She complied. The Chasid touched the mezuzah, kissed his hand, then walked inside. But Gold pushed him back out. Decker followed them into the hallway.

Gold said, “Every day, it’s someone else.”

The Chasid started a pitch in a foreign tongue.

“Maspeek.” Gold opened his wallet and took out a twenty. “That’s all I have. Go.”

The shnorrer didn’t budge.

Gold showed the man his empty wallet. “No more kesef. Lech. Mayveen?”

The shnorrer said, “Ani mayveen.” He looked at Decker.

Decker blew out air, then took out a twenty from his wallet and gave it to the man. The shnorrer pocketed the money, muttered some blessing, then moved on to the next mezuzah down the hallway.

11

Even though it was the job, Marge felt like a snoop. Decker had warned her about the feeling. True she had gone through other houses from the rafters to the baseboards, but in those cases, the occupants had been alive. Though Marge had no evidence that the Yaloms were dead, it didn’t look good. Though the paper still came and the mail was still being delivered, the only living things left in the Yalom place were houseplants.

So with key in hand, courtesy of Orit Bar Lulu, Marge plundered through items, bit by bit, with no one standing over her shoulder, nobody protesting her presence, or cussing her out.

They couldn’t have just fallen off the planet!

Within three hours, she had amassed an abbreviated biography of the Yaloms’ lives, had discovered private matter…secrets.

Dalia Yalom was on the pill and was a hidden lover of the soaps. To wit: magazines featuring daytime serials stowed in a hatbox, along with an autographed eight by ten glossy of a handsome but plastic man. Dalia’s closets were well stocked although there wasn’t an obscene amount of clothing for a woman of her means. But she did have odd tastes. A shoe collection made up of dozens of sneakers—beaded ones, painted ones, embroidered ones. She had tennis shoes made of everything from buckskin to terry cloth, from silk to see-through plastic. A variation of the glass slipper.

Though Marge had sifted through the shoes, one by one, she had found nothing. Satisfying herself that the master bedroom was devoid of clues, she’d moved on to the boys’ rooms.

She’d found Dov’s small stash, not much more than a few measly crumbs of cannabis. Dov’s escape from an overbearing father. She’d also discovered voluminous writings and stories crammed into three binders in the back of his closet. In light of what Decker had told her, Dov’s stories about loneliness and alienation had come as no surprise.