I looked down at the boy sitting in her lap.

He passed on a long time ago…

“Her son. Did he die in the flood?”

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Birdwell nodded. “A real tragedy. Belinda worked as a live-in for a family here in Littleton. Apparently she always spent the weekends home. Not that weekend. She was asked to babysit the family kids. The flood happened on a Sunday morning when everyone in Littleton Flats was home. Including her son.”

I tried to imagine what that must’ve felt like-taking care of someone else’s children while your own drowned. And you not being there to hold him.

He say he forgive me, she’d said.

Now I knew why.

“Did she have any other children?” I asked.

Mr. Birdwell shook his head. “She had him kind of late in life. I’m pretty positive Benjamin was it.”

I miss things.

Yes. She’d missed Benjamin enough to conjure him up from time to time. A woman in the first throes of dementia, and the last throes of loneliness.

“Can I have it?” I asked Mr. Birdwell.

“The picture? What for?”

“The story,” I said, lying again.

He hesitated, evidently debating the ethical parameters of releasing personal property to a journalist.

“I’ll return it,” I said.

“Well, okay. Don’t see why not.”

I’d already slipped it into my pocket.

LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER I’D DOWNED TWO GLASSES OF TEQUILA WHILE watching back-to-back episodes of Forensic Files, I lifted the phone and punched in some familiar digits.

I waited four rings until he picked up and said: Hello, hello…?

Sometimes I form the words back.

In my head I do.

I say I’m sorry, that I’ve been meaning to pick up the phone and tell him just how sorry I am, and that I apologize for taking so long. I hear the words in my head, and they sound genuine and contrite. I just don’t hear them coming out of my mouth. They get lost on the way from here to there.

Tonight I formed them again and they sounded slightly boozy and sad.

Hello? Hello… who is this?

It’s me, I said wordlessly. It’s me. Tom. I’m sorry, really.

He hung up.

I waited till I heard the depressing hum of an empty line.

When I leaned over to put the phone down, I painfully discovered the picture lying on my floor.

It must’ve fallen out of my pocket when I tried, unsuccessfully, to fling my jeans over a chair back. The glass had cracked, leaving small shards where my left foot stepped on them.

I was bleeding.

I hopped into the bathroom on one foot and managed to locate a bottle of iodine. I extricated a sliver of glass from just below my big toe, then swathed and bandaged it. I gingerly shuffled back into the bedroom, carefully scraped the remaining slivers into my right palm, and deposited them in my overflowing trash bag reeking of four-day-old food.

There was the wounded photograph to tend to. Speckles of bright blood had given the mother and son the look of accident victims. I felt as if I’d desecrated something fine and irreplaceable.

I wiped it with a tissue, but the blood had seeped into the fabric of the photo and dimpled it. I carefully removed it from the cracked frame and gently blew across its surface.

Something dropped to the floor. A folded piece of paper that had been stuck to the other side.

I placed the picture on my dresser and reached for it. My lacerated foot screamed.

It was a note.

Happy hundred birthday, it began.

I sat on the bed, spread the letter out over my knee.

Happy hundred birthday.

I wish you hundred kisses.

I wish you hundred hugs.

Love, Benjy.

P.S. Greetings from Kara Bolka.

THIRTEEN

Sam Weitz called me at work to ask if I’d like some life insurance.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because everyone should have life insurance. Didn’t you just get beat up?”

“Yeah.”

“There you go.”

“What does that have to do with anything? If I died, whom would I leave the money to?”

“You evidently aren’t up on the latest advances in the insurance paradigm. It’s not just about dying. There’s protection for long-term medical absences, for example. So you can keep getting paid. Haven’t you seen those commercials with the duck? What if you were laid up and couldn’t be a reporter anymore?”

I was tempted to tell him my salary, so he’d understand that if I couldn’t make it to my job at the Littleton Journal, I could always follow the path of upward mobility and go to work at McDonald’s.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I think I’ll forgo the insurance, if you don’t mind.”

“It’s your funeral,” he said, then added, “poor choice of words.”

“No. It’s funny.”

“Really?” he said, his voice brightening. He’d probably been called a lot of things as an insurance agent. Annoying, boring, bloodsucking-funny might’ve been a first. “Well, if you change your mind…”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“Okeydokey.”

Norma asked me if I wanted anything to eat. She was making a lunch run next door; Nate had already put in his order for moo goo gai pan and fried wontons.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

“You always say you’re not hungry, and then I have to give you half of mine because I feel God-awful sorry for you.”

“That’s me,” I said. “The proverbial object of sympathy.”

Maybe she took her cue from Hinch on that score. After all, Hinch had felt God-awful sorry enough to hire me.

“I can’t interest you in a half-pint of shrimp chow fun, huh?”

“Sure,” I said. “I could use a little more fun in my life.”

My attempt at a witticism flew right over Norma’s head.

I’d put the phone down after Sam’s call, then immediately picked it up again, only I’d forgotten whom to call. Then I realized I hadn’t forgotten, but had simply run out of possibilities.

There was no Ed Crannell listed in the entire city of Cleveland.

I’d tried everything in a hundred-mile radius and come up empty.

I wanted to ask Crannell whether the face he’d glimpsed through the oncoming windshield had been black or white.

Cleveland never heard of him.

The one in Ohio? I’d asked Crannell to be sure we were talking about the right Cleveland.

He’d nodded and told me he was a pharmaceutical salesman.

I tried that next. Wrote down every major drug company I could think of, then called each one of them and asked for an Edward Crannell.

No such salesman on payroll.

Maybe he was part-time, I suggested. Freelance?

There was a freelance saleswoman at Pfizer named Beth Crannell. Couldn’t be her I was looking for, could it?

No, it couldn’t.

Okay. There was a clear pattern developing here. No skid marks and no Ed.

I called the sheriff’s office.

He’d have all the valuable particulars from Crannell’s license. Assuming those particulars were in any way, shape, or form true. Assuming the license wasn’t bought mail-order or forged.

Sheriff Swenson wasn’t in, a female officer informed me. He would have to get back to me.

Something else was gnawing at me, of course.

I hadn’t forgotten. No. The note from Belinda Washington’s room hadn’t slipped my mind, been summarily dismissed, or relegated to the file of very strange things.

Happy hundred birthday.

Love, Benjy.

Could it have been another Benjamin?

Someone, for instance, not her dead son?

Sure. This was possible. Given the fact Benjamin Washington had died fifty years ago in the Aurora Dam Flood, even plausible.

I called Mr. Birdwell.

“Did a middle-aged black man visit Belinda before her birthday party?” I asked.