Crime, Thrillers & Mystery / The Butterfly Girl

The sunny patio was too tempting to resist, even through the tinted glass windows of the coffeehouse. Before sitting down at the wobbly oval metal table, she picked up the ashtray with two fingertips and a grimace of distaste, then placed it atop the low cement wall that encircled the patio. She nodded and smiled at the trio of gorgeous black men at the only other occupied table. They had better manicures and more expensive shoes than she was ever likely to have. She sipped her coffee while eavesdropping on the men, one of whom was consoling another about a failed love affair while the third man broke off bits of pastry and tossed them to the small flock of black-capped chickadees that lived in the tree in the corner of the patio. She put the cup down, closed her eyes, leaned back, let the sun warm her face and tuned her ears past the men and the sounds of the city to the sounds of the birds as they fluttered down and fought over crumbs.

After a long moment, she sighed, sat up and reached into to her worn leather bag with the Atlanta Police Department blazon. She removed an oversized deck of cards with an elaborate cruciform design on the back of each card. She twisted off the rubber band that held the cards together, then searched through the colorful paintings on the cards’ faces until she found the one she wanted. She slipped this beneath her coffee cup, then flipped the rest of the cards face down and started shuffling while gazing up at the half-constructed tower of the latest new highrise luxury condo project to grace the Midtown skyline.

A shadow interrupted her reverie. “Diana?”

She looked up, squinting against the February sun, to see a short, plump, fortyish redhead, who was winded, sweaty and flushed, with two sweatshirts draped over an arm and great round breasts leaking into a Johns Hopkins T-shirt. “Maureen!” Diana stood up to hug her. “Where are the babies?”

“Home, with Jason’s mother. Praise the Lord. Can I sit?”

“Of course. How are you?”

“Brilliant. Exhausted. I walked all the way here. Took me an hour. Never felt better. Do you know that today is the first day in nine weeks I haven’t been surgically attached to two hungry animals? I got out of the house for a walk round the block, saw the skyscrapers in the sun, and I just started walking.” She sucked in a deep breath and grinned, then waved her hand at traffic on Peachtree Street beyond the patio wall. “The babies are beautiful. But look at this! People, adults, with… books, and paper, and jobs, and…” She sat down across from Diana and blew three great, heavy breaths. “Wow.”

“You got away. That makes you a real parent, now.”

“That’s what Jason’s mother said when I phoned her halfway here.” Maureen focused on the card, frowned, and took it from beneath the coffee cup. “The Queen of Swords? Please don’t tell me you’re doing fortunetelling now: I’d tell you this was the Devil’s work if I thought you would listen.”

“I’ve been beating my head against the wall of our office all day, so I needed a new frame of reference. The cards are just… archetypes, ideas. Put them in a framework and sometimes things stand out. Sometimes reading them makes me think about a case differently, just because it throws me out of established thought patterns.”

At Maureen’s skeptical glare, she held up her hands, palms forward. “There’s nothing mystical about it. They’re just pieces of cardboard. Though the man who designed this deck would disagree: Aleister Crowley was this mad English mystic from about a hundred years ago, who talked this equally mad duchess into painting the cards. You would really disapprove of them. But now that Mustapha and I are Major Crimes, they give us the cases nobody else wants. This one’s a real puzzle, which is why I’m reading cards.” She sipped her coffee. “But you’ll notice I’m doing it here instead of at the station: I get enough crap from all the manly men over there already.”

“It stumped you two? Now I’m interested. Just please tell me it doesn’t involve small children.”

“No kids. Well, there’s a daughter, but she’s fifteen.”

“And she’s the Queen of Swords? Who’s the King?”

“No kings in this deck: Knights and Princes, Princesses and Queens only. I’m the Queen of Swords, because it’s my job to evaluate, think and judge. Swords are air signs: they deal with the world of thought and ideas.” Diana sipped her coffee, then started flipping through the deck. “But really, it’s not about me.” She dropped a new card on the table and tucked the Queen of Swords back in the deck.

Maureen picked it up and examined it. “Right. So who’s the Queen of Disks?”

“Disks are earth signs, all about fertility, material things, and especially money. And Moira Kaine, the victim here, was a trust-fund baby: a dilettante artist who painted butterflies on silk and had them framed by her husband Richard. He runs a high-end frame shop out of the street level of their townhouse in one of those re-gentrified parts of town. Down by Krog Street and where it goes under the train tracks.”

