“Getting ready to hang himself probably. But it was like Joey to start out with some idea and then drop it. He never could concentrate on anything for long. You should have heard my Aunt Tilda. She screamed so loud I dropped the phone, then she started right up about California being a sinful place and no wonder he’d killed himself—my Aunt Tilda been living with Indian men all these years, one right after the other. I think she kills them and sticks them in the floor of the icehouse when she’s through with them. Then I got this idea.” She paused and sat down on Joe’s cot. “Maybe it’s against the law. Listen. You know that little black-haired bitch drives the school bus? The one’s got a husband in the navy and is always fooling around with the Santa Ana soldiers? I thought maybe she’d drive me and Joey up to L.A. in that bus. What do you think?”

Annie had seen the girl at the bar now and then. A greedy nervous girl who stirred up the indolent surface of the bar atmosphere like a water bug, her hands on people, men and women alike, or tending to her long black hair, swinging it back off her face, pulling it down one side, running her long soiled fingernails through it. She had confided in Annie once that she needed a gin fizz, pronto, after a rough night with a couple of boys from the base.

“I’d pay her maybe fifty bucks. A lot less than I’d have to pay the undertaker. What do you think? Jesus! Here I got a body on my hands!”

“Why did he do it?”

“I can’t think about that. He was born too sad. Everything that happened made it worse. He should have been a preacher and had God. Then he would have known what he was supposed to do.” She was pleating her shirt in her hands, over and over. “I was pretty bad to him,” she said in a whisper. “I can’t think about it so don’t say anything to what I said.”

The day following the inquest, which Sigrid attended in what she called her family dress—the one she had in case one of the aunts or uncles should ever come to California—Annie received a package from Ben Greenhouse. It contained, along with a note, a handsome string of large amber beads. She’d never owned anything so substantial. The note read: “Ann, I haven’t much to say except that you pleased me, even if not in the traditional way. I hope this string of amber matches something in your mind. I’m tucked back inside my life again, and for a while it won’t seem too bad. Be a good girl, not a halfhearted trollop. Your friend…”