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the rug. He took Gerald’s finger and wrote in the soap, all of this
     because he hoped to persuade us the man was killed by someone else. David must have
     borrowed all those corny devices from old
Hawaii Five-O
reruns.”
    “Up yours!” he snapped. “You can’t prove a word of this.”
    “I think I can,” I said equably.
    “David killed Gerald?” Emily said, blinking those big innocent eyes.
    I shook my head. “It was Pat,” I replied. “Patricia.”
    Everyone turned simultaneously and stared, except for the couple in the rear.
    “Who?” the hubby asked the wife.
    “Me?!” Pat said. “Well, that’s ridiculous. Why would I do such a thing?”
    “You’ll have to tell us that yourself,” I said. “I suspect you fell in love with him
     years ago, when you played the Haig and Haig Mixed Team Tournament back in ’sixty-six.
     You told me yourself you were on the LPGA circuit back then. You still have the photograph
     of the two of you taken at the tournament, which he inscribed ‘To My Darling Trish,
     with All the Love in My Heart, Gerry.’ I spotted it the first time I used your phone,
     but of course at that point I hadn’t seen Gerald yet. When I went back again, I recognized
     him and I also remembered what Emily had said about an ex-girlfriend of his named
     Trish.”
    Dolan looked over at her. “You want an attorney present before you make a response?”
    “Oh, what difference does it make,” she said impatiently. “The son of a bitch is dead
     and that’s all I care about. I’d hoped to push the blame off on someone else, but
     then David came along and made a mess of it. ‘Mafia!’ I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
    “Serves you right,” David said. “You tried to frame Emily.”
    “Oh, poo. She could have pleaded temporary insanity. No jury’s going to want to hang
     a little thing like her,” she said.
    “But why did you kill him?” Emily said, aghast. “I don’t understand.”
    “To save fools like you, if nothing else,” Pat said. “You have no idea what he did
     to me. I was twenty-two and as green as they come. That bastard took me for every
     dime I had and then ran off with some tart with a lower handicap. He broke my heart,
     ruined my backswing, and wrecked my career. And then, to have him come waltzing into
     my life again after all these years! It was too much! The worst of it was that he
     didn’t even recognize me! Hadn’t the faintest idea who I was. After everything I’d
     suffered, I was nothing to him. Not even a fond memory. I knew right then I’d get
     even with him if it was the last thing I ever did.”
    The hubby in the back said, “Hear! Hear!” and clapped until his wife gave him a nudge.
    The party broke up after that. Pat was handcuffed and taken away and everybody else
     spent a good fifteen minutes reliving events. Emily asked David to stay for a while,
     touched that he’d tried to save her. Belatedly, I noticed that my head was starting
     to pound all over again, so I excused myself. Althea trailed after me, watching every
     move I made. She planted herself on the sidewalk while I got in my car and then rolled
     the window down on the passenger side, beckoning to her. She sidled over to the car.
    “Are you okay?” I asked.
    She nodded and then spoke up, her tone shy. “When I grow up, I want to be like you.”
    “Good plan,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. You come around to my office twenty years
     from now and we’ll form a partnership.”
    “Okay,” she said gravely and we sealed it with a handshake.

long gone
    S EPTEMBER IN S ANTA T ERESA. I’ve never known anyone yet who doesn’t suffer a certain restlessness when autumn
     rolls around. It’s the season of new school clothes, fresh notebooks, and finely sharpened
     pencils without any teeth marks in the wood. We’re all eight years old again and anything
     is possible. The new year should never begin on January 1. It begins in the fall and
     continues as long as our