There was a lengthy pause, then one of the men rose and came to the lectern. Marsha smiled up at him—he was well over six feet tall—and stepped aside.

  “I’m Carrie’s older brother Jack.” He bowed his head for a moment, gathering his thoughts. He was a handsome man, with silver hair, bushy eyebrows, and a strong, straight nose. He wore a dark business suit with a white shirt and deep maroon tie. His head came up, and he continued, “Carrie was born in Buffalo, Minnesota, the third of three children, of whom I was the oldest. My best memory of her is as a little girl, a very pretty little girl. Her favorite color was pink, and she loved to wear this one dress covered with lots of pink ruffles. Even her socks had little ruffles on them, and Mother would tie a pink bow in her hair. She loved to be told how pretty she was, how much she looked like a little princess. Until she got into high school, she was always very careful how she dressed. And she always looked like a princess. That’s how I’ll remember her, as my beautiful sister, the princess.”

  He looked around the room with a smile and a curious air of defiance, then went back to his seat.

  There was another pause, then the second man got up from the front row. He looked a lot like Jack, only not as tall. He went to the lectern. He wore a dark blue plaid sport coat, navy blue trousers, and a black necktie.

  “I’m Bob, Carrie’s other brother, the one in the middle. I also remember her as the little princess. I remember her sitting on the couch on Sunday mornings with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for the rest of us to finish getting ready for church, not moving so her dress wouldn’t get dirty or wrinkled. I remember years later, during her six months of sobriety, when she tried to recapture some of that little princess look, took pride in her new clothes, dyed her hair and got a perm, fell in love with a good-looking man. I remember how happy she was before it all went to pieces for her again. But for those six months, she was happy, and we were happy for her. I think she was fragile but none of us knew it or knew how to keep her from breaking. We live in hope that wherever she is now, she’s whole and healed.”

  “Amen!” cried Annie. “Hallelujah!” Then she looked embarrassed when no one echoed her sentiments.

  Bob went back to his seat, and there was another pause.

  Margaret stood and went to the lectern. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and her dark brown dress hung on her—she looked pounds lighter. Her voice, when she spoke, was husky. “I remember Carrie as exciting. She was the only cousin in our family close to me in age, so we played together a lot as children. She had a vivid imagination, so make-believe was great fun—providing I let her be the princess while I was the faithful servant or the wicked witch or even, once in a while, the loyal horse. I think Bob put his finger on Carrie’s problem: She was fragile in some nonapparent way, and something in her broke and could not be repaired. I think it left her angry or maybe jealous of anyone not broken. Sometimes, in these later years, when she was having a hard time of it, she would come to me for money, which I didn’t always give her, because she would lie about why she wanted it. Now that she’s gone, I can forgive her—and I hope she can forgive me. God bless her.”

  Everyone looked at the third man—Marty—but he shook his head no. Obviously he wasn’t going to speak.

  There was a brief pause, then Annie rose and came quickly to the lectern, unwrapping the scarf from around her head and leaving it draped around her shoulders. “Well, I liked her, she had sass!” Annie announced, gripping the lectern fiercely. “She didn’t take nothin’ from nobody. The way she told it, she’d been cheated left and right her whole life and so of course she was mad. Like everybody else, she had a cross to bear, and hers was like a lot of us’ns, liquor. An’ don’t tell nobody, but she liked some of that other stuff, too . . .” Here Annie cocked her head, winked, and sniffed sharply, as if inhaling something up her nose. “She was sad some of the time, and mad a lot of the time, but she could be sweet and she could be funny, when she wanted to be. She was a real go-getter, and while not everybody liked her, I did, so God rest her soul. That’s all I got to say.”

  Annie returned to her seat, breathing as deeply as if she’d run a mile. She turned her head and saw Betsy staring at her, and nodded once sharply.

  After another lengthy pause, Reverend Marsha returned to the lectern. “Let us pray,” she said, and heads bowed.

