He went to Rosa, of course. As an old friend, both of his late mother and the neighborhood at large, she was always the one Francisco went to when in confusion or distress. He knew she would take him seriously, no matter how crazy something might sound, and she had a clear way of looking at things and putting them in perspective, that usually set things right.
     He found her where she always was, at the counter of her grocery store, attention focused on a book off the large shelving unit behind her. She was forever reading.
     She glanced up as he approached, and a broad smile tightened the checkerboard of wrinkles criss-crossing her brown face. “Francisco!” she said. “What brings you in, today?” A closer look, and her sharp black eyes narrowed. “Sanders?” she asked.
     Francisco swallowed and nodded. “He’s dead.”
     Rosa nodded somberly, pushing her reading glasses up off her nose into the mass of dark, grey hair over her forehead, where they remained without any apparent support.
     “You don’t seem surprised,” Francisco said.
     “He had that look about him. I figured something was going to happen. Tell me.”
     Francisco gave her the details of his boss’s death.
     She frowned. “So they’re thinking suicide? No. I don’t see it. There must be more—something they don’t know—or aren’t telling you.”
     “Well...”
     “You know something. Good.”
     “Some papers I found,” said Francisco. “They tie in with something weird that happened a long time ago. You see...”
     Rosa listened intently to the whole story, reacting slightly when he mentioned the brass plate. He paused, thinking she was about to say something, but she motioned him to continue. She heard out the remainder seemingly unmoved until Francisco came to the part about his boss’s fiancé. “Ah,” she said, her mouth twisting wryly. “Thought there might be a woman in it.”
     “Does it mean something?”
     “Finish your story.”
     Francisco gave her the rest, and looked at her expectantly. “Is there something in it?” he asked. “The numbers and all, I mean?”
     Rosa stroked her chin and pursed her lips. “No,” she said. “Not as far as his death was concerned. He was obsessed, to be sure, but in that regard his other obsession seems to have been the significant one.”
     “The fiancé?” A nod. “How can you be so sure?”
     “Because nothing about her fits the numbers. And it would have, if Ralph Sanders had been able to make it. You can find number patterns in anything, if you look hard enough, and it seems he was looking mighty hard. I think we can be pretty sure she, and whatever he may have done in consequence, are an issue separate from your thirteens.”
     “So I’m getting worked up over nothing?”
     “Well, no. “Just ’cause they’re a separate issue doesn’t mean they’re a non-issue.”
     “But what does it mean?”
     Rosa shrugged. “How should I know?”