Were it not for Mister Pickle I might not have recognized Lucy’s former dorm room with its white horizontal blinds shut backward like a nappy fabric or fur rubbed the wrong way, a habit of hers that’s always driven me a little crazy. She routinely shuts blinds with the slats verso, and I gave up saying it’s like wearing your underwear inside out. She argues that when the closed slats curve up instead of down it’s impossible to see in. Anybody who thinks that way is vigilant about being watched, stalked, spied on. Lucy wouldn’t let someone get away with it.

Unless she didn’t know. Unless she trusted whoever it was.

SECONDS TICK BY and the dorm room is the same. Empty. Silent.

The cinder block walls and tile floor are primer-white, the furniture inexpensive with a maple veneer, everything plain and practical and prodding a remote part of my brain, a pain-saturated part of my memory that I keep sealed off like human remains under poured concrete. What I’m seeing on my phone’s display could be a private psychiatric hospital room. Or a visiting officer’s quarters on a military base. Or a generically bland pied-à-terre. But I know what I’m looking at. I’d recognize that moody teddy bear anywhere.

Mister Pickle always went where Lucy did, and as I look at his poignant face I’m reminded of what was going on with me during the long lost days of the 1990s. I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, the first woman to hold that position. I’d become Lucy’s caretaker after my selfish sister Dorothy decided to unload her on me. What was presented as a short impromptu visit turned into forever and the timing for when it all began couldn’t have been worse.

My first summer in Richmond and it was under siege as a serial killer strangled women in their own homes, in their own beds. The murders were escalating and becoming increasingly sadistic. We couldn’t catch him. We didn’t have a clue. I was new. The press and politicians thundered down on me like an avalanche. I was a misfit. I was chilly and aloof. I was peculiar. What kind of woman would dissect dead bodies in a morgue? I was ungracious and lacked southern charm. I wasn’t descended from Jamestown or the Mayflower. A backslidden Catholic, a socially liberal multicultural Miami native and I’d managed to anchor my career in the former capital of the Confederacy where the murder rate per capita was the highest in the United States.