“Down by… oh, where all those scrap metal yards used to be.”

“Yep. Last October, 911 gets a call from the daughter, Beth. Cops show up and find Beth wandering about the second floor living room, which is really the main floor of the house –you park in back and walk right in. Beth is naked but wrapped in a bright yellow electric blanket, trailing the end of the cord, hands and feet cut to ribbons from walking on broken glass. They also find her mother Moira with a picture frame smashed around her head—“

“Oooh, I remember this one.”

“The local vultures went on about it for days.”

“Cut her throat, right?”

“No. Someone shoved her backward into the picture, which was hanging next to another matching one on the living room wall. Then it looks like she made it out into the middle of the room before someone bashed the frame over her head. She gets to the far end of the room before going down. This drives a big shard of glass all the way into her brainstem, killing her instantly. She lands face down, so there’s almost none of her blood in the room: it all belongs to Beth, who wakes up from a nap and comes down from her fourth-floor bedroom a few hours later to get a glass of water and finds her mother’s body. Kid was so shaken up she walked on the broken glass, then tried to cuddle with her mom after she called 911.”

“Poor thing. And you never figured out who did it?”

“Mustapha and I didn’t get the case until the DA showed up on Friday and asked us to take it. And it’s unsolvable for now. We have two suspects who could have done it, and each of them is pointing the finger at the other. Everyone’s lawyered up and we’ve got no meaningful forensic evidence.” She shuffled the cards. “Which is why I’m here doing this.” She fanned the cards while keeping them face down and held them out to Maureen. “Here, pick one.”

“No way. I’ve got two souls and my own to think of.”

Diana shrugged. “Suit yourself. We put a second card on top of the Queen here, to indicate the general circumstances surrounding her.” She took a card from the deck and flipped it over.

“Ace of Disks. Pretty. Is this about money, too?”

“Yep. The embodiment of the principle of the material, you want to be technical about it. Here, probably money, because that was the real issue in the Kaine household. She had a big trust fund, Richard’s got a marginally profitable frame shop, and they had a pre-nup. Divorced, he gets the house: with her dead, he also gets half of six mil, with the other half in trust for Beth.”

“Sounds like motive.”

“Sure does. But Richard had an alibi, and it was solid.” She cut the deck and took another card. “Third card indicates what’s blocking or harming her.”

“What if you turned up the Death card?”

“That one really just means ‘transformation’.” Diana placed the card crosswise on top of the first two. “The Knight of Swords. Ideas in motion.”

“He’s got dragonfly wings, only they’re pointy. Ideas in motion?”

“They’re all pretty vague, on purpose. Something like, the desire to create new ideas or fields of thought. The wings look like the shard of glass that killed Moira.” She paused and bit an already-ragged fingernail. “This one might be ironic. The two detectives who caught the case, Grant and Sherman—“

“Oh, come on. You’re kidding.”

“I wish.” Diana waved her hand around at the glory of Midtown, glittering in a warm winter day. “At least the real Sherman was competent. But Martin Sherman is maybe six months away from putting in his thirty years, and he’s acted like that for at least the last ten. And Al Grant has exactly one skill, which is kissing ass. Not a pair of creative thinkers, but most of the homicides in that precinct are your basic domestics or drive-bys and don’t require much thinking. Anyway, Grant and Sherman get to the house and find Beth wandering about—“

“She didn’t hear a picture frame getting smashed over her mom’s head?”

“Upstairs in the bath, with headphones on, dreaming of Justin Timberlake. The husband shows up right as they’re interviewing her. Very protective of his daughter, who’s very traumatized by the whole thing. Sherman got in to see her later on, and she was straight out of Central Casting: stringy hair, loose white dress, lots of repetitive motion. Teachers and other parents confirm she’s been knocked for a loop.”

Diana took a sip of coffee, then put the cup back down next to the three cards. “Techs take Moira’s liver temp, figure she’s been dead about three hours. Richard was at his girlfriend’s house in Morningside since an hour before that. Girlfriend confirms it.” She flipped over another card and put it beside the first three. “Fourth card is sort of like the immediate past, where she was coming from.”

“The Lovers. Did she have a lover, too?”

