulted with Sirokin and then with the paramedics. When he finally got to me, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

“Alice Sweet’s memorial service was never planned. The cemetery is burying her today.”

“Right now?” I asked.

He nodded. He put his hand on my arm in a comforting gesture and spoke in a soft, soothing tone. “You can leave here as soon as I take your statement. What do I need to know?” he asked.

We stared at each other for a few moments. I considered the many ways I could answer the question. There were facts, and there were rumors. And if I was going to get to the cemetery before Alice’s casket was put into the ground and covered with dirt, I was going to have to stick to the facts. I didn’t know why being at the cemetery so Alice wasn’t buried alone was so important to me, but it was. It was the only thing I could focus on.

“When I arrived, the offices were empty except for the cleaning lady. Her name is Frannie. She’s in her car in the parking lot, and she’s scared she’s going to lose her job over this, though she did nothing wrong. You can get a statement from her and I’m sure it will match mine. She’s the one who found Mr. Stanley’s body. She went into his office for the master keys and screamed. That’s when I went in. The office is cold, like the A/C was left on high. Your team will be able to confirm all of this.”

“Why are you here?”

“John was having a set of keys made for me, and after what you and I found this morning, I wanted to make sure they weren’t left lying around.”

“Did you find them?”

I reached into my handbag and pulled out the set with my name on them. Tex held out his open palm, and I dropped them in.

“That it?”

“Frannie told me some rumors about the office.”

“We’ll talk about the rumors later.” He pointed toward the door. “Go to the cemetery. I’ll be in touch.”

I left the law offices and got into my car with Rocky. I drove a mile away from the site and then pulled over to the side of the road to calm down. It was two hours earlier in California. Hudson would be at his job site, but I needed to hear his comforting voice.

“Hey, Lady,” he said. The sheer fact that he answered my calls the same way every single time was like a dose of calm. I closed my eyes and pretended I was right there with him.

“Hi,” I said.

“You don’t usually call during work hours. Everything okay?”

“Not really.” I pictured John Sweet’s body on the landing of the pajama factory and Mr. Stanley’s body inside his office. I told myself there was nothing Hudson could do from California that would change what had happened or what I’d seen. “That’s kind of why I called. Can you—can you distract me for a few minutes? Tell me about your life out in California. How’s the job going?”

“Jimmy’s got the job under control. I drove up to Hollywood yesterday morning and had a couple of meetings. Weird town. You should hear these people pitch ideas.”

I leaned back against the interior of my car and cuddled Rocky against my chest. He responded to the sound of Hudson’s voice coming through the phone and nosed the screen. I put the call on speaker, but the passing traffic quickly drowned out Hudson’s voice. I took the phone off speaker and caught the tail end of his sentence. “…are our names.”

“I didn’t catch that,” I said. “What about our names?”

“I was saying the producers want to change everything that happened in Dallas and just about the only thing left in the script are our names.”

“I guess that’s something.”

“Yeah. That woman who came by your studio might know more than I thought. The latest pitch had a romance between me and Officer Nasty.” He laughed, as though that were funny.

“Why you?”

“They have her as the officer investigating the case. Thought that would give it a different slant. Female lieutenant. Apparently strong female leads are hot right now. In their version, she’s the sister of the victim.”

“What about Tex?”

“There is no Tex.”

“How can there be no Tex? He was just as involved as everybody else.”

“They think it’ll play better with one clear leading man, and that’s me.”

“Am I in there anywhere?”

“Sure. You’re one of the blondes.” He laughed again. “Listen, this isn’t a great connection. How about I call you later? By then Rocky might be a cat.”

I ran my hand over Rocky’s fur and felt unwelcome emotions well up within me. “Sure,” I said. “I’m not sure what my afternoon is going to be like, but I’ll be here.”

We hung up. The anxiety I’d felt that morning returned. I’d wanted my conversation with Hudson to act as a distraction from the crime scenes I’d seen, but it had the opposite effect. I felt unsettled and alone.

And angry. And I knew why.

