Each time she’d visit a homeless person, man or woman, didn’t appear to matter. All they shared was that they begged from the pavement or roadside. Orelia gave them money and then departed to return to her home without stopping anywhere else on the way.

He’d follow her to her destination and back to her residence to ensure there was no deviation. There wasn’t.

Unlike the first trip to the Captain, she hadn’t yet left another written note. She only stopped for a few minutes to deliver a bill or two. She then returned to her beautiful residence with the high walls and remained holed up inside until the next day.

With only small variations on distance and times, her outings appeared to achieve little and the people with whom she interacted shared nothing in common except they lived on the street. Odd, peculiar, and downright baffling.

Until today, he had decided not to approach any of the beneficiaries of her kindness. Instead, he waited to see what became of them without interference or contact from himself. He also worried Orelia may return out of the blue and discover him there. He wasn’t sure what might happen if she learned that her movements were under surveillance. Morris, struggling in the water before sinking under, always traveled in the back of his mind.

What he did learn from his spying blew his mind. Each time she displayed generosity, by helping her fellow man or woman hard up on their luck, that person didn’t enjoy her gift for long. Each met a bizarre fate in the form of an accident. Thanks to a brilliant idea of his, he learned of each event once they occurred.

He only needed a police scanner for a hundred bucks—delivered within four hours by Amazon. This, along with Google and scouring news outlets on his phone, saw his journal fill with notes. He’d recorded times, events and tragic accidents far too co-incidental to her visits to be considered normal bad luck.

Case in point, Jerome Rapid.

Homeless guy number two, Mr. Rapid, hitched a ride on the front of a train car the same night following his happy visit from Orelia. Later that night, as he crossed a train line, he slipped and fell onto the tracks. Somehow, he managed to escape the moving carriages and landed to the side, unharmed. What he didn’t see though was the other oncoming locomotive, which grabbed him by the feet, devoured his legs and dragged him thirty yards. The wheels had entangled Rapid’s entire lower half. One leg had been torn away, with the remaining attached by a thread of muscle. Despite this, he survived. A lucky circumstance, or maybe not from his perspective.

Number three spent his windfall on a bottle of scotch. No real surprise there. Then rolled out of bed and died a terrible death. In his inebriated state, he’d used a ledge seventeen-feet above a highway intersection as a place to rest his weary head. His blood alcohol level was point two nine.