“I’ve been here for days and days.”

“Ethan, it’s only been a couple.”

“When’s Mommy coming home?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you being a good boy for Nana?”

A hesitation. “Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“She yelled at me about jumping on the stairs.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Now I’m playing with the bat.”

“Bat?”

“The okay bat.”

I smiled. “Are you playing croquet with Nana?”

“No. She says it makes her back hurt to hit the ball.”

“So how do you play by yourself?”

“I hit the wood ball through the wires. I can make it go really far.”

“Okay,” I said. “Is Nana making anything for dinner?”

“I think so. I smell something. Nana! What’s for dinner?” I heard Mom talking. Then Ethan said, “Pot roast.” He whispered, “It’s got carrots in it.”

“Try to eat just one carrot. It’s good for you. Do it for Nana.”

“Okay.”

“What time’s Nana serving dinner?”

Ethan shouted out another question. “Seven,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll see you then, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“Okay. Bye, sport.”

“Bye, Dad.”

And he hung up.

• • •

I tried the Rochester Pirelli number again.

“Hello?” A woman.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to find Tina Pirelli.”

“Speaking.”

I tried to hide the excitement in my voice. “Would this be the Tina Pirelli who once taught kindergarten in Rochester?”

“That’s right.” A suspicious tone in her voice. “Who’s calling?”

“My name is David Harwood. I’m trying to find someone who I think was a student of yours, very briefly, back then.”

“David who?”

“Harwood. I’m calling from Promise Falls.”

“How did you get my number?”

I told her, briefly, about the steps I’d taken to find her.

“And who are you trying to find?” she asked.

“Constance Tattinger.”

There was silence at the other end of the line for a moment. “I remember her,” Tina Pirelli said quietly. “Why are you trying to find her?”

I’d thought about whether to make up a story, but decided it was better to play it straight. “She grew up to become my wife,” I said. “And she’s missing.”

I could hear Tina draw in her breath. “And you think I’d know where she is? I haven’t seen her in probably thirty years, when she was just a little girl.”

“I understand,” I said. “But when her parents moved away from Rochester, did they say where they were moving to?” Having had no luck so far tracking down a Martin Tattinger in the United States, I wondered whether they could have moved to Canada or overseas.

“Considering the circumstances,” Tina Pirelli said, “they didn’t really have much to say to anyone. They just moved away.”

“The circumstances being… the accident?”

“So your wife has told you about that,” she said.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Poor Constance, everyone blamed her. Even though she was just a child. Her parents pulled her out of school, and eventually moved away. I don’t have any idea where. I’m sorry. You say she’s missing?”

“She just disappeared,” I said.

“That must be terrible for you,” she said.

“It is.”

“I only had Constance for a couple of weeks. The accident was in September. But she was a good girl. Quiet. And I saw her only once after the accident.”

“How was she then?” I asked.

Tina Pirelli took so long to answer, I thought the connection had been broken. “It was like,” she said, “she’d stopped feeling.”

I called the Pittsburgh listing for M. Tattinger.

“Hello?” A man. Sounded like he could be in his sixties or older.

“Is this Martin Tattinger?” I asked.

When the man didn’t respond right away, I asked again.

“No,” the man said. “This is Mick Tattinger.”

“Is there a Martin Tattinger there?”

“No, there isn’t. I think you must have the wrong number.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But maybe you can help me. My name is David Harwood. I’m calling from Promise Falls, north of Albany. I’m trying to find a Martin Tattinger, who’s married to Thelma. They have a daughter Constance, and last I heard, they were living in Rochester, but that was some time ago. You wouldn’t by any chance be a relative, know anything about how I might find Martin?”

“The Martin Tattinger you’re looking for is my brother,” he said flatly.

“Oh,” I said, suddenly encouraged.

“He and Thelma, they moved around a lot, ending up in El Paso.”

I’d seen no Tattinger listing for El Paso. “Do you have a number for him there?” I asked.

“Why you trying to get in touch with him?” Mick Tattinger asked.

“It’s about their daughter, Constance,” I said, not disclosing, this time, my relationship to her. “There’s reason to believe she might be in trouble, and we’re trying to contact her parents.”

“That’s going to be hard,” Mick said.

“Why’s that?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize they’d passed on.”

Mick snorted. “Yeah, passed on. That’s a nice way to put it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“They were murdered.”

“What?”

“Throats slit. Both of them. While they were tied to the kitchen chairs.”

“When was this?”

“Four, five years ago? It’s not like I circle the date on my calendar, if you know what I mean.”

“Did they catch who did it?” I asked.

“No,” Mick Tattinger said. “What’s this about Connie?”

“Constance-Connie is missing,” I said.

“Yeah, well, there’s nothing exactly new about that. She’s been missing for years. Martin and Thelma, when they died, they hadn’t heard from her for ages, had no idea what happened to her. She took off when she was sixteen or seventeen. Not that I could blame her. You telling me she’s turned up?”

“It looks that way,” I said.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Where the hell is she? She probably doesn’t even know her parents are dead.”

“I think you might be right,” I said.

“She might get some satisfaction from knowing,” Mick Tattinger said. “Martin was my brother and all, but he was an ornery son of a bitch. We hadn’t been close for years. Him and Thelma wouldn’t ever have won any Parent of the Year awards. His bitchin’ and her drinkin’ and mopin’ about, they were a pair. But still, that doesn’t mean they deserved what they got. Martin was fixing cars, running a garage in El Paso. Far as I know, he was keeping his nose clean. So why does someone come and kill them? Nothing was stolen.”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly.

“But Connie’s alive? That’s a kick in the head. I figured she was probably dead, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. She was so screwed up, you know? It all goes back to something that happened when she was little, but no sense getting into that.”

“The girl that got run over in the driveway.”

“Oh, so you already know about that? Martin was a prick even before that, but after the accident, things really turned sour. He was working for a dealership that was owned by the dead girl’s uncle. He took it out on Martin, fired him. Martin blamed Connie, which to a degree I suppose you could understand, but she was just a kid, right? But he never did let up on her. Found another job at a dealership in another town, ended up taking the fall when someone broke in and stole a bunch of tools. Wasn’t Martin that did it, but management thought it was and fired him. Now he’d been fired from two jobs and things got worse. He finally found some other work, but it didn’t matter what happened, he always put the blame on Connie, like she was their own bad luck charm.” Mick paused, trying to recall something. “What was it he used to call her? He had a name for her.”

“Hindy,” I offered.

“Yeah, that was it. For ‘Hindenburg.’”

“How’d she handle it?” I asked.

“The few times I saw them all together, it was kind of strange.”

“What do you mean?”