For the past year, I’d been giving away pieces of myself. First when I sold the apartment building that had been my sole source of income when I moved to Dallas. It hadn’t felt like a loss because Hudson had been the buyer and giving up the building felt like a small price to pay for what I gained in terms of a relationship. But with Hudson in California and me in Texas, the relationship felt intangible.

My usual MO when life got difficult was to throw myself into work. Mad for Mod had been born out of a love of mid-century design and a desire to lose myself in a different era, but there was no escaping reality. And with business demands growing more difficult every day, I’d hired Connie to help. Mad for Mod was no longer my refuge. Alice’s death had come at a time when I least expected it, and while on some level I knew an eighty-six-year-old woman only had so much life left in her, I’d wanted to believe she’d be around forever. I hadn’t even had a chance to say a proper goodbye, not to her, and not at the memorial service that had been promised but had never taken place.

I felt like pieces of myself were blowing away, like fuzz from a dandelion that gets caught in a gust of wind. My apartment building belonging to Hudson. Mad for Mod being managed by Connie. Alice’s death left my morning swims lonelier than before, and now Tex was keeping me away from the one thing she’d given me to remember her by. If I couldn’t grab hold of something, I feared those pieces of me would be lost forever.

I drove to Greenwood Cemetery. The sun was strong, but I couldn’t get warm. Rocky sat on the passenger-side floor, curled in a ball. Every time I looked down at him, I found his large round eyes staring right back up at me. He’d seen every horrible thing I’d seen that morning. He couldn’t know what it all meant, but he seemed to sense how I felt.

Greenwood Cemetery was a picturesque graveyard that had been funded with money from a Republic of Texas Grant. Started in the late 1800s, it sat in a part of Dallas called Uptown. Though it remained one of the most eerily peaceful landmarks in the city, it went largely underappreciated by the urbanites who preferred wine bars, gourmet taco stands, and cupcake shops that moved into and out of the neighborhood with alarming frequency.

I parked my car in a space outside of the black wrought-iron fence and led Rocky to the gates. Confederate flags marked graves of soldiers who had fought for the South, but beyond them, in a quiet corner, was a newly turned plot. A small headstone read, “Alice Sweet 1932-2018.” For everything Alice had been in her life, her tombstone lacked the words to describe her accomplishments or what she’d meant to others. I looked at the plot next to hers, expecting to see George’s name. But instead, there was a vacant space. Alice, step-grandmother, stepmother, friend, and wife, had been buried alone. Something about that hit me harder than the two dead bodies I’d seen that same day.

The same shaking I’d felt at the pajama factory came back, this time in my upper arms first, traveling down to my hands. My legs shook too, barely able to keep me standing. I dropped down to the grass alongside the freshly turned dirt and felt tears run down my cheeks and drip onto my polyester dress. Despite our age difference, Alice and I had been friends because we understood each other’s choices. I never once questioned why she hadn’t remarried. She never once questioned why I was more interested in protecting my own life than in sharing it with someone else. Both of us, through circumstance, had become self-centered in a way strangers didn’t understand. I wasn’t focused on me because I thought I was more important than the rest of the world. I was focused on me because I felt invisible. I had no legacy for when I died. My company would dissolve. My inventory would become garbage. Nobody would remember the woman in the out-of-fashion clothes from the sixties who picked up discarded furniture from street corners before the trash pickup came.

For the first time in years, I felt my loneliness to my core. Kneeling on a fresh grave only hours after someone I’d known had been buried acted like a portal to all the suppressed emotions over death and destruction I’d never properly released. My parents. Past loves. Victims around Dallas who were little more than names in a newspaper. The tears flowed freely as I thought of how lonely these last few years had felt.

Deep, deep within me, I knew I wasn’t crying over my parents, or Alice, or my first real relationship that had left me too emotionally scarred to open myself up to Hudson, who by all accounts was perfect for me. I was crying for the loss of the person I’d been before all of that had happened. The person who knew how to love and be loved, who knew how to take care of others, who could be a friend and a companion and a soul mate. There was a time when I wanted all those things. The death of those dreams had occurred without me even knowing it. I was less than a year from my fiftieth birthday, and I was more painfully aware of the holes in my life than my life itself.