  “O Lord, we place in Your loving and forgiving hands the soul of Carrie Carlson. Bring her home to Your heavenly kingdom, Lord, and grant her the peace she sought for so long in this world. And please give peace and comfort to those here to mark her passing. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

  A soft chorus of amens answered her prayer.

  After another pause, Margaret stood and faced them, saying, “If everyone would care to come to my house, there will be coffee and cake.” She gave the address.

  Betsy didn’t want to go, but when she overheard Reverend Marsha saying she would drive Annie there, Betsy decided she didn’t want to miss a chance to interview them about Carrie.

  Glad now she’d brought her car, she went out into the cold and darkness and drove the few blocks to Margaret’s home.

  The house was a pale green clapboard ranch with a yellow brick front and a modest front porch. Inside, in the dining room, which was open to the living room, stood a cloth-covered table with two layer cakes, one with white icing and one with chocolate, each topped with a three-dimensional pink lily made of icing. Between the cakes was a punch bowl filled with some red liquid in which slices of oranges were floating, and near the far end of the table were two large coffeepots, one marked with a small cardboard sign labeled DECAF. A silver cream pitcher and sugar bowl were beside them.

  Pretty china dessert plates and silver forks and spoons were placed on the other end of the table, with heavy cloth napkins rolled and stacked pyramid style. Evidently Margaret had hoped for a better turnout—there were easily enough plates for a dozen people.

  “This looks beautiful,” Betsy said to Margaret, waiting with a plate for her slice of cake.

  “Thank you, Betsy, and thank you for coming. May I cut you a large slice?”

  Betsy knew she should say no, but her stomach was demanding something at once, and the cake looked delicious. “Yes, please, and make mine chocolate.”

  Betsy took her cake and a cup of decaf coffee into the living room. It was a large room with a big purple couch, a matching love seat, a green upholstered chair, and a padded-seat armchair.

  Carrie’s brothers, Jack and Bob, were seated on the couch, one of them eating vanilla cake, the other chocolate. Reverend Marsha was standing by the window with a cup of steaming coffee, gazing out into the night—it was still snowing, but very lightly. Margaret’s husband, Marty, was standing at the table, waiting for his wife to slice him a piece of cake.

  Mike Malloy, bending over Annie, who was seated in the upholstered chair, was nodding and writing something in his notebook. Annie, deeply involved in eating a large, dark slice of cake, seemed to be giving mostly short answers, and was not looking at Malloy.

  Betsy went to Marsha. There was an occasional table underneath the window; Betsy put her coffee cup down on it and used her fork to separate a generous bite of cake from her slice. “Not a fan of cake?” she asked before putting the bite into her mouth.

  “Oh, yes, but I had a really late lunch, so I’m not hungry. It looks delicious, though.”

  Betsy swallowed and said, “It is. May I ask you some questions?”

  “About what?”

  “Carrie Carlson.”

  “Why do you need to ask? Who are you?”

  “My name is Betsy Devonshire, and I do private investigations. Margaret Smith has asked me to look into her cousin’s death.”

  “I understand that man over there is a police investigator. He’s asking us questions, too.”

  “Yes, he’s Sergeant Mike Malloy. But I’m doing my own investigation. You can ask him if you like, and he’ll tell you I do this, sometimes as an adjunct to his investigations.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Yes, ma’m.”

  “What could you possibly ask me that he won’t?”

  “I don’t know—nothing probably. We just sometimes draw different conclusions.”

  Marsha fixed Betsy with a cool, blue stare, then blinked and nodded shortly. “All right, ask me some questions.”

  “How well did you know Carrie?”

  Marsha took a drink of her coffee. “Not well. I don’t think anyone in my profession knew her well. She was quite determined about that.”

  “You mean she didn’t like members of the clergy.”

  “That, too. But I am also a licensed, registered counselor specializing in problems of the homeless.”

  “I see. She was not very cooperative, you mean.”

  Marsha smiled. “I mean she was obstinate, illogical, demanding, and difficult. Just like a great many other of my clients. If she had been sweet, kind, understanding, and cooperative, perhaps she could have been moved from the ranks of the homeless to renter, from jobless to fully employed. She was, under that angry veneer, intelligent and clever. But Belligerent was her name and ‘None of Your Business’ was her game.”

