I handed her the drawing of the bi-polar bear.

Sonia studied it for a long minute, then handed it back. “If you like it, go ahead and keep it. Who knows, maybe it will be valuable someday.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry I violated your privacy, though.”

She gave a lopsided smile. “You’re only one in a long line. I’m getting a length of blue ribbon and making a cordon sanitaire to wear whenever I have to see a doctor or . . . or any violator. I get to have privacy, I get to get rid of CheeseNuts. You can keep the journals if they ever come back.”

62
There’s No Place Like Home

I left Lawrence the day before Thanksgiving. Nell Albritten and Emerald Ferring tried to persuade me to stay for the big fete at St. Silas, but I needed to be home. Sergeant Everard took me out for a farewell supper the night before I left. One thing led to another, as they sometimes do.

“You could open an agency down here, you know,” Everard said as I got dressed early Wednesday morning. “There’s obviously an abundance of crime in Lawrence that none of us know about.”

“You’d start imagining I was killing people to create work for myself,” I said. “You’d start arresting me every time a dead body showed up in the county.”

He laughed and helped me put Peppy into the car, along with my luggage and an enormous picnic basket prepared by the St. Silas women.

“You could be right about that, Warshawski. You could be right. Still, you go buy yourself a pair of red high heels, just in case.”

I fished in my suitcase for my Magli pumps. “Got them, but they’re taking me back to Chicago.”

Much as I longed to be home, I backtracked to the middle of the state, west and north of Fort Riley to the little town of Belleville. I’d persuaded Aanya Malik to let me have the tiny hand Doris McKinnon had sent to Dr. Roque, along with her soil samples. Charmaine Long cradled the miniature case it was in against her cheek.

“Matt’s little baby,” she murmured. “My little niece. Thank you, thank you for bringing her home to me.”

We talked through the afternoon, while I recounted once more the long hard story I’d pieced together. Charmaine, too, wanted me to stay for Thanksgiving, stay until Friday when she would have a private funeral for Matt and Jenny and baby Cady.

“I don’t belong there,” I said, finally extricating myself. “I need to go back to the place I do belong.”