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a note attached that read: Tuesday night’s grief group cancelled due to emergency in instructor’s family . She tapped her chin, wondering at the irony of Debbie encountering some kind of grief of her own. Jazzy took down the note and tucked it into her purse. She pulled out a credit card and slid it up and down between the door and the frame until she heard a click. Aha! Sweet victory. She’d seen the credit card maneuver on a show about criminal tricks on a cable channel and had tried it a few times in other places without success. You had to have just the right kind of locking mechanism, apparently. As luck would have it, the rec center did.
    She got the room ready for the group, turning on the lights, opening the blinds, and arranging the folding chairs in a circle. She found some colored markers in the tray of the dry-erase board and drew a forest complete with a unicorn and assorted squirrels. Since grade school she’d been told she was good at squirrels, and so she drew them with enthusiasm, shading their tails with a flourish. Above the drawing she wrote, “Do the thing you long to do and become the person you’re destined to be.” When she was finished she surveyed the room but wasn’t quite satisfied. Something was missing.
    Suddenly remembering, she rifled through her bag until she found her iPod and the portable speaker system Dylan gave her for Christmas. Once it was plugged in, she picked some upbeat music, keeping in mind the group’s collective age, which was mostly ancient with some middle-aged thrown in. She started with Frank Sinatra’s “The Sunny Side of the Street” and “The Best Is Yet to Come,” George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun,” and the Bangles’ “Walking on Sunshine.” There was nothing like music to lift a person’s mood.
    The group filtered in one at a time, each person noticeably brightening as they saw the changes in the room. “Nice drawing!” one of the women said, and Jazzy smiled in response.
    When Rita arrived, she made a beeline to Jazzy and sat right next to her. “I brought photos of my daughter,” she said, pulling out a small photo album. Jazzy shifted in her seat to look. In every picture, Rita’s daughter had a wide smile with straight white teeth. In a few of the shots she had her arms draped around her mother’s shoulders. They looked comfortable together, Jazzy thought. Such a beautiful girl. Her death was such a loss for the world.
    “She was a sparkler,” Rita said, smiling wistfully.
    “I can tell. I’m sorry.”
    “I think about her every day.”
    Jazzy said, “How could you not?”
    Rita gave Jazzy’s forearm a squeeze. “And it’s not just me. Everyone loved her. Her friends filled the church at the funeral, and all of them had a story of how she touched their lives. Her death was such a loss.” She shook her head. “And the one who did it still walks free. I worry about him out in the world doing this to someone else’s daughter.”
    “You think it was her boyfriend?” Jazzy asked.
    Rita nodded vigorously. “Oh yes. He was very charming and good at covering his dark side. Melinda alluded to some problems they were having, but I thought they were the usual problems all couples go through.” She sighed. “I didn’t know the half of it. Things felt off, but I just didn’t see the signs. After she died, one of her friends told us some things that convinced us he had murdered her. He had a bad temper, they’d been fighting, his alibi was questionable.” She sighed. “But it’s one thing to know something, another to prove it.”
    “The police couldn’t pin anything on him?”
    Rita sighed. “No.”
    Jazzy nodded and waited, sensing there was more.
    “We were supposed to go out to lunch that day,” Rita said. “When she didn’t show up, I got worried. And when she didn’t answer her phone, I knew something was terribly wrong.” She looked down at her hands, and her voice dropped. “The police found her in her