Often after a day of classes at Fenger High School, Pat Matusek walked to Roseland Community Hospital to see her cousin Tommy.

She was 14. He was 15. He was dying.

She'd bring him water, fluff his pillow, hold his hand, tell him that she loved him. On many of those days she walked home crying, yet it was her afternoons with Tommy that made her think she could be a nurse.

Pat lived above Joe Matusek's Club, the tavern her father ran in the 10800 block of South Michigan Avenue. Next door was a funeral home, run by Arlene Baskys' dad. Between their second-floor apartments stretched a low, flat roof, and Pat and Arlene often ran across it to tap on each other's windows, looking for a playmate.

Pat was born in 1945, the year World War II ended, to Joe and Bessie Matusek, both of Czech descent. In those postwar years, most residents of Chicago's Far South Side were white and working-class, still close to their immigrant roots.

It was the kind of neighborhood where kids walked everywhere and went home for lunch, though Pat took sandwiches to school because her mother worked during the day while her father, who ran the bar at night, slept.

In their tightknit neighborhood, Pat and her friends stood on corners during the fall to help her dad sell peanuts for the Kiwanis Club. In winter they went sledding. Life, though not idyllic, felt safe.

By the time Pat was 5, she had another best friend, also named Arlene — Arlene Kubasek — and through the years the three girls laughed a lot together.

They laughed their way through Catholic elementary school and on through Fenger High, where Pat was on the Titanette pompom squad. They laughed as they sunbathed on the roof between the tavern and the funeral home, watching the people and the cars down on Michigan Avenue, which they called "The Ave."

Pat and Arlene Kubasek could hardly stop laughing on the night, during their high school sophomore year, that they went to the drive-in with four other girls, then sat in the car eating popcorn and rolling their hair on giant curlers. On the way back, they got lost. Forty miles from home, when they spotted a gas station, they were reluctant to stop for directions because their curlers made them look like creatures from Mars.

"Pat looks at us and says, 'Oh, for crying out loud!'" Kubasek recalled one day not long ago, sitting with her old friend Arlene Baskys. "She gets out of the car, slams the door and found out from the guy where we are and how to get home from there."

Sweet, assertive, funny, full of life.

That's how they remember Pat.

The two Arlenes still laugh easily when they think of Pat, but the memory of her death brings them quickly to tears.

"It hurt everyone down to your soul and your being and your bone," Kubasek said. "You didn't think you'd ever stop crying."

Baskys says that for a while she slept with a flashlight or a knife, but eventually, determined not to raise her children in fear, went through five years of therapy to retrain her thinking.

"I think I was successful," she said.

Kubasek is 71, Baskys 68. Seeing them together, it's hard not to wonder what Pat would be like at their age.

Would she still love water ballet? Be married, divorced, retired? She probably wouldn't still wear her hair in a perfect flip.

Pat was 20 on the hot evening of Wednesday, July 13, 1966, when Arlene Kubasek dropped her off at the townhouse, well before curfew, which was 10:30 p.m. except for the two nights a week the women were allowed to stay out until 12:30 a.m.

Do you want to come in for coffee? Pat asked.

Kubasek said no. She was too hot. Too tired. They'd see each other Friday, go hang out on Rush Street on the Gold Coast. She waved and waited for Pat to go inside.

The next morning, Pat's mother called Kubasek, worried. The radio said some nurses had been killed; the police wouldn't give out information. Had Pat gotten in OK the night before?

Kubasek hurried to her car and drove to the townhouse. Police, cameras, gawkers were everywhere, and someone said something about "the bodies."

She knew before she was officially told: Pat was dead.

The Matuseks wanted Pat to be buried in the clothes she would have worn for her upcoming graduation, so on the day after the murders, Pat's sister, Betty Jo, asked Kubasek for a favor.

Would Kubasek go with her to the townhouse to get Pat's nursing cap and uniform?

Police escorted them inside.

"It was terrible," Kubasek said, remembering what she saw. The police didn't rush them, but they left as fast as they could.

Betty Jo had one more request. She wanted to do Pat's hair and makeup for the funeral. Would Kubasek help?

"She wanted to make her sister look like her sister," Kubasek said, choking up on the word "sister."

Together they helped prepare Pat's body for burial, at the funeral home run by Arlene Baskys' dad, next door to Joe Matusek's bar.

Fifty years later, Pat Matusek's two best childhood friends are the primary custodians of her past.

Her mother, Bessie, passed away in 2005. Her father, who had become a familiar figure on TV, with his cane or in his wheelchair as he protested the possibility of Richard Speck's parole, died in 1990 on Pat's birthday.

Betty Jo, whose married name was Purvis, died in 2015. Though she rarely talked to her two children about what happened, she made sure her sister Pat lived on through her daughter, to whom she gave the name Patricia Ann.

Patricia Ann Matusek