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" 'Patsy. Bad,' he responded in the telepathic voice. I could feel his kisses on my cheek and my neck. For a split second, I felt his hand on my cock.

"I reached down and gently moved his hand away. But the damage had been done. I had to nail down hard on myself. Then I spoke to him:

" 'No, it's not Patsy's fault,' I said out loud. 'She was just being Patsy, that's all. Now, you go and leave me alone now, Goblin. I have to go downstairs. I have to see to things. ¡¯

"He gave me a final hug and I was amazed at his strength. I could see nothing in him that appeared spectral or ephemeral. But he vanished as I had asked him to, and the baubles of the chandeliers moved as if he had evacuated the room at his departure.

"I stood staring at the chandelier. It hadn't hit me yet that nobody alive inhabited this back bedroom anymore. But it was trying to hit me. Things were trying to get through. Goblin had been the image of my weeping soul. Oh, I had so misjudged Goblin, but who would ever understand?

"When I came down to the kitchen, Patsy was sitting at the table just staring at me and Big Ramona was on one of the stools by the stove just staring at her. Lolly was there too, all dressed up for a date, her copper skin and rippling yellow hair just gorgeous, and there was Jasmine in her apron in the far corner by the back door.

"I could hear Aunt Queen crying in her bedroom. Her nurse, Cindy, had arrived, and I could hear Cindy's sympathetic tones as she tried to comfort her.

"Patsy's eyes were glassy and hard and she was chewing a piece of gum that made her jaw look hard. She put a cigarette on her lip and snapped her lighter. She had her huge poofed-up stage hairstyle, and her lips were thickly made-up with frosted pink lipstick.

" 'So everybody's going to want to know what we were talking about,' she said. There was a little tremor in her voice, a note I'd never heard before, but I wasn't sure anybody else heard it.

" 'Seymour says you wanted some money,' Jasmine said.

" 'Yeah, I wanted money,' said Patsy, in her hard voice, 'and it's not like he didn't have it to give. He had it. Just wait till they read his will. He was loaded, and what did he ever do with it? But that's not what set him off to cursing and shouting at me and then grabbing for his chest and throwing up and dying. ¡¯

" 'So what did?' asked Jasmine.

" 'I told him I was sick,' said Patsy. 'I told him I was HIV-positive. ¡¯

"Silence. Then Big Ramona looked at me.

" 'What's she talking about?' she asked.

" 'AIDS, Ramona,' I said. 'She's HIV-positive. It means she's contracted the AIDS virus. She could come down with full-blown AIDS any time. ¡¯

" 'I'm the one that's sick,' Patsy said, 'and he's the one that up and dies because he was mad at me, mad that I got it. You ask me, he died of grief. Grief for Sweetheart. ' She broke off and looked from one to the other of all of us.

" 'Grief's what killed him,' she went on. She shrugged. 'I didn't kill him. You should have seen what he was doing out there. He'd rolled over one row of pansies with his truck, and there he was laying another bed of them, like he didn't even know what he'd done with his truck. I said, "Look at what you've done, you sniveling crazy old man. " He started in on all that, "You sold her wedding dress!" like that wasn't so over, sniveling crazy old fool, and he said he wasn't giving me a red cent, and then I told him. I told him I had medical bills to pay. ¡¯

"I was too stunned to think, but I heard myself ask her, 'How did you get it?¡¯

" 'How should I know?' she replied, looking at me with those brittle glossy eyes. 'From some bastard who had it, probably a user, I don't know, I've got an idea and then I don't. It wasn't Seymour, don't you go blaming him. And don't you go telling him either. Don't you none of you tell anybody what I'm telling you. Don't you go telling Aunt Queen. Seymour and I have a gig tonight. But the thing is, I can't pay the rest of the pickers unless I have some money. ¡¯

"By pickers, she meant the guitar players who'd be backing her up.

" '

You expect one of us to go in there and ask Aunt Queen for money?' asked Big Ramona. 'Cancel your goddamned gig. You got no business playing music tonight when your father is stone dead at the mortuary in Ruby River City. ¡¯

"Patsy shook her head. 'I'm flat broke,' she said. 'Quinn, go in there and get some money for me. ¡¯

"I swallowed, I remember that, but I don't remember how long it was before I could answer her. Then I remembered that I had Pops' money clip in my jeans. They'd given it to me, along with his keys and his handkerchief, at the hospital.

"I took it out and I looked at it. It was a wad of twenty-dollar bills, but there were also more than several hundreds. He always saved those hundred-dollar bills just in case something came up. I counted it all out-one thousand dollars-and I gave it to her.

" 'You telling the truth about being HIV?' Jasmine asked.

" 'Yeah, and I see you're all crying buckets,' said Patsy. 'He blew his stack when he heard. You're just one big sympathetic family. ¡¯

" 'Anybody know outside of us?' Jasmine asked.

" 'No,' Patsy said. 'I just told you not to tell anybody, didn't I? And why are you asking me, you worried about your precious bed-and-breakfast? There's nobody left to run it, case you haven't noticed. Unless you all are taking over. ' She shot a mean glance at each of us in turn. 'I guess Little Lord Tarquin here could become the youngest bed-and-breakfast owner in the South, now, couldn't he?¡¯