out two figures half a block ahead of them, making their way down the darkened sidewalk, heads bent low together as they talked.
"I'd give anything to know what's going on with those two," Auntie Lil remarked wistfully. "It seems I haven't cracked a single secret yet."
"Let's slow down and follow them," Annie suggested. "Maybe we'll learn something along the way." They matched their pace to the couple ahead of them.
Thus, a strange parade formed. At the front ambled a distraught Father Stebbins and a preoccupied Fran. They walked, unseeing, past busy stores and crowded restaurants, their minds focused on distant problems. Behind them, Annie and Auntie Lil walked slowly. They were all too distraught or so busy scrutinizing their own prey that they failed to notice those who, in turn, were watching them.
"She's going up to his room," Annie predicted. They stood across the street, watching in the shadows, as Father Stebbins fumbled with the key to the massive padlock that secured the front gate. Fran waited quietly, as if she knew the routine. The pair disappeared inside the church and a series of lights flickering on charted their progress to the upstairs back room. Annie was right. But what did it prove?
"I don't think waiting here any longer will do us much good," Auntie Lil decided reluctantly. "Besides, I'm getting a chill. I'm sorry I didn't bring that nice shawl I bought in Devonshire last year."
"Coffee, then," Annie said. "Good and hot." They headed for the cheerily lit windows of the Delicious Deli. They could see Billy inside, busily wiping down the counter and arranging the desserts in preparation for the after-theater crowd. Auntie Lil and Annie were his only customers. He looked up briefly, spotted the blood on Annie's sweat shirt and did a double take. Adding Auntie Lil into the equation called for yet a third look at them.
"That your blood or her blood?" he asked evenly, nodding at the mess.
"I've got to get home and change," Annie admitted. "Someone beat up a street kid, Timmy. The one that ran with Little Pete. Know him?"
Not a muscle twitched, not an eyelid flickered. The proprietor's face was perfectly still. Finally he shrugged and gave a heavy sigh. "Yeah, I know him. He was just a boy. A kind of well-educated boy, if you know what I mean, but it doesn't seem quite fair that an adult would beat him up like that."
"She didn't say an adult beat him up," Auntie Lil said sharply. There was a silence and they looked at one another.
"I just assumed," Billy said evenly. He pointed to Annie's sweat shirt. "Looks like he took it pretty bad. I figured the other guy had to be bigger."
Either Billy had known the beating was coming or he had grown so weary of the neighborhood's sad lessons that he was adopting a fatalistic calm in response.
"Can I get a black coffee and a hero?" Annie asked. She laid her head briefly on the upper counter. "And no cracks about Bob, please. He didn't do what they said in the papers and I'm tired of people thinking he did."
Billy looked away quickly and filled her cup without comment. He turned to Auntie Lil as a sudden thought struck him. "I have a message for you," he told her. "People seem to think I'm some kind of a post office."
"A message?" she repeated. Perhaps Little Pete wanted to see her again.
"Yeah. From some guy claiming to be your nephew."
"That was my nephew, Theodore," Auntie Lil told him crisply, her coffee order forgotten. "What did he say?"
"He said to tell you that he'd had an invitation to go to the building."
Auntie Lil stared out the window and thought hard. Who had invited Theodore to Emily's building and why? How annoying that he had found something out without her. "What time was that?" she asked Billy, acutely aware that Annie was listening carefully.
"About an hour ago. You want anything or do you just want to leave another message back?" He raised his eyebrows sarcastically and slapped meat and cheese on a hard roll for Annie.
"I'll be back in a minute," Auntie Lil decided. "Wait here for me, Annie. We may need your help."
Before the younger woman could protest, Auntie Lil was heading out the door. She planned to pass by Emily's building and see if she could get in the building somehow. Listening in at doors might have been beneath her, but she was not above being petty. She might hear