“The file’s staying open.”

“So you think there’s a possibility that he might have been murdered.”

Hayashida said something that grew first more sinister as time went on, and eventually more perceptive. “The question,” the detective said, “is how.”

The next morning, the newspaper carried Honeysett’s death notice:

HONEYSETT, Wayne Weaver—Beloved father of Wendy of Calgary and Joyce of Halifax, and grandfather of Jacques, Michael, Lowell, and Christine. Predeceased by his wife, Jacqueline, who was the world to him. Mr. Honeysett was the founder and proprietor of Honeysett’s Credit Jewellers for many years, and the family is grateful to all of his former customers and associates who have expressed their sadness at his sudden passing. Visitation at McRae’s Funeral Home, Wednesday from 2 to 4 p.m. Cremation to follow. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you make a donation to your local mental health clinic.

The next day was Wednesday. I decided to attend. I was, after all, perhaps the last person to whom Honeysett had spoken. And he had known me. Maybe going to his funeral would make up for not having one for Gabe. Or maybe I just needed a reason to wear a dress again.

IF FUNERAL HOMES HAVE NO RIGHT to look pleasant and inviting, McRae’s was doing it correctly. Its original red brick exterior had acquired a patina of black soot, and the building had been designed to look like something between a small prison and a large animal shelter. Its front door opened directly from Barton Street with neither room nor intention for landscaping to soften the impact of its facade. Stepping inside from the late-morning sunlight, I wasn’t surprised to encounter darkness. But when my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, I was amazed to encounter a familiar face. It was Harold Hayashida, who was more shocked to see me than I was to see him.

“I was unaware that you knew the deceased so well,” he said, wearing that half-smile people display in a funeral home.

“And I didn’t know police officers attended the funerals of suicide victims,” I said.

We were in an alcove with plaster walls the colour and texture of oatmeal, and I looked down the corridor to see a small sign reading honeysett above an open doorway. I turned back to Hayashida, who was scribbling something in his notebook, just as a middle-aged couple entered and stood blinking and looking around, waiting for their sight to be restored, as I had.

If Wayne Honeysett had been a groper, he had made friends in spite of his perversion. Or maybe they enjoyed it, because the room was crowded with sombre people speaking in low isn’t-it-awful tones, and most were women. I saw this while standing at the entrance, waiting for two blue-haired women in dark textured suits to finish speaking to two younger women, whom I assumed were Honeysett’s daughters, Wendy and Joyce.

When the first younger woman greeted me, I offered my hand and looked into attractive grey eyes set in a round face framed in thick golden hair. I had nothing to say, except, “I’m so sorry.”

“How did you know my father?” the woman said.

“We were neighbours,” was the best I could answer. “On the beach strip.”

She smiled, nodded, and dropped her eyes, which would have been a cue for me to step forward and greet her sister, who was taller and heavier, with short dark hair, except that the first sister still gripped my right hand. When I tried pulling away, she tightened her grip, looked at her sister, and said, “Joyce.” Joyce smiled at me, then she too dropped her eyes to my hand.

They were looking at the ring I had decided to wear, the ring Gabe had given me a few weeks earlier, the black opal that Tina had commented on. I managed to pull my hand away from Wendy’s grip and fold it within my other hand. “Where did you get that ring?” Joyce asked.

“It was a gift,” I said. “From my husband. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” Wendy said, “it belonged to our mother.”

“That’s impossible,” I said, and walked to a corner chair some distance from the door. I’m not good at improvising dialogue. I was remembering what Gabe had told me about the ring. I got it from a jeweller, he said. And it hadn’t been stolen, he promised. That ring cost thousands, Tina said.

A carved wooden box sat at the front of the room among several long-stemmed roses. The box, I assumed, contained Wayne Honeysett’s ashes. Was everybody cremated these days? Were we that short of land that nobody was buried anymore? Flanking the flowers were two large sheets of plywood covered with snapshots and advertisements for Honeysett’s Credit Jewellers. Behind the display a door led down the corridor to the left. Small knots of people moved past the photographs, bending to examine them closely, dredging up memories. I waited for the flow to ebb, then rose from the chair and walked across the room to the display, planning to check out a couple of pictures, put a face to the man who had died without a head, then leave through the door.

How did we remember people before photographs? And what will they be doing at funerals fifty years from now—watching 3-D videos of Uncle Farley riding his tricycle or cutting a birthday cake? I didn’t know, but with cremation becoming as popular among old folk as sweatpants and athletic shoes, we need those pictures to remind us of who we are mourning, and why.

Wayne Honeysett may not have been a large man, but he had been something of a cutie. He also looked familiar, and I realized I had probably seen him on the boardwalk or somewhere on the beach. He had a warm smile, crinkly eyes, and, I noted in the family photographs, an attractive wife who wore her hair shoulder-length, as I did. They looked like a close family, the girls as small children and in their teenage years, smiling and laughing in a manner that said they truly loved being in the company of their parents. I mentally slapped down the cynic in me, who suggested that no one would display photographs of the family in any other mood but happy at a time like this.

I wondered, standing there admiring the father, mother, and two attractive daughters whose ripening with time had been recorded by the camera, if our lives traced an arc of happiness, if at the end of our allotted time on earth we could look back and recognize the summit, the day and the place where we had achieved the highest level of joy we would experience, and place our finger on it, touch it, and say, “I was never happier in my life than I was on that day.”

I was actually reaching out to touch a snapshot of the Honeysetts, taken somewhere palm trees grow, when I felt a hand at my elbow and heard Hayashida speak in the special voice police officers use when they are being polite but would rather not. “Mrs. Marshall,” he said when I turned to look at him, “do you suppose we could step into the hall for a moment?”

He moved aside and indicated the open door leading to the corridor, where the two sisters were standing, their arms folded across their chests, and their expressions no longer reflecting the pleased-you-could-come look they had applied to greet mourners. He herded us deeper into the funeral home, past the coat racks and into a small office area with one desk and two chairs. “May I see that ring?” Hayashida said, closing the door behind us.

I removed the ring and handed it to him. He took a small penlight from his pocket and shone it onto the inside of the ring, near the front where the stone was mounted. “Describe your father’s mark, please,” he said. He was not speaking to me.

Both sisters began to speak, but it was Wendy who raised her voice to drown out her sister. “It’s a W over an H,” she said. “The sides of the H, the upright parts, spread into the W above it. My father put that inside every ring he made.”