Death Before Facebook

expression, it might help, she thought. Back in the kitchen, she said, “Let me do it.”
    “That’s okay. I can manage.” Marguerite seemed very thin as she moved about her messy kitchen, pathetic and lonely in her baggy sweats. Skip thought it odd that she was alone so soon after her son’s death, that the house had not been touched, as if visitors had not come. When Marguerite opened the refrigerator, Skip saw that it was nearly empty, not filled with food the way it should have been—with casserole dishes and hams, cakes and pies from friends and relatives.
    “Do you think you should be alone?” she said. “Could I call someone to stay with you?”
    Marguerite said, “We’re always alone.” She looked off in the distance. “Neetsie’s friends used to come over now and then. I don’t know—I guess Cole and I aren’t very social. We don’t… belong to a church, or clubs or anything. Neither of us goes out to a job.”
    She sounded as if she were wondering aloud how she had come to this friendless state.
    “Do you have relatives?”
    “Cole doesn’t. My dad died a long time ago. My mother’s in a nursing home.
    “All the same…” She stared into space again. “We’re having a memorial service. People might come over afterward—is that what they do?”
    Skip shook her head—working in Homicide didn’t make her a funeral consultant.
    Marguerite looked panicked. Two cats, a tortoiseshell and a black-and-white one, rubbed against her ankles. “I guess I should clean the house.”
    That was a job Skip didn’t envy.
    “Hello, pretties. Hello—should Mommy feed you? Mommy’s so bad. Such a bad mommy that can’t even feed the kitties.” She tapped some cat chow into a bowl. At the sound, another cat glided in, a black one. Skip had now seen half a dozen cats, none of whom was Mosey, and one dog.
    “Does your dog bark when strangers come around?”
    “Sometimes—she barked at you. But sometimes not—she’s a lousy watchdog. Why?”
    “I just wondered about the day Geoff was killed. Did you hear her then?”
    She frowned. “I don’t think so. But the pills. She could have barked two feet away and I wouldn’t have known it.”
    Marguerite asked what Skip took in her coffee, handed her a steaming mug, and picked up a mug of her own. “Shall we go in the living room?”
    At least, thought Skip, there was some sun in there.
    “I don’t have much time to clean,” said Marguerite. “I have so many projects.”
    “Do you keep the garden yourself?” She looked out the window, more appreciative than ever now that she’d seen the inside of the house.
    “Why, yes. Do you like it?”
    “Very much.”
    “I can do creative projects; I just don’t seem to be able to handle the daily maintenance stuff. Neetsie’s just like me.”
    “I know what you mean.” Skip noticed that Marguerite smiled when she spoke of Neetsie, almost for the first time. She picked up on it: “What does Neetsie do?”
    “She’s a very fine actress, actually. She’s going to be good. I really think she’s going to make it. She goes to UNO at night, just a couple of classes, and supports herself with little jobs she gets.” She smiled again, the indulgent mother.
    “She must be very talented.”
    “Oh, she is.”
    “And Geoff?”
    “Geoff?”
    Skip smiled, tried to make herself as nonthreatening as possible. “What did he do?”
    “He was into computers. Like his dad.”
    “His dad? But he and your husband have different names.”
    “His stepdad. They were very close. Cole taught him about computers and it brought him right out of himself; he blossomed into a new person.”
    Skip thought a thirty-one-year-old man who lived with his parents hadn’t come that far out of himself. She said: “He had a job in computers?”
    A shadow crossed Marguerite’s face. “No. Geoff was a very, very bright young man. Exceptional. But we couldn’t afford the good schools—we had to teach him ourselves. He didn’t adjust to other kids very well. He wasn’t socialized.”
    Skip nodded and smiled, absolutely in the dark as to what she meant.
    “He was brilliant, really. But he read comic books as a kid. You know how some kids do that? He never seemed to outgrow it.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “That kind of mentality. Kind of withdrawn. He was a very quiet, very inward-looking boy. He had a girlfriend, though. Things were looking better for him. I don’t think he’d really had one before.”
    “How