The three of them polished off the refreshments, then played a couple of games. The Magnolia Ladies came home from the baby shower and Liz and Verna said good night and went home. Bessie put away the card table and straightened the parlor, then climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

All in all, it had been a memorable day, from its inauspicious and rather ordinary beginning at Beulah’s Beauty Bower to its extraordinary conclusion with Miss Hamer’s Rebel yell and the arrest of a Chicagoland gangster right across the street—not to mention Miss Hamer’s claim that her father had paid Harold to jilt her and leave Darling. Who would have thought that all those amazing things could happen on just one day? She rather hoped that things would go back to being ordinary again tomorrow. She’d had just about all the excitement she could handle.

In her room, Bessie turned on the light beside her bed. She was tired, but her mind was still racing and she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Her glance went to the box of her father’s papers that she had carried down from the attic, sitting on her dresser. She hadn’t had an urgent reason for going through them—until now. Of course, it wasn’t likely that she’d find anything to confirm or refute Miss Hamer’s assertion. But still, she ought to make the effort. When she didn’t find anything, she would at least know that there wasn’t anything to find.

Mr. Noonan had brought the box over from the funeral home one day not long after her father had sold the business. He was already too sick to be able to go through the papers, so Bessie had carried the box to the attic without bothering to take a look. Mr. Noonan told her that he’d kept the business items he had found in the files—burial records, grave marker and grave location information, invoices, employee records, and the like—and was returning items that looked to be of a more personal nature: newspaper clippings, notes from grateful clients, complaints, and so on. There was a note inside the box from Mrs. Noonan, saying that she had put everything into folders, a folder for each year. Now, Bessie was grateful. Her father had been in the funeral and gravestone business for decades and had accumulated a great many papers. At least she didn’t have to sort through dozens of scraps.