B006JIBKIS EBOK by H. Terrell Griffin

had been taken in front of a church alter. Jarvis had a head full of hair, hanging just below his ears. The bride was looking up at him with a large smile. Her dark hair hung to her shoulders, black under the white lace of the cap and veil. She wasn’t the Connie Sanborne I knew.
    “Let me show you a picture of the woman whose death I’m investigating,” I said, pulling the picture of Connie taken by my pool that hot summer day. “Do you recognize her?”
    “No,” he said. “Can’t say that I do. Are you sure this woman graduated from Northwestern at the same time as my Connie? There couldn’t have been two people with the same name without Connie knowing about it.”
    I put the picture back in the inside pocket of my suit coat. “That ‘s the information I was given, Dr. Jarski. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” We shook hands, and he showed me to the door.
    I settled into my rental car, turned the ignition, placed the seatbelt in the prescribed position, and was about to leave, when I heard Jarski call to me. He was coming down the sidewalk at a fast pace, and came around to the driver’s side of the car. I hit the power button to lower the window.
    “May I see that picture again?” he asked.
    I dug it out of the pocket of my coat laying on the passenger seat, and handed it to him. He studied the picture intently for a minute or so.
    “You know,” he said, so low I could hardly hear him. “I may know this woman. If it’s who I think it is, she had long black hair, and worked with my wife for awhile in Chicago.”
    “What’s her name?”
    “If I’m right, this is a woman named Vivian Pickens. I only met her once, and that was before we left Chicago. But she and Connie were pretty close for awhile. Connie gave me a list of people to notify of her death, and Vivian was one of them. I dropped her a card a few weeks after the funeral.”
    “What kind of work did Connie do in Chicago?” I asked.
    “She was a social worker, but after Lisa was born she stayed home.”
    “Do you still have Vivian’s address?”
    “I think so. Come on back inside.”
    We climbed the steps to the porch and went into the living room. He went to the writing desk, opened the middle drawer and came back with a sheet of paper with typewritten names and addresses.
    “This is the list of people Connie wanted notified,” he said as he handed me the paper.
    Vivian’s name was next to a street address in Chicago. I noticed several other names that did not mean anything to me, and the Office of Alumni Affairs at Northwestern University.
    “Did you notify the Alumni Office at Northwestern too?” I asked.
    “Yeah. I made sure I let everyone on the list know. I guess Connie wanted to have her death listed in the Alumni magazine so that people she had known in college would know.”
    “This is strange,” I said. “I got your address from the Alumni Office and was told that Connie’s death had been reported about four years ago, and then a few days later, they got a call from Connie telling them that she had divorced you, and that you must have sent the death notice out of spite.”
    “That’s absurd,” he said, his voice rising. “Why in the world would anyone want to do something like that?”
    “I don’t know, but maybe I can find out. Did you meet Connie in college?”
    “No, I went to the University of Chicago to graduate school. Connie had finished Northwestern and was working at a half-way house for women near the UC campus. I actually met her while waiting for a bus one day.”
    “What kind of place was the half-way house?”
    “It was a place for women who had been released from prison but hadn’t completed their sentences yet. The state would send them to this half-way house, where they could go to work during the day and have a structured environment in which to live. They got job training and help in finding a job. It was really quite successful, but Connie seemed to burn out after a few years. She was