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sleep, and there wasn't nothin' out of line later when I got up along about midnight to drain my radiator. That's the problem with getting older—leastwise it is for me. Have to get up and down time and again overnight to use the bathroom."
    "So you say you saw nothing unusual that night?"
    "Nope. Not a thing."
    "Were you and Agnes friends?" Sue asked.
    "Hardly." Becky shrugged. "We was neighbors. Agnes weren't what you'd call friends with nobody from around here. Acted sort of high and mighty, which was kinda funny. I never could understand her bein' snooty, considering she never did nothin' but work as somebody else's fetch and carry. No. Me and her wasn't friends."
    "When's the last time you saw her?"
    Becky Lawrence's eyes narrowed. "To talk to her, you mean?"
    Sue nodded.
    "Must've been Sunday a week or so before she died. Came over with a pile of dog shit in a paper bag and dumped it right in the middle of our front yard. Right here beside the front step. I asked her what the hell she thought she was doing? She said Major and Tuffy had left some calling cards in her yard and she was just returning the favor. Made me mad as hell. Our dogs do their jobs right out in our own backyard. The mess she brung over here wasn't even theirs. These are little dogs and that crap was way too big."
    That seemed like as good a time as any to put in my two cents' worth. "Mrs. Lawrence," I said. "A sizable sum of money was found hidden in Mrs. Ferman's garage. Did she ever talk to you about money?"
    "Are you kidding? The way that woman talked, you'da thought she was one step away from the poor-house, from bein' one of them bag ladies you see all the time downtown. Agnes was forever saying how tight things were and asking to borrow stuff—like tools or lawn mowers—rather than forking over money to buy one of her own. And like as not, if she borrowed a tool, she borrowed the man that went with it as well. After her husband Lyle passed on— and he was a good man, by the way. Far better'n Agnes deserved, if you ask me. After Lyle died, her grass would of growed hip deep if Malcolm and some of the other men in the neighborhood hadn't taken pity on her and mowed it. Agnes may have had all kinds of money in her garage, but she was tight as hell. She never paid nobody nothing for mowing that grass. Not one red cent, not even for gas to put in the mower."
    "It sounds as though you didn't like her much," I observed.
    Becky Lawrence sniffed. "You could say that. Agnes Ferman's gone. If you ask me, the whole neighborhood's lucky to be shuck of her."

Three
    As Detective Danielson and I headed north toward Everett on 1-5, there wasn't a whole lot of conversation. Sue seemed to be brooding while I started thinking about something she had said earlier. "No services," I said. "Doesn't that strike you as odd?"
    "What?" Sue asked, sounding as though my question had summoned her back from a million miles away.
    "No services," I repeated. "When my grandfather died, my grandmother chose not to have a funeral. She said that most of their friends were already gone and, at their ages, there were far too many funerals. But Jonas Piedmont was in his nineties when he died. My grandmother and I were the only close relatives in the area. On the other hand, Agnes Ferman was only in her late sixties. That's relatively young by comparison, and she has both a brother and a sister right here in the Seattle area."
    "Maybe the whole family has an aversion to funerals," Sue suggested. "I don't like them very much myself."
    With that, Sue turned away and continued to stare out the window. Since she didn't seem interested in talking, I shut up and drove. Traffic moved along smoothly until just north of the I-5/I-405 interchange at Mill Creek. There a combination of express-lane construction and a multivehicle fender bender turned the freeway into a parking lot.
    I stopped the Caprice behind a diesel-belching eighteen-wheeler, switched off the engine, leaned back against