Louise sniffed and drew Jonah closer, as if she felt he needed protecting.

She didn’t speak again until they reached the car. Even then, she was all motherly fuss and bustle. “Climb into your seat, Jonah; don’t dawdle. Here, let me straighten that strap.”

Liam settled himself in front with a sigh. He was forcing himself to say no more, although it always annoyed him when people implied you had to have a religion in order to hold to any standards of behavior.

And then out of nowhere, as Louise was flinging herself into her seat with an indignant little bounce, it came to him who that old man in the waiting room was. Why, of course: Mr. Cope. Ishmael Cope, of Cope Development-the billionaire whose office buildings and luxury condominiums and oversized shopping malls despoiled the entire area. His picture popped up in the paper almost weekly, his heron-like figure bending forward to shake hands with some accomplice over his latest environmentally ruinous project.

Billionaires could buy anything, evidently, including better memories. Liam saw Mr. Cope’s assistant once again in his mind-her owlish glasses and earnest, slightly sweaty face. What a notion: paying someone else to experience your life for you! Because that was what she’d been hired for, really.

A new ache shot through his left temple as Louise gunned the engine, and he closed his eyes and rested his head against the side window.

4

Over the next few days, Liam often found his thoughts returning to the hired rememberer. It wasn’t that he wanted to hire her for himself, exactly. What good would that have done? He had already lived through the one event he needed reminding of. No, it was just the concept that intrigued him. He wondered how it worked. He wondered if it worked.

On Wednesday evening he asked Kitty if he could use her computer. She was using it herself at the time, sitting on the edge of his bed with the computer resting on her knees, and she shielded the screen in a paranoid way when he walked into the room. “I’m not looking!” he told her. “I just wanted to know if I might do a little research once you’re finished.”

“Research… on my computer?”

“Right.”

“Well, sure, I guess so,” she said. But she looked dubious. His aversion to computers was common knowledge. There’d been numerous complaints from St. Dyfrig parents when they couldn’t reach him by e-mail.

He retreated to the kitchen, where he was warming a pizza for his supper. (Kitty would be going out with Damian, she’d said.) A few minutes later, he heard her call, “It’s all yours.” When he walked into the bedroom, she was stepping into a pair of rhinestone-trimmed flip-flops. “Do you know how to log off when you’re done?” she asked him. “Do you know how to work this, even?”

“Certainly I know how!”

Her computer sat on the nightstand, attached to the phone line there. He assumed this meant that no one could call in, which didn’t trouble him as much as it might have. He settled on the edge of the bed and rubbed his hands together. Then he looked up at Kitty. “Did you want something?” he asked.

“No, no,” she said, and she gave an airy wave. “I’m off,” she told him.

“Okay.”

She didn’t mention when she’d be back. Was she supposed to have a curfew?

As of noon, they’d passed the forty-eight-hour mark since his release from the hospital, but she had said nothing about going home. Well, none of his affair.

He waited until she had left the room, and then he typed Ishmael Cope in the Search window. It was true that he knew how to work a computer-he’d taken a mandatory teachers’ training course-but the smaller keyboard gave him some difficulty and he had to hit Delete several times.

There were 4,300-some references to Ishmael Cope. Liam knew from experience that many of these would be false leads-whole paragraphs in which Ishmael and cope coincidentally appeared at widely separated points, or even (amazingly enough) other Ishmael Copes in other cities-but still, he was impressed.

Ishmael Cope was buying up farmland in Howard County. Ishmael Cope and his wife had attended a gala for juvenile diabetes. Ishmael Cope’s plan to build a strip mall on the Eastern Shore was meeting with stiff opposition. Pass on, pass on. Aha: a newspaper profile, dating from just this past April. Mr. Cope had been born on Eutaw Street in 1930, which would make him… seventy-six. Younger than Liam’s father, although Liam had taken him for much older. He had only a high school diploma; he’d started his working life assisting in his parents’ bakery. His first million had come from the invention of an “edible staple” to fasten filled pastries and crepes. (Liam allowed himself a brief grin.) The rest of his career was fairly run-of-the-mill, though: the million parlayed into two million, four million, then a billion as he swept across his own personal Monopoly board. Married, divorced, married again; two sons in the business with him…

Nothing about any memory problems.

The next entry dealt with a question of sewage disposal for a golf community that Mr. Cope was proposing near the Pennsylvania border. In the next, he was merely a name on a list of donors to Gilman School. Liam signed off and closed the computer. He might have known he would come up empty. The whole point of hiring a rememberer, after all, was to conceal the fact that one was needed.

And anyhow, what had he hoped to accomplish even if he had found what he was looking for?

On Thursday morning he had another visit from the police. There were two of them, this time-a man and a woman. The woman did all of the questioning. She wanted to know if Liam recalled any recent conversations in which he had publicly mentioned some valuable possession. Liam said, “Absolutely not, since I have no valuable possessions.”

She said, “Well, maybe not by your standards, but… a high-definition TV, say? For lots of folks, that’s a hot property.”

“I don’t even have a low-definition TV,” Liam told her.

She looked annoyed. She was an attractive young woman, petite and towheaded, but a little W of wrinkles between her eyebrows marred the overall impression. She said, “We’re just trying to figure out why your place would have been targeted, and on the very first night you lived here.”

“Well, it wasn’t Damian, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Damian?”

He regretted bringing the name to her attention. He said, “It wasn’t the guys who moved me in.”

“No. Those were friends, as I understand.”

“Right.”

“How about the man’s voice? Did you hear him speak?”

He felt a sudden sense of despair. He said, “Didn’t they tell you I don’t remember? I don’t remember a thing!”

“Just checking.”

“What: do you imagine you’ll trip me up?”

“No need to get excited, sir.”

He forced himself to take a deep breath. No need at all; she was right, but somehow he felt accused. To this woman he looked inattentive, sloppy, lax. He decided to go on the offensive. “So what will you do next?” he asked her.

“Well, we have the case in our records now.”

“Is that it?”

She stared him down.

“How about fingerprints? Did they find any fingerprints?” he asked.

“Oh, well, fingerprints. Fingerprints are overrated,” she said.

Then she told him to take care (an expression he hated; take care of what?), and she and her partner walked out.

Back during Liam’s first marriage, when all their friends were having babies, he and Millie knew a woman who experienced some terrible complication during labor and lay in a coma for several weeks afterward. Gradually she returned to consciousness, but for a long time she had no recollection of the whole preceding year. She didn’t even remember being pregnant. Here was this infant boy, very sweet and all that but what did he have to do with her? Then one day, a neighbor climbed her porch steps and trilled out, “Yoo-hoo!” Evidently that was the neighbor’s trademark greeting, uttered in a high fluty voice with a Southern roundness to the vowels. The woman rose slowly from her chair. Her eyes widened; her lips parted. As she described it later, it was as if the neighbor’s “Yoo-hoo” had provided a string for her to grab hold of, and when she tugged it, other memories came trailing in besides-not just the previous “Yoo-hoos,” but how this neighbor brought homemade pies to people at the drop of a hat, and how she always labeled her pie tins with her name on a strip of masking tape, and how in fact she’d contributed a pie to the final, celebratory meeting of the childbirth class that they had both attended. Childbirth! And bit by bit, over the course of the next few days, more and more came back, until the woman remembered everything.