It was a nice funeral. The preacher said what things he could, and stressed the fact that at the last Amelia had repented of the crime and had made the supreme atonement, that justice was divine, and that who was there among us to condemn.
Bertha Cool sent a nice floral wreath, and there was a huge pillow of flowers marked: From an old friend.
I didn’t try to trace the pillow. If I had, I felt quite certain that Marian’s Uncle Stephen would have been found at the paying end of the bill, but Uncle Steve wasn’t at the funeral.
Afterwards, when I dropped in at the office to say good-bye to Marian, I could hear the typewriter laboriously clacking away behind the partition. I wondered who it was.
“A new reporter?” I asked.
She said, “That’s Uncle Steve. He wanted to write the obituary himself. It seems that he used to know her.”
I raised my eyebrows.
Marian looked at me steadily. “Donald,” she said, “was she really your aunt?”
“My favourite aunt,” I said.
She came closer to the counter, so that her uncle couldn’t hear me, and pushed her hands out across the partition. Her eyes were wistful. “When,” she asked, “am I ever going to get to see you?”