bit?" T.S. asked. "Sounds to me like you've been holding campfires and telling tales all night. Sounds to me like they knew every last detail involved and a good many more that weren't involved."
"They are very dramatic women," Auntie Lil explained stiffly. "They like a good story and they're so appreciative. I simply got a little carried away." She dabbed at her brow again and he saw that she was truly upset. He felt ashamed.
"I'm sorry," he apologized. "Did you know the dead woman well?"
"Emily?" She stared out the window. "Not really. She'd had some long-standing tiff with one of the other ladies and had not been speaking to any of them for several months. But they're right, you know, Theodore. No one—and I mean no one—deserves to die without a name."
Her lower lip quivered and T.S. stared at her in despair. He hoped she would not start to cry. He didn't think he'd ever seen her break down and wasn't sure he could handle it now.
"Now, now, Aunt Lil." He patted her hand sympathetically and her white cotton gloves felt hot to his touch. "Someone will step forward to claim her."
"Oh, isn't that the way of the world?" she asked bitterly. "Always expecting someone else to step forward. No one else will step forward. If we don't do it, we'll never know who she really was." Her lower lip quivered again and it was a little frightening to see her supreme self-control fail.
"This has you really upset," T.S. said quietly. "I hadn't realized quite how much."
"Well, maybe when you get to be my age you'll be able to watch other people drop dead without blinking an eye, but I don't mind telling you that I'm finding it hard."
T.S. blinked. When he hit eighty-four years of age, he was sure he would not even begin to approach Auntie Lil's normal, everyday courage. "You didn't seem so upset before."
"That stupid Officer King had me so angry, that I couldn't be upset. But now I just can't stop thinking of that poor woman lying somewhere dead and no one to even claim her body. Why can't we help them find out who she is? It isn't as if we're sticking our noses into another homicide. This is child's play, really, considering our true capabilities." She turned to him with pleading eyes and he shifted uncomfortably in the seat.
"I just don't see how we could help," he protested faintly.
"We can find out who she is, so her relatives can be notified and she can have a decent burial. And at least be interred under her real name, for God's sake."
"Why us?" T.S. complained. "Let her other friends do it. They ought to know her real name, anyway, if they were the good friends they claim to be. They wept enough tears back there to flood Salt Lake City."
Auntie Lil stared at him without comment for an icy moment, then tapped sharply on the glass divider. "Driver—could you take us to the pier at Forty-Fifth and Twelfth Avenue before we go to Queens?"
"You're paying, lady," he answered back, taking a sudden right onto Forty-second Street.
"What now?" T.S. asked. When she didn't answer, he glared out the window. She was punishing him with the silent treatment and he'd be damned if he'd let it get to him.
"Right there is fine," Auntie Lil told the driver as they approached the Hudson. The river sparkled dully in the autumn sunlight, its waves alternating between flat gray and a murky brown. Auntie Lil pointed toward a deserted landfill pier that hosted a small amusement park during the summer months. It was now empty and desolate, no more than a barren stretch of land dotted with an odd patch of dry grass here and there.
"Keep the meter running," she ordered the driver. "You come with me," she ordered T.S.
"You're paying for the cab," T.S. warned her and immediately felt worse. He was behaving like a sullen child. On the other hand, why not? She was treating him like one, wasn't she? And all because he could not go along with her latest cockeyed scheme.
They walked in silence to the end of the landfill, then followed a concrete pier out into the waves. They reached the end and she stopped him beside a set of large pilings and pointed down the river toward the southern tip of Manhattan. "See that shadow there?"
"What shadow? All I see is smog."
"That's the trouble with you, Theodore," she told him. "You're so busy being