During a visit to New York City the previous summer, Neville tried to return to a bookstore where he had long bought books, run by a woman named Mary who never suspected he was also an author and who cared only about resale profit. A friend told him that Mary had since been killed by a passing car while walking home from the grocery store, and that her body went unidentified for days until her estranged husband found the shop closed and eventually traced her to the morgue. Neville uses her story to observe that despite years of opportunity, she never showed any interest in the spiritual truths he might have shared with her.