  “Was Carrie in need of meds?”

  Marsha frowned in thought. “I think she had a personality disorder, but I’m not sure it was a kind that there’s a medication for. Like Annie said at the service, she was sure that she’d been cheated her whole life of what was rightfully hers, and so was determined to have her own way as often as possible. Technically she wasn’t insane, but she was a very unhappy person. She had a talent for making people around her unhappy, too.”

  “Do you know of anyone particularly angry with her, or who may even have hated her for any reason?”

  There was a pause for thought. “No. People didn’t like her, because she was quarrelsome. But what they mostly did was stay away from her, or refuse to rise to her bait. She hadn’t been in a fight in a shelter in a number of weeks. Since the weather started getting bad, she’d been mostly behaving. That’s proof she could control her temper, and her drinking, when the result of not controlling herself was to be thrown out into the cold.”

  “You wouldn’t actually throw someone out into a snowstorm because they were drunk or under the influence of illegal drugs, would you?”

  “There are shelters that will take people in those conditions, but they aren’t nice places, and the people have to sleep on the floor. There’s only so much we can do, and we have to protect the clients who aren’t breaking the rules. When it wasn’t awfully bad out, Carrie would resume getting drunk and picking fights. She’d happily sleep in a park or under an overpass if she thought she’d got some of her own back.”

  “How terribly sad. Maybe a few thousand hours in a psychiatrist’s office would have helped her.”

  “Very possibly. Alcoholics Anonymous would have helped, too, and been a lot cheaper. But first you would have had to persuade her to go, and that simply was not possible.”

  “I see. Did she have any friends at all?” Betsy ate some more cake.

  “She knew a lot of people, and sometimes they would form a kind of hasty, temporary friendship when one or the other had money for alcohol or drugs. I don’t know why Annie decided they were friends, but Annie marches to her own drummer, too. I don’t think Carrie had any friends in a way you or I would define it. She was a solitary sort of person.”

  “Did anyone you know of hate her?”

  “No, not really. The friendships and quarrels both were . . . ephemeral.”

  Betsy nodded and picked up her cup of coffee. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  She finished her coffee before going on to talk to Annie.

  “May I get you another cup of coffee?” she asked, and Annie looked up at her suspiciously.

  “Who’re you?” she asked.

  “I’m Betsy Devonshire, a friend of Margaret Smith.”

  “You were at the funeral.”

  “Yes. Would you like another cup of coffee? I’m getting one for myself.”

  “Sure. Milk and sugar, please. Real sugar, and lots of milk.”

  “More cake, too?”

  “You think that would be all right?”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  Betsy took the woman’s plate and cup and went into the dining room. Almost half of the cake remained; she cut a slice for Annie, refilled and doctored her cup as requested, and after refilling her own cup—imitation sugar and just a dribble of milk—returned to the living room.

  “Thank you, honey,” said Annie, reaching for the plate. “Just put the coffee down right there, okay?”

  Betsy put it on the saucer on the coffee table as indicated. “May I ask you some questions?”

  “What about?”

  “About Carrie.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What was she like?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, I never met her.”

  “Then what were you doing at the funeral?”

  “Margaret Smith invited me.”

  Annie took a big bite of her cake. “Why don’t you ask her about Carrie?”

  “I will, but I want to ask you, too. You defended her very well at the funeral.”

  After a pause while Annie swallowed, she said, “I had a good reason to.”

  “What’s that?”

  Annie smirked and lifted the cake plate. “This. I was hoping for a whole supper, but this is pretty good. I’ll have to remember to thank our hostess. Now will you kindly go away and let me eat in peace?”

  “All right,” said Betsy as mildly as she could. She finished her own cake, then took her coffee cup and dessert plate into the kitchen, where she found Margaret stacking a few other plates in the sink.

  “May I talk with you for a minute?” asked Betsy.