“Well, yeah. But this is one of the cards that doesn’t really mean what it looks like. It’s not about love: it’s about coming to a fork in the road and having to make a permanent choice. Which it looks like Moira might have been doing: her lawyer said that she talked to him about drafting a separation agreement. The daughter says her mom wasn’t in love with the boyfriend anymore and didn’t want a separation, but this may have been teenage wishful thinking. She’s very close to her dad, but in the good sense, not the creepy one. Richard says he doesn’t know about any separation, but he does know about his wife’s boyfriend and offers up that the boyfriend probably did it. Grant and Sherman go to talk to the boyfriend—“

Maureen held a finger up. “Hold onto that thought. I have to pee.” She got up and walked into the coffeehouse.

The man who was trying to console his friend caught Diana’s eye. “Honey, you telling fortunes today?”

Diana smiled. “It’s not like that. I’m trying to solve a problem.”

“Cos Danny here, he needs to know love’s gonna come his way again?” Danny nodded sadly.

“A good-lookin’ fellow like you? In a city full of good-lookin’ fellows who don’t even notice okay-lookin’ divorced women like me? You’ll do fine.”

“You see?” said the first man as he patted Danny on the shoulder. “What I keep tryin’ to tell you.”

Maureen came back outside, armed with a coffee and a bottle of water.

“Did you breastfeed Grace?” she asked.

“Yep. But it stopped working after about four months, and I switched her to formula.”

“Because this is totally dehydrating me.”

“Oh, sure. She was a hungry little beast. Still is: now that she’s doing both kung fu and swimming, nothing lasts more than a day in the fridge. I’ve lost about ten pounds without even trying, just because there’s never anything to eat. And yet she complains about how the Breast Fairy still hasn’t shown up to bless her. I keep managing to stop myself from telling her maybe if she didn’t exercise quite so much, she might have more of a chance.”

“She can have some of mine. I used to be a financial analyst, and now I am a cow. So who’s the wife’s boyfriend?”

“His name’s Richard, too, but everyone calls him Ricky. Ricky Gonzo, born Richard Garrison. Another dilettante artist, but he does larger-than-life paintings of consumer products, lots of fake irony. Suburbia is hell. Yawn. But he’s ten years younger, well-connected enough to get gallery shows, and very slim and toned, unlike big cuddly bear Richard. He spends a lot of time and Moira Kaine’s money in clubland.”

The breeze started to pick up, so Diana moved her coffee cup to cover all four cards. “Detectives go to interview Ricky and he tells a completely different story. He says Moira emailed him and told him to come over, but when he got there and went into the living room, the lights all went out and someone shone a bright light into his eyes. Then someone else smashed a picture frame over his head. He said it was the husband, Richard, and that Richard told him to stay the hell away from his wife. Ricky gets out and goes home, then goes out clubbing.

“When Grant and Sherman catch up to him, he’s on his fifth appletini, raving about how he thought Richard was going to kill him. He does have cuts on his forearm and face that tend to support his story, but they don’t believe him, because Richard had an alibi and Ricky is a drunk scumbag and Richard a respectable citizen.” She flipped over another one and placed it immediately in front of herself.

Maureen picked it up and scrutinized it. “The Four of Wands. It says ‘Dominion’ down here: is that what it means?”

“Sort of. That’s the only thing I don’t like about this deck: the one-word interpretations. Wands are fire signs, and mean creativity, motion, the spirit. This card means… an established home, a stable base. Putting the card here is all about the base of support the person has, and Richard and Moira Kaine had a pretty good deal going. She’s an artist, kind of, and gives money to all the posh high-culture organizations: the symphony, the High Museum, that sort of thing. He frames her art and that of lots of other people she puts him in contact with.”

“They’ve got this nice home with the shop on the ground floor, one of those new urbanism developments. Second floor is the public area, where she was killed. Third floor is her bedroom and studio. Top floor is the daughter’s suite and storage. Richard used to share the third floor with Moira, but once the marriage started to go downhill, he started living in the back room of the shop downstairs. He’s got a bed, computer, TV, microwave, lots of porn and a bag of weed.”

“And a girlfriend.”

“Yep. Alison Randolph, plays the viola for the symphony, nothing to hide. Met him through Moira, in fact. Says Richard was there since at least an hour before Moira’s death.” She plucked out another card. “This card ‘crowns’ her: it’s like the overarching spiritual or mental state of her life.”

“Seven of Cups. ‘Debauch’? She sounds debauched, but so do all these people. Don’t wedding vows mean anything any more?”

