"I'm a private investigator, not a cop." Tess found the license at last and thrust it at Keisha. "All I want is to ask you a few questions about your son, Donnie Moore."

The woman's face seemed to go dead at the mention of Donnie's name. She sucked on her lower lip, looking at Tess's license.

"That was a long time ago," she said softly. "Why you coming around now?"

"Can we talk inside? It's awfully warm out here in the sun."

But the rowhouse was far hotter, stifling and close. In the small front room, two small children slept on two old sofas, which had been set up like church pews, facing the altar of a brass wall unit with a television set and VCR. The children looked tired in their sleep, if such a thing was possible.

"My nephews," Keisha said, stopping for a second to look at them. "They was up late last night."

"They belong to your sister, the one I met in your apartment?"

"Tonya told you how to find me? She never did have good sense. No, these are my brother's children. I'm watching them for my sister-in-law while she's at DSS, trying to straighten out her food stamps. They's trying to cut her off because of one of those new rules, but she don't even know which one she broke."

"Where's your brother?"

"Gone," Keisha said, and something in her voice kept Tess from asking for more details.

Somewhere above them, a baby began to cry. Keisha ran upstairs, her cloth bedroom slippers slapping on the uncarpeted stairs, and returned a few minutes later with a fat, copper-colored baby in a diaper. She had taken the time to throw a plaid cotton shirt over her bra, although she hadn't bothered to button it.

"She needs a change," she said, leading Tess into the middle room. This would have been the formal dining room when the house was built, but now it was empty, except for an old-fashioned deep freezer against one wall. Keisha used this as a changing table and while her movements were lovingly efficient and competent, it made Tess nervous to see the baby lolling on the slick, hard surface.

"She's pretty," she said tentatively, not sure if that was the appropriate word. More puckish, really, making a fish mouth that reminded Tess of Harpo Marx, but what mother wanted to hear that?

"You got any?"

"Uh-uh," Tess said politely, trying to project the kind of longing she knew mothers expected of nonmothers. She didn't have much of a baby jones. Still, there was something appealing about this chubby girl, a life-of-the-party light in her eyes, a way of churning her arms and legs as if ready to dance.

"This is Laylah," Keisha said, making the baby wave a tiny hand at Tess.

"Lay-lay-lay-lah," Tess sang a little riff to the baby, then felt embarrassed. "I guess people do that all the time."

Keisha looked puzzled. "There's a song with my baby's name? Isn't that something? I'd sure like to hear that sometime."

"Yeah, Derek and the Dominoes." Keisha looked blank. "You know, Eric Clapton."

"Oh yeah, that guitar player. The one whose little boy fell out the window. The one who did the song with Baby-face."

Funny, the different contexts people brought to the world. Then again, Tess hadn't known Toni Braxton was from Severna Park. "How old are you, if I may ask?"

"Just turned thirty-one this past April."

"So when you had Donnie you were"-Tess stopped, in part to do the math, in part because the math made her feel rude.

"Fifteen. Yes'm. But what do you want to know about Donnie for? Sure was a long time ago."

"I'm trying to find the other children who were with him at the Nelsons', and I thought you might know where they were."

"Why? I mean, why do you want to find them?"

"Because someone asked me to." That sounded a little sinister, so she added, "There may be some money coming to them, because of what happened."

"Money for them, but not for Donnie?"

"No, I'm afraid not." She didn't owe Keisha any further explanation, but decided to make one up, in case Keisha was distracted by her own grievances. "Because of your lawsuit, I guess. Double jeopardy and all that."

"Oh," Keisha said. The baby's diaper was the kind with tape, and Laylah wasn't a squirmer, but it still took Keisha quite a bit of time to fasten the sides. "Well, I don't know where they are. I never even met 'em."

"What about the trial? Weren't you at the trial?"

"Uh-huh."

"They were there, too, weren't they? I know they were called as witnesses."

"Oh I s'pose we might have spoke, once or twice. But we didn't meet in any real way."

Keisha reminded Tess of the weight you had to pick up from the bottom of the pool to pass Junior Lifesaving. Sometimes, if you didn't come at it just right, you had to surface, take a breath, and make another pass. "Why was Donnie in foster care?"

"I don't s'pose that's anyone's business now, is it? It wasn't right, I'll tell you that much. It was all a stupid mix-up. They took my boy from me for no reason and they got him killed, and they didn't have to pay."

"They put him in foster care just like that, with no hearing?"

Keisha hugged Laylah to her, dropping her head so she could sniff the back of her daughter's neck. She smiled, as if the baby's scent was a kind of aromatherapy. Tess wondered if you had to be a mother to smell it, or if babies' necks smelled good to everyone.

"Look, that was all a long time ago, and I don't remember much about it. I don't want to remember much. I got Laylah and I'm a good mother now, a real good mother, and my baby's father is good to me. What's it to me, you do something for those other chil'ren?"

In the front room, one of the sleeping nephews whimpered like a puppy. Keisha Moore didn't move, just stood in the shadowy dining room, rocking Laylah in her arms.

Tess put her card on the freezer/changing table. "Just in case," she said. "For what it's worth, Laylah really is a cutie."

When she passed through the front room, the two little boys slept on, their cheeks patterned by the rough weave of the old sofas, their clothes twisted and wrinkled on their skinny, compact bodies. She hadn't noticed before that they were wearing their shoes, high-top athletic shoes with Velcro fasteners at the ankles, shoes that had cost someone dearly. They had probably been too tired to take their sneakers off when they went to sleep. But why hadn't Keisha or her sister-in-law followed behind, undoing the straps and sliding the shoes gently down their ankles so as not to wake them?

Tess remembered running barefoot through her summer days, careless and free, a stubbed toe or a dropped jar of fireflies her biggest fears. On Washington Street, the children couldn't even afford the luxury of running barefoot through their own dreams.

Chapter 6

Almost a decade had passed since Gramma Weinstein had given up her big old house in Windsor Hills and moved into a cramped apartment in the suburbs northwest of Baltimore. "So urban," she had said, and the family had been pleased at this uncharacteristic rhetorical restraint on Gramma's part. But in the end, the changing neighborhood was less important to her than the cost of maintaining the house, a rambling wreck of a place with rotting wooden shingles and a weed-choked yard. "I am a woman of reduced circumstances," she liked to tell her children and grandchildren. "You know, Poppa didn't leave me that well fixed." They knew, they knew.

Yet Gramma still wanted to entertain on the scale to which she had become accustomed when Poppa was alive. For Judith's birthday dinner, she had invited all five of her children, their spouses, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. It added up to twenty people, which would have made her apartment feel like an overcrowded elevator, an elevator filled with tsotchkes and china springer spaniels, each one with its own name and history.