  “Certainly,” said Margaret, wiping her hands on a dish towel draped over the handle on the oven door.

  “Do you know of anyone who was particularly close to Carrie?”

  “No. But I was no longer close to her myself. I was surprised at that Annie person coming to the funeral, for example. I had no idea Carrie knew her. Actually, I was surprised at Annie. I didn’t think Carrie had any friends, she was a very difficult person. She’d quarrel with anyone.”

  “Who would know?” persisted Betsy.

  “Perhaps Reverend Marsha?”

  “No, I’ve already talked to her.”

  “Then I don’t know, I’m sorry, but I just don’t know.”

  “Would Marty?”

  “He liked to pretend she didn’t exist.”

  “Well, tell me about her family.”

  Margaret said, “We had the same grandparents, on my mother’s side, Mr. and Mrs. George DuPre. They’re dead, of course, and so are Carrie’s parents. Carrie was the only daughter of Uncle Will—he was my mother’s brother—and Aunt Marie. As you heard at the funeral, they started that little princess business, which I now think was a mistake. Carrie was very pretty, but badly spoiled. She came to think that any time she didn’t get her way, it was some sort of conspiracy against her. She was bright and she could be very sweet—generally when she wanted something. I liked her when we were little, even when she talked me out of my favorite doll. She was a year older than I, and my parents used to hold her up as an example to me. Nothing but A’s on her report cards right up until her last year of middle school, when she discovered alcohol. She’d gotten harder and harder to get along with, being so self-centered and greedy, but in high school she became simply impossible. Her poor parents! Uncle Will and Aunt Marie spent thousands of dollars over those next few years for therapy, and then getting her out of juvenile hall, then out of jail, and then into treatment centers, paying her living expenses between times. At first they made excuses for her, then they tried Tough Love, but in the end they gave up. They refused to talk to her, to see her. They said it was self-defense. She broke their hearts and their spirits. It was so awful, just so awful.”

  “Did she finish high school?” asked Betsy.

  “No, she dropped out after her junior year. Flat refused to go back, said all her teachers were against her and so were half the kids. Which might have been true at that point, she was always coming to school high or drunk, getting caught stealing, getting into fights with everyone . . .” Margaret sighed. “I put a lot of the blame on her dreadful boyfriend, whose name was, believe it or not, Dice. A juvenile delinquent and a thoroughgoing wicked young man. I’m sure he’s the one who introduced her to drugs. But she took to them very easily.”

  “What was Dice’s last name?”

  Margaret thought, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”

  “What about her two brothers who were at the funeral? Were they her only siblings?”

  “Yes. Jack’s the older one, he graduated before she started getting into serious trouble, but Bob stuck up for her all his senior year, even got suspended once when he waded into a fight, trying to break it up—one she started, by the way. I had the most terrific crush on Bob for doing that.”

  “Do you think they’ll talk with me about Carrie?”

  “Yes, I’m sure they will.”

  Betsy halted on her way to the brothers to talk to Marty. He was a handsome man in his middle fifties, a little below average height, with very pale gray eyes. He shook his head when Betsy asked if he would talk to her about Carrie. “I don’t think I ever met her,” he said. “And that’s probably just as well.”

  Carrie’s brother Bob was a medium-tall man with light brown hair sprinkled with gray and kind brown eyes. He was in his later fifties by the look of him, with broad shoulders and a trim waist, an athlete’s build. His voice was surprisingly deep for a man with such a mild expression.

  “I always thought it was her new boyfriend that got her all twisted around,” he said. “Dice—I don’t know his real first name—was a real tough guy, a greaser. Broke our mom’s heart when Carrie took up with him. Looking back, I think he abused her, but the more we objected to him, the more Carrie stuck up for him, defied everyone. He’s the one who encouraged her drinking and got her started on smoking dope. I wish—” For just an instant his face filled with anguish. “Ah, what’s the use of wishing! It happened like it happened, nothing to do about it now. But he was the ruination of her, it was almost like that was his goal in life, to take some naïve kid and mess her up forever.”