“Ask my ex. And it’s really more like ‘illusion’. That is, she thinks everything is going great, but it’s all kind of shallow. Cups are water signs, so they’re all about feelings and emotions. And according to both her husband and her boyfriend, Moira Kaine never met a feeling she didn’t indulge. She had other affairs, which Richard pretended to ignore. But she finds out about his and goes apeshit, which is why he was living in the back room.”

She took a sip of coffee. “But one thing Grant and Sherman do find out is that Moira paid twenty thousand dollars to Ricky, the boyfriend, in the first week of each of the last seven months. Which of course Ricky neglected to mention during the first interview. So they haul him in again and grill him.”

Maureen held up a finger. “Because they figure he made up the thing about the husband in order to explain the cuts he got in the struggle over the picture frame when Moira died.”

“Motherhood has not dulled your intellect.”

“I’ve done nothing but watch cop and hospital dramas for four months now.”

“Ricky cops to getting the money from her but said she gave it to him to support his art. He’s got some receipts, but they only add up to maybe thirty out of the hundred and forty grand he got out of her. Either he spent it on drugs or hid it real well. He has no alibi for two hours on either side of Moira’s death. He’s got an absurd story. He’s a cokehead. Grant and Sherman figure he’s blackmailing her and they get in a fight over it and she dies. So they arrest Ricky for Moira’s murder.”

“But he didn’t do it.”

“More like, they had no way of proving he did it. But they’re used to slam-dunk cases.” She flipped another card. “This one is one vision of the future: if I believed in fortune-telling, I’d say it’s what will happen if the cards’ advice isn’t taken.”

“Prince of Wands. Hey, that could be Ricky, couldn’t it?”

“Sure. But probably not Richard: he’s earthy and solid, so he’s more of a Disks man. But you have to watch out about the face cards. You can’t really look at any card as masculine or feminine, or even as indicating people rather than ideas or archetypes. Most cards can mean what they mean, or the opposite – or an extreme version. Sometimes, it’s about something not being there. It’s not strictly logical: that’s the whole point. It’s like a… psalm, or whatever.”

“No, it isn’t, but I take your point. It’s allegorical.”

“Precisely.” Diana waved the card at her. “Think of this as the principle of thought as applied to creativity.”

“And that means?”

“Like I said, they’re vague. Something like, being able to link ideas together in new or different ways, or adapt to a new situation quickly—”

Both women looked up at the round, bearded figure who had suddenly blocked their sunlight. He held a large, steaming cup of tea in one hand and a plastic sandwich bag full of green leaves in the other. “Damn, Dee,” he said. “Usually you wait like a week before you get frustrated enough to start contacting spirits.”

Diana brandished the rest of the deck at him. “It’s not mystical. Maureen, this is my partner—”

“Detective Alawi.” Maureen held out her hand. “I remember you from last year.”

He shook her hand, then pulled up a chair. “Mustapha. You were the lease buyback lady from the county auditor’s office.”

“Sale-leaseback. City auditor’s. This sounds like a tough case.”

“I thought I had it cracked until about ten minutes ago.” He turned to Diana. “How much you told her?” He took some of the leaves from the bag and put them in his teacup, then put the bag in his jacket as the patio filled with the scent of fresh mint.

“We’re up to the arrest.”

“Jumped the fuckin’ gun. Begging your pardon, ma’am. So you know the boyfriend was gettin’ money—”

Diana rapped his knuckles with the cards. “My story. So once they arrest Ricky, his lawyer tells the DA they’re going to argue that the husband did it and is setting Ricky up. Ricky knew about the pre-nup. Ricky says why would he want to kill someone who was giving him twenty thousand a month? So the DA sends Grant and Sherman off to look into the husband—”

“Which is why I came down here to find you,” said Mustapha. “I took the LUDs from the husband’s cell and business phone and walked’em around Vice and Narcotics, and whaddaya know, a regular contact of Richard’s is this guy Big Peanut, very successful supplier of fine pharmaceutical products to a buncha midlevel dealers in some of the hoods. So I get that guy Brinks from Narcotics and we call up Mr. Peanut and say we wanna talk about Richard Kaine and he has us meet him out in fucking Brookhaven, of all places, up in one of them gated condo communities fulla white yuppies.”

Diana laughed. “What, he was dealing up there?”

“Naw. He’s got three damn condos there, all next to each other. He’s got his moms in one and his lady and their two kids in another, and one for himself with the usual bigscreen and all the toys. I ask him why he lives up there, and he gets all serious and talks about how he felt his own damn neighborhood was a bad influence on his kids so he put’em all up there where his moms and his lady could keep an eye on each other and the kids. He looks at me all serious and tells me that once you get yourself a shortie, you’ll do anything to keep’em out of trouble. He even called me ‘dog.’”

