“No.”

“It’s got a pretty bar.”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe I’ll see you there someday.”

Her expression said maybe not.

I DROVE HOME.

When I walked through the door, I was going to turn right and head up to the bedroom to watch Nick at Nite reruns of I Love Lucy. I did love Lucy, at least maintained a true-blue affection for her. After all, Lucy, Ethel, Fred, and Ricky had babysat my brother and me through numerous afternoons when my mom was present but otherwise occupied, when she’d traded Jim, Jack, and Johnnie for Tom, Dick, and Vinny, a parade of mostly faceless men who sometimes tousled my hair on their way upstairs.

I didn’t go watch I Love Lucy. Instead I flicked on the basement light at the top of the steps and walked down. Tentatively. Making sure to stop at each step and peek.

As far as I could tell, the basement was empty this time.

I’d given it a cursory look after the assault, when I’d finally lifted myself to a wobbly semblance of standing.

He’d been kneeling halfway between the heater and the wall.

The place I’d first seen him.

Banging around with that metal thing in his hand. You could safely assume he hadn’t been fixing the boiler.

So what had he been doing?

If he was breaking and entering, why had he come down here?

I felt along the wall. There were two lopsided shelves nailed into the plaster. Some old paint cans, stiffened rags, a broken radio from the fifties sitting on top of a tattered board game. I wiped off the coating of dust. Milton Bradley’s Life. For a brief moment, I saw myself hurrying a tiny blue car around the labyrinthine road to Millionaire’s Mansion, hoarding my pile of funny money from my mother’s rheumy eyes. Not that she didn’t see things. Jimmy cheating, for instance. She always saw that. Swiping money from the bank like a little thief.

A sudden pang of dread lodged itself in the center of my chest.

I looked down where the drywall met the floor. A brown spider scurried beneath a paint can.

A jar of bottle caps.

A cracked hockey stick with the faded logo of the San Jose Sharks.

A nearly unraveled baseball.

Some old books. A biography of Edward R. Murrow. A History of the Cold War. Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam. Hiroshima by John Hersey.

Wren’s, I imagined.

There was plaster dust sitting on the cover photo of a mushroom cloud. When I pushed the books aside, I uncovered a large, ragged hole in the wall. You would’ve needed something pretty heavy to do that, I thought, trying to picture that metal thing in the plumber’s hand. The thing he’d ended up whacking me over the head with.

I peeked into the hole but saw nothing but drywall and ripped edges of newspaper insulation.

When I continued my way around the basement, I stepped on something.

Small and plastic.

I kneeled down, assaulted by the strong scent of mildew, and picked it up.

A phone-jack cover. The screw was still dangling in the hole.

Where had it come from?

There. Along the base of the wall.

The phone jack was open, red and yellow wires separated from their respective screws, reaching into the air like fingers frozen in rigor mortis.

I brought the cover over to the single naked bulb dangling from the basement ceiling. The jack was obviously unused-there was no phone down here. The cover might’ve been lying around forever, years even.

There was no dust on it.

So, okay, it hadn’t been.

TEN

This time Mrs. Flaherty was warier.

“What do you want now?” she asked.

“I’m investigating the accident,” I told her.

“Investigating?”

“That’s right. I’m beginning to think it didn’t happen the way they said it did.”

“Who said? I don’t understand.”

“The other driver. I don’t think it happened the way he described it.”

“You think he’s lying?”

“Maybe he’s confused. Or he thinks the accident was his fault, so he made things up.”

“They told me Dennis drove into the wrong lane.”

“Yeah. That’s what the other driver said.”

No, I realized. The other driver had said Dennis drifted into the wrong lane.

I suddenly understood.

His depression, his drinking…

Mrs. Flaherty thought Dennis had done it on purpose-steered his car into oncoming traffic in a moment of suicidal clarity.

“You don’t believe him? This other driver-what was his name, Earl?” she asked.

“Ed. Ed Crannell.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“Maybe not.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said softly. “My son’s dead.”

I heard what sounded like sobbing.

I waited. It was 8:32 a.m. Norma hadn’t come in yet. The office of the Littleton Journal was a simple storefront sandwiched between Foo Yang Chinese takeout and Ted’s Guns amp; Ammo, which offered Michael Moore targets with every purchased handgun.

“Mrs. Flaherty? Can you describe Dennis for me?”

“What?”

“Can you describe your son?”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t biracial, was he?”

“Biwhat?”

“I mean, Dennis was Caucasian. White, right?”

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’m just trying to…”

“What are you saying?”

“Just clarifying things…”

“The police said it was Dennis. I buried him.”

“Of course. Five-foot-nine, brown hair, olive eyes. That’s your son, Dennis?”

“Why’d you ask if he was negro?”

“Look, forget I even…”

“You think it wasn’t him, is that it?”

“No…”

“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You think it might’ve been someone else. A negro. He was all burned up… black.” She wasn’t asking anymore; she was stating. Hope had infused her voice with the sudden fervor of the true believer.

I should’ve stopped her, of course. Right there. I should’ve said that wasn’t my point at all, no, I was merely getting his description in the interest of journalistic accuracy.

Maybe the words journalistic accuracy were legally banned from my vocabulary. There was that catch in her throat to contend with. That thrilling willingness to swallow something whole. I’d heard that seductive sound before-around the table at editorial roundups, where I’d offer stories for approval amid the sweet buzzing of acolytes.

Understand and forgive. It was like blowing smoke in the face of a nicotine addict.

“Just supposing,” I said to Mrs. Flaherty, “that someone robbed Dennis? What if someone stole his car, his wallet? The body was unrecognizable. I’m just trying to be 100 percent sure here.”

“Yes… yes, of course,” she said. “Dennis had brown hair, olive eyes-just like you said. He had a little scar on his right cheek. He fell off the monkey bars when he was 5. Is it possible… Mr…?”

“Valle. Tom Valle.”

“Is it possible they’re wrong? It is, isn’t it? It’s not him? It’s someone else?”

She took down my address.

She told me she’d send me a picture of Dennis.

She rattled off a few particulars of Dennis’s sad travesty of a marriage.

She provided me with the phone number of Dennis’s ex-wife.

She told me Dennis had won five merit badges as a Boy Scout.

I had a hard time getting her off the phone.

When Hinch came in, he asked me what I was working on.

Hinch was big-boned, broad-shouldered, a largess that had lately migrated south to his stomach. Some mornings he arrived with gray stubble still clinging to his chin. I suspected Miss Azalea wasn’t doing well.

“Following up on the crash.”

“That crash on Highway 45? Old news, isn’t it?”

“There are a few things I’m trying to clean up.”

“Like?” Hinch had made his way to the coffee brewer, which I’d generously started percolating-usually Norma’s job.