Free All's Well That Ends by Gillian Roberts

was going on with her at the time. That little eagle had been a gift during the Vietnam War. A suitor, or maybe one of her husbands.
    She said his name, but I don’t recall it. So every single object was a treasure to her, because they held her memories.” She inhaled, looked down, shook her head, sighed out the smoke. “And what else do we have, when you get down to it?”
    “Yes. So true,” I said, leaving the politics of why the other neighborhood women should not, by Ramona’s rights, have in-GILLIAN ROBERTS
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    herited any of those memory-treasures. “I guess you must have been in her house several times, enough times to learn about the different pieces.”
    She shrugged. “I’d stopped by, as I said, after she lost her husband. Brought a cake one time, asked her to go to a church social with me another. She declined, invited her over another time, but she couldn’t make it. So no, not that often.”
    “And about those other visitors, the ones you didn’t know.
    Did she talk about them with you? Tell you their names, or how they came to be in her life?” She did it for whoever was associated with a pathetic-looking, flag-waving eagle, I mentally reminded the universe. For heaven’s sake, she could do it for the humans in her life as well and make my mission easier.
    “You mean that day when we had the tea?” Ramona asked.
    “Did she talk about her other friends that day?”
    “That day or any of the other days when you stopped in, or had a little chat outside.”
    “No. Never.”
    Nice that she’d needed to know which date I was talking about in order to say no, never.
    “Not that I mentioned taking note of them to her, you see. I didn’t want her to think I was prying, and if she’d wanted me to know, she’d have told me. It’s only that I’d hear the automobile door and think it was somebody for me—the houses are close, as you can see. Her driveway and carport are right beside mine, and almost in my living room. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know. They were quiet, the visitors. And most times, they went out somewhere else. No carrying on. I didn’t mean to suggest any such thing.”
    “No, no, of course. One last question: The night she passed away, were you home?”
    “It was a weeknight, wasn’t it? Which night, do you recall?”
    “A Thursday evening.” Unless happenings were a lot more dramatic on Hutchinson Court than I had reason to think, it was difficult for me to believe this woman wouldn’t recall in minute 57
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    and excruciating detail where she’d been, what she’d seen, and what night of the week it had been when her secondary source of entertainment, her next door neighbor, had killed herself.
    “Oh wait, of course. It was a Thursday. Yes, I saw her briefly.
    She was all gussied up. High heels and lots of jewelry, and I must say, though events proved otherwise, that I would never have suspected that she was feeling low. She was cordial and seemed quite contented.”
    “What was she doing when you spoke with her?”
    “Taking the trash to the curb.”
    “In her high heels and jewelry?”
    Ramona Fulgham grimaced. “What are you going to do when there’s no man of the house? I remember because she said she always forgets until it’s too late at night to want to go outside and take care of it. I understood, because when your husband passes away, things like that become sad reminders of what he would have done. Not that I would have wanted to take out the trash in my dress shoes, or with clean hands and all. Don’t want those smells on us, do we? I try to do it in the afternoon if I’m going out at night, like I was that night. But then, I’m not—I was not, I guess—Phoebe Ennis. To each his own.”
    Again I agreed, and waited while Mrs. Fulgham spent a moment looking as if she were remembering all the glorious Thursday nights that somebody else had taken the trash can down to the curb. “Did she in any way mention her plans for the