Today she’d helped a woman who’d been walking along the sidewalk, pushing a shopping cart overburdened with plastic bags filled with clothes, cans and bottles. A wide-brimmed red hat covered her face that if worn by a svelte young lady would be fashionable. Matched with her baggy trousers and stained purple t-shirt it delivered the correct impression, that her wardrobe was from a thrift shop or the trash.

He wanted to cross the road and warn her, but he was uncertain if his interference might have any effect. His first duty was to save his own life. He reasoned that only by continuing his surveillance could he put a permanent stop to whatever black magic Orelia wielded.

This Orelia was a different person to the one he’d first met. Maybe she’d changed. Maybe she had become the world’s most charitable author, infatuated with society’s underdogs. But he knew better. She had an agenda and today had become his lucky day because he had discovered something. Correction, today he’d remembered something he had forgotten. And that something seemed important.

Funny how inconsequential details become large beacons in hindsight. Thank goodness too, because he couldn’t keep following her forever. His car had earned three parking fines and yesterday he’d narrowly missed being towed.

As usual, she had led him to a disheveled man leaning against the wall of an ornately decorated building of the early previous century. A pair of carved lions the size of large dogs sat guarding the curved-arched entrance. One half of the beast’s snout, eaten away by the decades, made the carving of the animal appear to suffer leprosy. Ten etched columns ran along its façade overlooking a small open hallway running behind and the length of the frontage. The structure had seen better days but must have been elegant and imposing in its heyday. The irony that this place was a library, announced by the sign above the entrance, was not lost on him.

Two authors stood outside a library and one said to the other… he recited below his breath, then couldn’t think of a punch line.

The man’s makeshift home, a flattened cardboard box, had been placed to the side of the door. Protected by the alcove, he’d spread out his meager creature comforts of a thermos, mug, rug, and surprisingly a book (maybe borrowed from within).

William positioned himself nearby, three columns away, out of sight, but close enough to hear, he hoped. If he was somewhere in Europe, he might have imagined himself as John le Carré’s espionage hero George Smiley. He wished he possessed a tenth of the fictional character’s spy craft skills, but he’d feel safer if he possessed Lee Child’s Jack Reacher’s aggression. He’d even take just mastering his glare.

As with the other homeless, this man’s appearance told a sad story of a tragic life lived on streets and in back alleys. His matted hair, lined face, and at this distance the slumping of his shoulders, painted a picture of lost hope.