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their way up the snakelike narrow road.
    “The cavalry,” Cissy said to her son, though she had a bad feeling about the boatlike first vehicle. It brought back memories she didn’t want to recall, recollections of another bad time in her life ten years earlier, the horrific events that had landed her mother in prison.
    When the first cop rolled out of the driver’s side of the Caddy, her heart sank. He didn’t have to flash his badge or utter his name. She knew him because Detective Anthony Paterno had been in charge of the investigation that sent her mother to prison. His hound-dog face sported a few more lines, and his thick hair was more shot with gray, but otherwise he, like his car, had changed little.
    “You’re Cissy,” he said.
    “Yeah. This is my son, B.J., er, Bryan Jack. Come on. This way.” She glanced past Paterno to the paramedics. “Maybe there’s a chance Gran can be revived,” she said, hope blooming in her heart, though she was pretty certain it was too late. Holding B.J. as if she thought she might lose him again, she half-ran up the brick walk to the front door. Paterno and his partner, a tall, mannish-looking woman with simple glasses and a short haircut, were on her heels, the paramedics and firefighters a step behind.
    “Stay here,” Paterno said, motioning to a bench on the porch while his partner, who introduced herself as Janet Quinn, stepped through the open doorway. “Jesus, what happened?”
    “I don’t know. I wasn’t here when she fell…. Oh God.” Swallowing hard, Cissy cradled B.J. close to her body while rocking back and forth.
    “Mama sad,” B.J. said, and she nodded.
    “Very.”
    “Mama cry?”
    “Oh, maybe.” She smiled through her tears and kissed his head. Shielding her son from the open doorway, she didn’t try to look inside to the foyer. She’d seen enough.
    Two EMTs, hauling equipment, rushed past her.
    “Careful. This could be a crime scene,” Paterno said as they entered.
    “We got it, Detective,” the female EMT said. “Back off. Let us work. Oh hell…she’s already gone.”
    All of Cissy’s hope died.
    “Nothing left to do but bag and tag her,” the second EMT said so emotionlessly Cissy caught her breath. This was her grandmother, for God’s sake! Not just some unknown, unclaimed, unloved body! The woman they were talking about was Eugenia Cahill, a short, sharp, sassy woman who had run corporations, played competitive bridge, and sat on the boards of…Oh God, what did it matter what boards she’d sat on? She was gone.
    “No sign of forced entry,” Quinn said. “We’re checking to see if robbery was a motive.”
    Still on the porch, Cissy turned away from the drama inside. The whole scene was surreal, and Cissy, holding her son, watching rain drizzling down from the night sky, realized for the first time that she’d never see her grandmother alive again. She blinked back a fresh spate of tears. Theirs hadn’t been a loving relationship, in fact they’d had more than their share of knock-down, drag-out fights when she’d been a teenager living here, but she’d loved Eugenia, and, aside from an uncle and aunt now in Oregon, and another uncle in an institution, Eugenia was the only family she had left. Certainly her closest relative, besides James, her half-brother.
    Except for Marla. Remember her? Your mother? The damned escaped convict. You have to count her.
    And what about Jack?
    She didn’t want to think about her louse of a husband right now. Daring another look inside, she saw one of the EMTs shake his head. Cissy swallowed hard. She’d known from the second she’d seen Eugenia that the old woman was dead, but it hit so much harder when her suspicions were confirmed.
    Paterno walked back outside. “Your grandmother—”
    “I know.” She was shaking inside, but managed to keep some sort of calm. Her mind was racing in a zillion directions, but she tried to focus on the detective with his sober face and dark eyes. “But