Lost by Gary; Devon

now? Eighteen? Twenty? Out on their own. They’re practically strangers to me.”
    â€œThat shouldn’t be either.”
    â€œNo, it probably shouldn’t, but it’s true. Sad, but true. Emma, why don’t you stop this and help me?”
    â€œThat’s just like you! If you think I’m going to be a party to this, you’ve got another think coming!”
    But as they neared the back door, Emma ducked and pulled out of Leona’s arm. “I want to say one thing, though, Leona. These past few months before this trouble came up, that’s the way we should’ve been all these years. And I don’t want you to go, because now that I finally feel like we know how to get along.… I feel like I’ll never see you again.”
    â€œWhy, Emma May Mattingly, I do believe you’re jealous. Shame on you. Shame on you . Bite your tongue.”
    Still it was another half hour, quarter past eight and pitch dark outside, before the upstairs bedroom she had used for almost five months was put back in order, the last suitcase stowed with the other six in the trunk of the blue Buick, and she was ready to go. Grumbling and complaining, Emma had been up and down the stairs more times than Leona cared to count, bringing a box Leona didn’t need, asking questions, and all the time arguing with herself: “I could stop this, you know. I could call the hospital and warn them what you’re going to do. But then I suppose they’d suspect I was in on it.”
    â€œYou could always be anonymous,” Leona told her, and grinned.
    â€œWell, it wouldn’t take a mental giant to figure out who it was, now, would it? But don’t you tempt me.”
    Leona went up to the bedroom one last time. “For a final check,” she said. “I always feel as if I’m forgetting something.”
    Actually, what she went back for was the black lizardskin briefcase she had left under the far side of the bed. It had come to her as part of the Merchassen estate. To Leona, it somehow represented all the years she had been with the Merchassens, first as housekeeper, then as secretary (and nurse in a crisis), and finally as companion to Helen Merchassen until she had died at the age of eighty-two the summer before last.
    The black briefcase was what the doctor had affectionately called “a smuggler’s wonder,” and he had bought it simply because it was clever. It opened in half and she laid it flat on the bed. On one side there was a series of pockets and dividers with zippers that seemed to fill the space quite well. But underneath was another compartment at least two inches deep; here is where Leona kept the small vials of medicine wrapped in cotton batting and the compounds and few instruments she had taken from the office before the auction. The doctor had been a fastidious man, so there weren’t many other things she thought she should take, except for the personal documents he and his wife had left behind—drivers’ licenses, birth certificates, appointment books, a diary. She decided it would be disrespectful to allow these small personal items to be passed on to strangers, and the relatives had no use for them. So she kept them—and she kept them in the pockets and dividers that held the medicines it was probably illegal for her to have.
    The other side had an actual false bottom. She cleared this half of everything she had originally put in it. There was a slot in the spine of the briefcase, and by fiddling with the small blade of a penknife, she triggered the release of a panel in the bottom, revealing an inch-deep space the full length and width of the briefcase. And that was where she had placed the larger denominations of bills when she closed her account and withdrew her money at the bank in Scranton. She pulled three thousand-dollar bills from the top of one of the bundles and closed the fake floor of the case.
    She and Dr. Merchassen had