It was getting late on Colorado’s Front Range. Clouds drifted across the night sky in long, tattered strands, as if shredded by the mountaintops on their journey toward Boulder.
Amy watched in silence from the balcony off her bedroom. She was alone for the night. Gram and Taylor were staying with a neighbor for a few days, until they could replace the sliced-up mattresses and other busted furnishings. Amy had been cleaning up their ravaged apartment all afternoon, working into the evening. Little was salvageable. The insurance adjuster had come and gone hours ago. The check would come in a few days, he’d promised, though it wouldn’t help much. Most of the furniture was much more than ten years old and had almost zero depreciated value. For what it was worth, the adjuster seemed to agree with the detective’s assessment. This was no simple burglary. Someone had wanted to send her a message.
The question was, what was the message?
All her life, Amy had been exceptional at solving problems of any kind, from calculus to crosswords. Ever since she’d opened the box of money, however, she’d felt completely clueless. She hated that helpless feeling, that inability to figure things out. She’d felt that way only once before in her life. Many years ago.
Right after her mother died.
“Amy, you okay here tonight?” It was Gram.
Amy was leaning on the balcony rail. She glanced over her shoulder, back into the bedroom through the sliding glass door. “Yeah, I’ll be okay. Taylor asleep?”
Gram joined her on the balcony. “Like a log. I just wanted to come up and see how you were doing, check on things.”
“Not much to check on, is there?”
“Aww, forget it. I’ve been meaning to get rid of a lot of all this old junk anyway. We’ll be fine.”
Amy smiled with her eyes. “What is that you used to tell me? Our guardian angel owes us one?”
Gram smiled back. “It’s been a long time since I said that. That’s quite a memory you have there.”
“I don’t forget much. Just certain things.”
Gram looked at her with concern, as if she sensed what her granddaughter had been thinking. “Amy, darling. When something bad happens, it’s natural to think back on the past, to other sadness.”
She nodded, looking up to the sky. “I can see Vega.”
“Where?”
“Right overhead. It’s the brightest star in the constellation of Lyra. See it?” she said, pointing.
“It forms a harp, or lyre, with those four other faint stars that are positioned like a parallelogram.”
“Yeah,” Gram said, smiling. “I do see it.”
“That’s the constellation I was looking at the night Mom died.”
Gram’s smile faded. She lowered her eyes.
Amy said, “I have a very spotty memory of that night. Certain things are clear. Other things are fuzzy. Some things I can’t remember at all. I remember the noise, the sound of the gunshot. I remember waiting in my room, pitch dark. Going up in the attic, then down the hall and into Mom’s room.” She drew a deep breath. “And I remember the hand hanging over the side of the bed.”
They stood in silence at the rail. Finally Gram spoke. “We found you in your room. I found you. You were curled into a tight little ball, shivering. In shock, I think. You were on that padded ledge of the bay window. Right by your telescope.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“That’s normal. It’s probably best.”
“No,” she said sharply. “It drives me nuts. I can’t figure it out. I’ll never figure it out if I can’t remember what happened.”
“What happened was tragic. You don’t need to go back there.”
“Do you really think she killed herself?”
Gram made a face, as if the question surprised her. “Yes. No one’s ever questioned that.”
“I’ve always questioned it.”
“You were eight, Amy. Suicide wasn’t something you could accept.”
“No, it’s more than that. Think about it. Why would Mom shoot herself in the head while I was in the house?”
“That’s why she tied that rope to your door, I suppose. I think the police were right about that. She didn’t want you to come out and find the body.”
“That doesn’t hold up, Gram. Mom had caught me playing in the attic just a few months before that. She was completely aware that I knew how to get out of my room with the door shut. She knew about the ceiling panel in my closet.”
“Maybe she forgot. She was obviously in a very tortured state.”
“But she wasn’t suicidal.”
“That’s a pretty tough judgment for an eight-year-old girl to make.”
“Not really. I remember the conversation Mom and I had before she died. I asked her to read me a story. She said she was too tired. But she promised to read me one the next night. She promised it would be the best story I ever heard.”
“Who knows what was going through her mind?”
“That just doesn’t sound like something a woman would say to her daughter an hour before she kills herself. She never even said goodbye, Gram.”
“Amy, you don’t know what happened after she tucked you into bed.”
“ Exactly. I don’t know, because there are things I can’t remember about that night. I try to remember. You know what happens? I get numbers in my head. M 57. You know what that is? It’s an astronomical designation for the Ring Nebula, the dying star I was looking at the night Mom died. Here I am trying to sort out the death of my mother, and all my overeducated brain can bring into focus is M 57, the fifty-seventh object in Charles Messier’s eighteenth-century catalog of fuzzy objects in the sky. It makes me crazy, Gram. Look at the sky right now. You can pick out the constellation of Lyra where the Ring Nebula lives, but you can’t see the Ring Nebula with the naked eye. We’re looking right at M 57, but we can’t see it.
“That’s the way I feel about the explanation for Mom’s death,” said Amy, her voice fading. “I’m looking right at it. But I just can’t see it.”
Gram looked into her troubled eyes, then gave her a gentle hug. “It’s not your fault that you don’t remember. Sometimes we don’t figure everything out. Sometimes we just never know.”
Amy wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. She knew Gram was trying to make her feel better, but it wasn’t working. That was Amy’s greatest fear in the world. The fear of never knowing.
Together, they turned away from the night sky and headed back inside.