“You can hardly blame him,” said Maureen.

“Hell, no. But it’s not the first thing you expect out of a drug dealer named Big Peanut. Anyway, we ask him about Richard and he’s like, yeah, the frame guy. But it’s just a business relationship. A legit one, that is. His lady makes art and he has Richard frame it. ‘He’s the man I trust,’ says Peanut, and takes us into his crib and shows us his lady’s paintings. I wish youda been there, Dee. You woulda laughed yourself sick. Me an’ Brinks had to pull over and crack up on the way back.”

“What did the paintings look like?” asked both women at once.

Mustapha put down his tea and picked up the Prince of Wands. “Imagine if someone never went to art school did a bunch of these, only in Seventies Nubian style. There was one of a girl with a huge ‘fro running a sword through a vampire chick. You woulda called it ‘breathtakingly awful’ or something like that.”

“I hope you took pictures,” asked Diana.

“Nah. We asked Peanut about Richard, like maybe did Richard reach out to him to knock off his wife? Peanut says he would always help a friend in need, but Richard never talked about his family. They just do business.”

“So it’s another dead end,” said Diana.

“Richard’s a total Boy Scout otherwise. Smokes a little dope, is all. Can I pick a card?” He reached for the deck, cut the cards, flipped over the top card and tossed it face up onto the table.

Maureen picked it up. “You see? This is why this worries me.”

Diana took it from her. “The Devil? It’s not about the devil. It means paying too much attention to material things and neglecting everything else. Since this card’s position describes the subject’s home, it’s not like it tells us anything new. Material things, butterfly wings, and we’re still at an impasse.”

She took the deck from Mustapha and picked a card. “This card is her love.”

“The Hermit. What’s that, a lantern he’s got?”

“Yep. Wisdom through meditation, or maybe hiding wisdom away instead of sharing it.”

“Sounds more like the husband than the boyfriend.”

“Well, that’s what everyone started to think, but he had the alibi. But once the ME does the autopsy, it turns out Moira might have died a little earlier than they thought. Maybe even early enough that Richard could’ve done it, if he could have driven from Inman Park to his girlfriend’s place Morningside at light speed on a Saturday night.”

“Fat chance. Couldn’t they do some lab thing and find out exactly when?”

“Nah,” said Mustapha. “That’s a TV thing.”

“You work for the city; you know what our funding is like,” said Diana.

“They go back to the girlfriend and she sticks to her story, but she does say he seemed a little worried and distracted when he was there. So they bring him in for an interview—”

Mustapha broke in. “But he’s lawyered up now, and the lawyer keeps repeating the original story—ouch!” He glared at Diana. “What’d you do that for?”

“Told you it was my story.” She turned to Maureen. “And now they can’t arrest him, because all his lawyer has to do at trial is point the finger at Ricky and it’s reasonable doubt all around.”

“What if they were working together?” asked Maureen.

“No way,” said Mustapha.

“Why not? The husband could have promised the boyfriend a share of the estate for messing up the case.”

“Ricky ain’t that smart. And the husband’s too smart to trust Ricky.”

“Plus,” said Diana, “there’s no evidence that they ever communicated.” She held up another card. “Second to last card is her hopes and fears.”
Maureen took it from her. “Ace of Wands. Let me guess: the… principle of pure… creativity?”

“Exactly. Nice work.”

“So she’s an artist, or really a wannabe artist, you said? So maybe she’s trying to do something new and really creative. Maybe she was going to dump both men and dedicate herself to art.”

“Sure,” said Diana. “Maybe. But like everything else in this case, there’s just no conclusive evidence and too much reasonable doubt.”

Mustapha sipped his tea. “And no DA is gonna take the crapshoot of trying either one of’em. Husband’s got motive but no real opportunity, boyfriend has opportunity but no real motive, back to square one.”

“Couldn’t the DA charge them both?” She watched Mustapha’s nose twitch. “Oh, that’s TV again, isn’t it?” The breeze picked up again. Maureen reached out and slapped her hand down on the three loose cards, then picked them up and started toying with them. After a long moment, she said, “What if… what if the husband really did do it? You said there were two picture frames on the wall: what if there was a third one?”

Mustapha grinned. “What do you mean?”

