Chapter 15
The recently departed looked even more like one of the city’s lost souls up close and personal. His coat was a blue so faded it had turned gray while hair streamed down his shoulders and off his chin. The man himself could have been twenty or fifty. Whatever his age, he wouldn’t see another year—not now that he was quite solidly dead.
“The other body you mentioned was the same?” I asked, squashing my instinctive urge to move further away from the corpse just as I’d previously tamped down the strange attraction to the male at my side. But even though my living mother had imbued in me a healthy hesitancy about touching dead bodies, her ghost was more interested in deciphering the puzzle before our eyes.
“Three people gathering can create wisdom,” Mama whispered.
And at the sam
