Chapter 42 Deli
Deli
Aunt Mo pulled into a parking spot beside a garden enclosed in wild white roses.
“So, who do you know here, again?”
Aunt Mo shrugged. “I’ve lived in Fearnhall for a long time. Plenty of people get old and move in. Just have to drop off some paperwork. I’ll be back in a second. Maybe two.”
She headed into the retirement home with an official looking envelope and left Deli to wait in the car.
Deli pushed the cuticle on her thumb back with a pen cap she found in the center divider. Then she picked dried mud out of the tread of her boots. She was studying a tree in the middle of the garden—dotted with glimmers of red—when a figure appeared behind it.
An older woman in a lacy white nightgown wove barefooted through the mud in confused stops and starts.
Deli searched for someone in a uniform or with a name tag coming after her, but the woman was alone.
Deli got out of the car. Glossy pomegranates hung heavy from the tree, and the woman wrapped a blue-veined hand around a fruit and tugged it free.
Deli cleared her throat softly. “Ma’am? Are you alright? ”
She went still, the pomegranate clutched to her chest in both hands. Long strands of silver hair had come loose from a twist and now blew sideways across her face, but her eyes . . .
They burned like hearths in an empty house—fire in a hollow. Honey and amber gone dull. Still, they were unmistakable.
Deli had wiped away dust from this woman’s photo.
She was with Lachlan’s mother.