“Ouch,” Lindsey said, a fine trickle of blood beginning to spread into the white foam of the shaving cream. “This is a total hassle.”

“Press down on the nick with your thumb. It stops the bleeding. You could do just to the top of your knee,” he offered. “That’s what your mother does unless we’re going to the beach.”

Lindsey paused. “You guys never go to the beach.”

“We used to.”

My father had met my mother when they were both working at Wanamaker’s during the summer break from college. He had just made a nasty comment about how the employee’s lounge reeked of cigarettes when she smiled and brought out her then-habitual pack of Pall Malls. “Touché,” he said, and he stayed beside her despite the reeking stink of her cigarettes enveloping him from head to toe.

“I’ve been trying to decide who I look like,” Lindsey said, “Grandma Lynn or Mom.”

“I’ve always thought both you and your sister looked like my mother,” he said.

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still convinced that Mr. Harvey had something to do with it?”

It was like a stick finally sparking against another stick – the friction took.

“There is no doubt in my mind, honey. None.”

“Then why doesn’t Len arrest him?”

She drew the razor sloppily up and finished her first leg. She hesitated there, waiting.

“I wish it was easy to explain,” he said, the words coiling out of him. He had never talked at length about his suspicion to anyone. “When I met him that day, in his backyard, and we built that tent – the one he claimed he built for his wife, whose name I thought was Sophie and Len took down as Leah – there was something about his movements that made me sure.”

“Everyone thinks he’s kind of weird.”

“True, I understand that,” he said. “But then everyone hasn’t had much to do with him either. They don’t know whether his weirdness is benign or not.”

“Benign?”

“Harmless.”

“Holiday doesn’t like him,” Lindsey offered.

“Exactly. I’ve never seen that dog bark so hard. The fur on his back stood straight up that morning.”

“But the cops think you’re nuts.”

“‘No evidence’ is all they can say. Without evidence and without – excuse me, honey – a body, they have nothing to move on and no basis for an arrest.”

“What would be a basis?”

“I guess something to link him to Susie. If someone had seen him in the cornfield or even lurking around the school. Something like that.”

“Or if he had something of hers?” Both my father and Lindsey were heatedly talking, her second leg lathered but left unshaved, because what radiated as the two sticks of their interest sparked flame was that I was in that house somewhere. My body – in the basement, first floor, second floor, attic. To keep from acknowledging that horrible – but oh, if it were true, so blatant so perfect so conclusive as evidence – thought, they remembered what I wore that day, remembered what I carried, the Frito Bandito eraser I prized, the David Cassidy button I’d pinned inside my bag, the David Bowie one I had pinned on the outside. They named all the clutter and accessories that surrounded what would be the best, most hideous evidence anyone could find – my corpse cut up, my blank and rotting eyes.

My eyes: the makeup Grandma Lynn had given her helped but did not solve the problem of how much everyone could see my eyes in Lindsey’s. When they presented themselves – a compact flashing past her when in use by a girl at a neighboring desk, or an unexpected reflection in the window of a store – she looked away. It was particularly painful with my father. What she realized as they talked was that as long as they were on this subject – Mr. Harvey, my clothes, my book bag, my body, me – the vigilance to my memory made my father see her as Lindsey and not as a tragic combination of his two daughters.

“So you would want to be able to get in his house?” she said.

They stared at each other, a flicker of recognition of a dangerous idea. In his hesitation, before he finally said that that would be illegal, and no, he hadn’t thought of that, she knew he was lying. She also knew he needed someone to do it for him.

“You should finish shaving, honey,” he said.

She agreed with him and turned away, knowing what she’d been told.

Grandma Lynn arrived on the Monday before Thanksgiving. With the same laser-beam eyes that immediately sought out any unsightly blemish on my sister, she now saw something beneath the surface of her daughter’s smile, in her placated, tranquilized movements and in how her body responded whenever Detective Fenerman or the police work came up.

When my mother refused my father’s help in cleaning up after dinner that night, the laser eyes were certain. Adamantly, and to the shock of everyone at the table and the relief of my sister – Grandma Lynn made an announcement.

“Abigail, I am going to help you clean up. It will be a mother/daughter thing.”

“What?”

My mother had calculated that she could let Lindsey off easily and early and then she would spend the rest of the night over the sink, washing slowly and staring out the window until the darkness brought her own reflection back to her. The sounds of the TV would fade away and she would be alone again.

“I just did my nails yesterday,” Grandma Lynn said after tying on an apron over her camel-colored A-line dress, “so I’ll dry.”

“Mother, really. This isn’t necessary.”

“It is necessary, believe me, sweetie,” my grandmother said. There was something sober and curt in that sweetie.

Buckley led my father by the hand into the adjoining room where the TV sat. They took up their stations and Lindsey, having been given a reprieve, went upstairs to call Samuel.

It was such a strange thing to see. So out of the ordinary. My grandmother in an apron, holding a dish towel up like a matador’s red flag in anticipation of the first dish coming her way.

They were quiet as they worked, and the silence – the only sounds being the splash of my mother’s hands plunging into the scalding water, the squeak of plates, and the clank of the silver – made a tension fill the room which grew unbearable. The noises of the game from the nearby room were just as odd to me. My father had never watched football; basketball his only sport. Grandma Lynn had never done dishes; frozen meals and takeout menus were her weapons of choice.

“Oh Christ,” she finally said. “Take this.” She handed the just-washed dish back to my mother. “I want to have a real conversation but I’m afraid I’m going to drop these things. Let’s take a walk.”

“Mother, I need to…”

“You need to take a walk.”

“After the dishes.”

“Listen,” my grandmother said, “I know I’m whatever I am and you’re whatever you are, which isn’t me, which makes you happy, but I know some things when I see them and I know something is going on that isn’t kosher. Capisce?”

My mother’s face was wavering, soft and malleable – almost as soft and malleable as the image of her that floated on the sullied water in the sink.

“What?”

“I have suspicions and I don’t want to talk about them here.”

Ten-four, Grandma Lynn, I thought. I’d never seen her nervous before.

It would be easy for the two of them to leave the house alone. My father, with his knee, would never think to join them, and, these days, where my father went or did not go, my brother, Buckley, followed.

My mother was silent. She saw no other option. As an afterthought they removed their aprons in the garage and piled them on the roof of the Mustang. My mother bent down and lifted the garage door.

It was still early enough so the light would hold for the beginning of their walk. “We could take Holiday,” my mother tried.

“Just you and your mother,” my grandmother said. “The most frightening pairing imaginable.”