“Yes,” I said. “It was—nice.” I paused, steered the conversation back in the original direction. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Rotika? Say you threw out the sign-in sheet when you didn’t?”

“’Course not,” Rotika said. Something quickened in her round, earnest face. “Might as well give you Mrs. Travers’s stuff while you’re here, though.”

I imagined Lillian’s blue chenille bathrobe, a Tarot deck with three of the seventy-eight cards missing, maybe her bridgework. And suddenly I felt a longing to wrap myself in the robe, breathe in the scent of the only mother I’d really known.

I’d thought I was keeping it together pretty well, but tears came instantly.

“We boxed everything up yesterday,” Rotika said sympathetically, hoisting her sizable backside out of the receptionist’s chair. “Let me just get it for you right now. You’ll have to sign for the stuff, of course.”

“Sure,” I said.

Rotika disappeared through a door behind the desk, and I heard her rummaging and muttering.

I leaned over the desk, snatched the clipboard and flipped through.

There were pages for each of the last three days, but nothing before that.

Rotika came out of the backroom lugging two boxes, one on top of the other. Her eyes narrowed when she caught me with the clipboard in my hands.

“I done told you—”

“I’m a private detective,” I said. “I have to be sneaky.”

Rotika heaved the boxes onto the countertop; she looked at me, intrigued. Shoved a piece of paper at me, along with a pen. “You’re a private detective? I thought you worked in the medical field.”

“It’s a front,” I whispered, scanning the form and signing off on Lillian’s things.

She studied me. “Now that’s an interestin’ job,” she declared, tearing off a copy of the receipt and handing it to me.

I nodded solemnly. So far, except for the botched visit to the art gallery in Scottsdale, my P.I. experience consisted entirely of Googling bimbos on the computer in my living room, but Rotika didn’t need to know that.

“I guess it means you gotta do stuff like dig through Dumpsters,” she said speculatively. “Lookin’ for incriminating evidence and all like that. You ever been in a fight?”

I thought of Heather, launching herself off my coffee table with manicure scissors in her upraised hand. “I was stabbed,” I said.

Rotika goggled. “That’s why you was bleedin’ the other day, and they had to take you to the hospital,” she recalled breathlessly.

“That’s why,” I confirmed.

“Let me help you with them boxes,” she said.

We loaded Lillian’s things into the trunk of the Volvo.

I thanked Rotika, and we shook hands.

She trundled back into the building.

I went around back to do a little Dumpster diving.