Excerpt

When it was all over, the five women would marvel that it took a death to change their lives. They stood in a row--Polly, Charlotte, Dinah, Justine, Kat--under the opaque glass ceiling of the Columbarium-in-the-Canyon, looking up at Ginger’s niche high on the Wall of Inurnment. There was little to see: Ginger’s husband had ordered the bare minimum, just name and dates, to mark her place.

Initially, they stood in silence, subdued by the confines of the place. The ceiling panels flooded the long room with light, but the glass was bottle-green and the 12-foot walls were windowless, giving the whole vault a cool underwater feeling that removed it even more from the world outside. Also, they had already grieved so long for Ginger that when they finally spoke, they talked less of her and more of all that had happened in the past half year, and how, as Polly said, it all started with a death.

“Not just a death,” said Kat bitterly, “but a murder.” She alone was weeping.

“Not at first,” said Polly. “Just a death and a mystery. No wonder we felt like we were in a novel. That’s how they all start now.”

“Pursuing killers is all that’s left to the modern hero,” said Charlotte. “Except that ours was more like a quest than a pursuit, a quest for vengeance.”

Dinah, abstracted since they’d come, had been listening after all. “What’s amazing to me is what it did for all of us,” she mused. “So much for the classical idea that revenge is a goal that destroys you.”

“I thought we all agreed that what we did was more justice than revenge,” said Justine, something tremulous in her careful voice.

“Whatever it was, we did it,” declared Polly, turning to leave, “and we got them good. Ginger was right about seizing power wherever you can.”

Kat, who was tall enough, reached up to run her fingers over the bas relief letters of Ginger’s name. “Ginger would have loved the whole thing,” she said softly, and followed her friends out into the California sunlight.