Your Heart Belongs to Me

is why she came here and I ever met her. She loved Alvin in spite of himself, but he never set well with me. They made it eight and a half years, then she fell backwards off a convenient stepladder and smashed the back of her skull bad on some convenient concrete.”
    When Wanda June did not continue, Ryan said, “Convenient, huh?”
    “Son, don’t take me wrong on this. I’m making no accusations, have no intention to smirch anyone’s reputation. Lord knows, I’m no policeman, never even watched them CSI shows, and there was plenty of policemen on Ismay’s case, so it’s got to be that they knew what they were doing when they called it an accident. Can’t be but crazed with grief and loneliness why Alvin took up with another woman just a month after Ismay’s gone. Crazed with grief and loneliness, crazed by the estate money and the insurance money, poor crazed and lonely Alvin.”
    “She died in the fall, Wanda June?”
    “No, no, son, they did some powerful surgery on her, and she had brain swelling bad for a time, didn’t know who she was, but she came around, she had fortitude and the Lord. No memory of the convenient stepladder or the convenient concrete, but she was getting back all the rest of herself, she got to be Ismay again. She was in a rehab hospital, working on some left-arm paralysis, which she was nearly shed of, when she was slammed by a convenient massive heart attack, while poor Alvin was visiting her with some friend of his, them alone in the room with Ismay and the door shut, and that was just one convenience too many for Ismay, God bless and keep her.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss, Wanda June. I can hear in your voice how close you were to her.” He asked the most important question: “When did Ismay die?”
    “It was three years ago this past Christmas Eve. Alvin, he was bringing her a gift, this beautiful silk scarf, which I guess was so beautiful it gave her a heart attack, which is comforting to think that beauty was what did her in, ’cause it wouldn’t have been anyway convenient if the heart attack didn’t happen and somebody then had to strangle her accidentally with the scarf.”
    If Wanda June Siedel could be believed, Ismay Clemm had died twenty-one months prior to the myocardial biopsy during which Ryan had met her.
    He sat listening to the angry yellow wind, the gears of his mind having ground to a halt on the thought-obstructing fact that had just been thrown into them.
    Wanda June didn’t need encouragement to continue: “Ismay, she met Alvin on a Christian Internet site, which right there is some contradiction, the Internet being the devil’s playground. If Ismay hadn’t gone on the Internet, she wouldn’t ever met Alvin, she would still be out there in Denver with her sister, which means she and me never would have been friends, but I’d rather never known her than her be dead before her time.”
    “Denver,” Ryan said.
    “That’s where she was born, lived as a girl, and then married to Reggie. She moved here to Newport, to Costa Mesa actually, she was forty-seven, because Alvin had a job here, such as it was, and so she got on with the hospital.”
    “And her sister—she’s still alive?”
    “The sister, Ismena, she didn’t marry Alvin, she doesn’t do e-mail let alone Internet, so she’s still not fallen off a stepladder or swallowed a silk scarf or anything, she’s doing fine, she’s a sweetheart like Ismay.”
    Reason might have returned to the universe. If there was a sister, an explanation might exist that would comport with the world of laws and logic with which Ryan was comfortable.
    “So you’ve stayed in touch with Ismena,” he said.
    “Ismena Moon, that’s the maiden name, Alvin was a Clemm. Ismena and me write each other, talk on the phone some.”
    “She still lives in Denver?”
    “She does, she lives in the very house Ismay and Reggie owned, bought it away from Ismay once Ismay up and married the supposedly Christian Alvin, not that it’s my place to question anyone’s faith, stepladder or no stepladder.”
    “Wanda June, what did Kyra Whipset tell you about me?”
    “Didn’t even talk to her. She just knew somebody who knew me and knew I was friends with Ismay. They said you’d been impressed by her or something, would I call you.”
    “As I said earlier, Ismay was very kind to me at a terrible time in my life. I wanted to…to repay that kindness. But I didn’t know she had passed on.”
    “Son, I would