in tears. She doubted she would ever smell lavender again without crying. It was safer to sort through the papers. They didn’t smell like lavender. They didn’t smell like anything at all. She blew her nose and tossed the used tissue onto the pile that was accumulating on the floor. How many boxes had she gone through? Like the number of days she’d spent crying, she’d lost count of that too. It had all become a blur. Even the funeral. That mother of all ordeals. The service had been small and quiet because they hadn’t been living in Chicago long and there was no family. Aside from Rhonda, there was nobody who could be called a friend either. Sybil had been Cassie’s only anchor to this place and now the girl felt like a boat drifting with the current. When other people lost a sister, there was always somebody else to fill the void. Cassie doubted if anybody could understand what her particular brand of loneliness felt like. The word “orphan” didn’t begin to cover it. She broke down and started to sob. “Enough!” she commanded herself sternly. She looked up at the ceiling to blink back the tears. For a few minutes she focused on nothing but breathing. Just breathe and don’t think. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Finally she calmed down enough to focus on the matter at hand. She reached for another box of papers. It looked like a bunch of old charge card receipts. Why Sybil had kept this junk was beyond her. She dumped the box upside down on the coffee table. As the pile of papers spewed out, something hard fell on top of them. Cassie cocked her head sideways, examining the object. Strange looking thing. It was shaped like a ruler. About a foot long and about two inches wide, only it had five sides. Solid in the middle but five-sided. What would you call a shape like that? A polygon? She looked at the surface of the ruler lengthwise. There were strange markings inscribed in the stone. Some looked like long hash marks and some looked like pictograms. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics only they weren’t Egyptian. She’d seen enough of those in museums to recognize them. Along the sharp edge that divided the ruler into five sides, were more hash marks and loops. Cassie made no move to pick up the stone ruler. She dismissed it as something from the shop that Sybil had decided to keep. Her sister did that all the time. She’d come across another “treasure” that she just had to have for her own. The apartment was full of things she couldn’t seem to part with. African masks on the walls. A rare Chinese vase in a niche by the door. Fragments of Greek friezes. It begged the question of where the money came from for Sybil’s expensive private collection. Cassie frowned and regarded the stone ruler again for a few moments. Maybe she’d ask Rhonda about it when she saw her next. Her eyes swept the room. The papers and the clothes and the antiques and the artwork. So much more stuff to get through. Suddenly she felt very tired and a bit overwhelmed. Nobody else to do it but her. She sighed. Without bothering to clean up the tissues on the carpet, she got up, grabbed her purse and left the apartment. She wanted to head back to her dorm room for a long, long nap. She could come back tomorrow. Everything would still be waiting for her. More memories to pop out of a drawer or jump off a shelf to remind her that she was alone in the world. It would keep. She’d cried enough for this day.
Chapter 5 – Corvette And Model-T A dozen hours after Cassie fell into a restless doze, dawn broke over a suburb on the far outskirts of the metro area. It was a hamlet that had once been rural and still retained a few of its American gothic homesteads. Daylight crept toward the oldest of these original structures — a two-story farmhouse standing on an acre of green land. It was surrounded by one hundred and twenty acres of tract housing but had so far managed to resist being engulfed by the neighborhood. A