“He’s a framer, right? So when he finds out about the boyfriend, or about the separation agreement, he gets in a fight with his wife and kills her. He knows the boyfriend’s coming over, so he goes downstairs and builds a frame just like the broken one. Then he breaks it over the boyfriend’s head, and when the boyfriend runs away, he goes back downstairs and takes apart the frame again, then goes to the girlfriend’s as fast as he can to establish his alibi.”

Mustapha whistled. “Give the lady a star.”

“Maureen, you’re smarter than Grant and Sherman. But we thought of the same thing. Trouble is, that particular framing material is pretty common and there’s lots of it floating around. And none of it had any blood evidence.”

“We even spent a real productive afternoon the other day tracking down two of the husband’s clients and testing their frames with Luminol, see if there was any blood on them. No dice.”

“If we’d got the case when it was fresh, we might have done some Dumpster checking on the way from the Kaine house to the girlfriend’s, but it’s been four months.”

“Well, I tried.”

“And you did fine,” said Mustapha. His expression changed as he looked over Diana’s shoulder and behind her. “Hey, Grace.”

“Hi, Inspector Alawi.” Diana put the cards down on the table and turned to see her daughter bounce onto the patio, all gangly legs and shiny braces and coiled energy and long, curly brown hair. She wore black track pants and a bright red T-shirt with “Eagle Claw Invitational” silk-screened on it in black and yellow. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sugar. You’re early.”

“Caught the bus just as it was coming. I totally flipped this girl Chelsea, she’s like the champ?” She adopted a fighting stance. “Totally had her.”

“Grace, this is Mrs. Tower. You met her last year, when we were at the holiday fundraiser for the Mothers’ Union.”

“Um, sure. Hi.”

“Hi, Grace.”

“Mrs. Tower just had twins, honey.”

“Really? Wow.” Grace looked around. “Are they here?”

“No, dear,” said Maureen. “They’re at home.”

“Oh. Hey Mom, you have to take me to get new shoes.”

“I have to? What am I, made of money?”

“Yes, you have to. Remember you said I could go with Dad and Rachel to the symphony thing? I tried on my good shoes and they’re totally too small for me now. They hurt my feet.”

“You’re just not used to walking in heels, sweetie.”

“No, they’re too small. I had a ring on top of each foot where they pinched me. You don’t want me bonding with Rachel when she takes me shoe shopping.” She stuck out her tongue. “As if.” She looked down at the table. “Oooh, tarot cards. Can I pick one?” Without waiting for an answer, she reached down and started to pull the top card from the deck.

Just at that moment, the breeze gusted, sending half a dozen cards tumbling off the deck and onto the ground. Mustapha and Maureen leaned down to pick these up., but the card Grace had chosen flew out of her hand and caught the breeze, flying up into the air and toward the stone wall. Grace took two running steps, vaulted to the top of the wall and leaped off that to pluck the card out of the air before it drifted into traffic on Peachtree. As she came down, she grabbed a branch of the tree to steady herself, sending a cloud of chickadees flying in all directions as she dropped to the ground.

The three men applauded. “That was sweet!” said Danny.

“Thanks!” said Grace over her shoulder. She sat down on Diana’s lap.

“Sifu’s never around when I do something like that; he only sees me fall on my butt.” She put the card down on the table. “Wheel of Fortune. Can I buy a vowel?”

“Maybe it was an accident,” said Maureen.

“It really means ‘the passage of time,’” said Diana.

“Which is all we’ve got,” said Mustapha. “And we’re no closer to cracking this, and probably never will be.”

Maureen shrugged. “Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t help. But thanks for letting me hear about it.” She stood up and stretched. “I’m starting to miss my little guys. Maybe I’ll take a cab back home. No, I’ll walk.”

“Maureen, it was so nice to see you. Call me, and let me come over and meet your sons.” She patted Grace on the back. “Up, honey; I have to pee.”

“And then you’re going to take me shopping.”

Diana pretended not to hear this and went into the café. After a trip to the bathroom and a refill of her coffee, she paused before she went back outside. Through the window, in the sun, she could see Grace shuffling the cards and chattering away while Mustapha nodded with a bemused smile on his face. At some remark of hers, he reached out and patted her on the shoulder. For a long moment, she stood there and watched them, thinking there was a thought somewhere in the back of her mind, but unable to find it.

The whistle of the espresso machine brought her out of her reverie. She shook her head and went back outside into the sunlight.

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