I cried until there was nothing left: no heartache, no longing, no loneliness. I didn’t know how many visitors to the cemetery had seen me on the ground by the corner of Alice’s grave. I didn’t care. Until today, I hadn’t allowed myself to see my future. But today, what I saw came with more clarity than I could have wished for. I wasn’t a victim. I was alive, but people in my life hadn’t been so lucky. Alice, John, Suzy, Mr. Stanley, and countless others hadn’t had a choice about their futures.

When my emotions were spent, I pushed myself up to a standing position and dusted the dirt from my dress. Blade prints of grass had left my bare flesh with the appearance of fossilized foliage. I ran my hands over my tights back and forth to stimulate circulation and then did the same for my face. I suspected I looked subpar thanks to my meltdown. But what I had lost in terms of tears, I’d gained in terms of perspective. No more feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t too late to change my life. I’d done it once before, and I could do it again. I just needed a direction.

My car keys were caught inside my handbag on the second set I’d taken from Stanley & Abbott. I tugged to free them, and the backup set flew out of my bag and landed next to Alice’s headstone.

I had never been the type to believe in signs. I liked to feel I was responsible for whatever I did, that I had control over my decisions. That it had been my choice to leave Pennsylvania after a painful breakup with the man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. That I’d been the one to prioritize physical therapy in the ensuing weeks after tearing my ACL while skiing away from him. That moving to Dallas, starting my own business, finding a handyman and ultimately shifting that relationship from professional to personal—all had been at my own behest. But seeing the keys I wasn’t supposed to have fly out of my bag and land next to Alice’s headstone, right after wondering what I should do next, gave me pause.

I looked up at the sky. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

It was equally possible that the torn ACL led me to morning swims, which led to my friendship with Alice. Which brought me to standing exactly where I was, in the middle of a graveyard, wondering if something I’d done in my past had brought me to where I was today.

To be honest, I could see both sides of the argument.

Rocky retrieved my keys. We left the graveyard and climbed into my car. I backed out of the parking spot and drove toward Alice’s house.

It was early afternoon, but cars were starting to back up by the entrance ramps. I headed northwest toward a part of town called Merriman Park and eased my Alfa Romeo off the street and into Alice’s long narrow driveway. I’d been here before for social visits, but it had been a while. She lived alone and much preferred to find a local coffee shop where we could spend our time. I quickly learned that “coffee shop” meant “bakery” where Alice could indulge her sweet tooth while pretending she was there for the caffeine.

I pushed aside any lingering sadness over the knowledge that I’d never meet Alice at a coffee shop again and put on my metaphorical Mad for Mod decorator’s hat. Entering a newly vacant property was part of my day-to-day routine. Alice had even had me walk most of her house once because she wanted to hear what I saw when I looked at the interior she’d long since tuned out.

I unlocked the front door and stepped onto the terrazzo tile in the foyer. Unlike a property recently staged by a realtor, Alice’s house still looked like it had when she was alive. Coats hung from a row of hooks in the hallway, and a tall planter in the shape of a moai sat next to a bamboo table and held umbrellas. I walked through the hallway, past the living room, and into the kitchen.

Alice always said the heart of a house was the kitchen.

I unlocked the door at the back of the house and let Rocky loose in the yard. When I turned back to face the kitchen, it immediately became obvious that she’d been working on her correspondence when she’d died. A wooden box filled with thick ivory stationery sat on the table next to an address book and a sheet of self-adhesive stamps. I walked around to the back of the chair where it appeared Alice had been sitting and looked down at the table.

That’s where I saw the letter. It was addressed to me and was eerily familiar. It was a draft of the letter John Sweet had given me at the law office, the one in the sealed envelope with the key to the unit at Hernando’s Hide-It-Away that had led me to the gun. I read over the words in the last communication Alice had had for me, and once again I was touched by her honesty and her polite urging of me to live my life without regrets. But something niggled at my brain, something small that I couldn’t place. I picked up the page and read it three times before it struck me what was wrong.

The handwriting on the letter on Alice’s dining room table wasn’t the same as the writing on the letter I’d been given by her now deceased grandson.