“Are you the detective?” Randy Marx had come into the kitchenette behind me, his Birkenstocks noiseless on the linoleum floor.

I jumped, splashing some of the thin coffee onto the floor. Marx was a tall man in his thirties or early forties, wearing a blue T-shirt with the ubiquitous Jayhawk striding across the front. He was pale, so pale he looked ghostlike, his thick lips barely darker than his cheeks. He shook hands, smiling perfunctorily, but his eyes were watchful.

He refilled his coffee cup, which read get off your cross: we need the wood! and ushered me on down the hall to the Sprangletop Room. Its windows looked out at the bulldozers on one side but faced a small park on the other. The park held more playground equipment, a baseball diamond, and a garden where birds swooped among prairie grasses or pecked at the frost-burned remnants of sunflowers.

“That’s all that’s left of the land that St. Rafe’s used to stand on.” Marx nodded at the park. “We grow ten different varieties of native grasses there. The meeting rooms are named for them. That’s sprangletop.”

He pointed at a patch in the garden. I nodded respectfully, as if I knew which particular plant he was looking at.

“Anyway, St. Rafe’s started as a retirement home about fifty years ago—of course, I wasn’t here then—but we rethought our mission when addictions and homelessness became a bigger problem in Douglas County. About ten years ago, the board voted to change the building. They added more single rooms and treatment rooms and sold twenty acres to pay for it all. It gave St. Rafe’s a respectable endowment, but the trade-off was to put us in the middle of big boxes and tract houses. So it goes. Life is full of trade-offs, we keep telling our residents.”

“Sonia Kiel,” I said. “The sergeant who came to the Lion’s Pride when I called 911 said she’d done this before.”

Marx ran a finger around the rim of his mug, not looking at me. “She knows she’s not allowed to stay here if she’s drinking, but sometimes that urge gets too strong for her. She’ll leave, go out on the streets, stay in a church basement if the weather’s bad—a lot of the downtown churches have a strong sense of community service. Then she’ll be ready for another stint at sobriety and come back here. She’s been hospitalized before, but it was for exposure, not an overdose.”

“You must believe in her recovery if you let her keep coming back,” I said.

He looked up briefly. “I don’t know what I believe about Sonia. I— You don’t live here, do you?”

I shook my head. “Chicago, where I sit on the board of a shelter for domestic-violence refugees. I confess to a big-city bias about how generous shelters can afford to be with limited resources.”