“You saw him fall, Roe,” Bess said directly to me. The air of exhaustion was gone, and in its place was a dreadful intensity. “Was he dead when he fell, or did he die from the impact?”

“I think he was dead when he came out of the plane,” I said, trying not to cry in the face of her pain, since she was keeping her own tears in check. “I don’t think he felt a thing, or ever knew he was falling.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Mrs. Burns, here you are,” said the blond Mr. Dry-den sharply, though he could have had little doubt about Bess’s location. He was tucking his glasses into his breast pocket. Without them, his face looked even more alert. “You have a phone call you need to take in the living room. Ladies, thanks for coming to see Mrs. Burns in her time of grief.”

None of us had heard the phone ring.

“We’ll just set your meal out, and then we’ll leave,” Mother said firmly. “Bess, if you need us, we’ll be right here.”

“Thanks so much,” John Dryden said-dryly. And damned if he didn’t stay in the kitchen, watching us get out paper plates (since we couldn’t feature Dryden and O’Riley helping with the dishes) and heat up spaghetti in the built-in microwave. We prepared three plates of spaghetti, Waldorf salad, and green bean casserole, and set the table as best we could, what with having to search for the forks and napkins and glasses.

“Mr. Dryden,” said my mother, as he escorted us to the front door without our having caught another glimpse of Bess, “can you tell us when the funeral will be, and the name of the funeral home? I need to arrange for some flowers.”

“I don’t believe we’re certain at this time about any of that,” Dryden said cautiously. “There has to be an autopsy.”

So Dryden was a stranger to Bess Burns, if not to Jack. Any Lawrenceton native would know the Burns’s burials would be from Jasper Funeral Home, since Jerry Saylor of Saylor’s Funeral Home had divorced Bess Burns’s sister. From the way Mother and I looked at each other, Dryden knew he’d said something significant; you could see him trying to figure it out, abandoning the attempt.