I went into schmooze mode. “Come on, Terry. You’re an observant girl. And sensitive. You write songs-you notice things about people.” She looked down, working hard to live up to my flattering assessment of her powers of perception and conjure up his image. All three of us were.

“He had long hair and a baseball hat. He said something that made you laugh,” I prompted. “What did he say?”

“It was nothing. Something stupid, like I had a nice wrist move. He was a champion Frisbee player when he was in college, so he would know. It just seemed like a dumb thing to say at the time, but it was perfect. Better than asking if I was okay. I hate when people ask me that.”

(Note to self: When we’re finished, don’t ask if she’s okay.)

“Did he mention where he went to school?” I asked.

“Man, it was all of two minutes. It wasn’t a date. He said it was cold and they jumped around a lot to keep warm.” She ratcheted down and gave it some more thought. “His friend called him JW-he was with Retro Joe.” Then she made an up-and-down motion with one hand, almost as if she were playing a washboard. “And he had something strange about his lip. You could barely see it because of the facial hair. A scar-like the guy who played Johnny Cash in that movie.”

“He had a cleft lip?”

“I don’t know what you call it. It’s kind of cute, like a little line. And his hat had an ornate D on it.”

“D like in Dodgers?” Babe asked.

A voice over my shoulder said, “No,” and three heads turned in its direction at the same time. It was one of the truckers.

He peeled off a few bills and left them on the counter. “D like in Tigers. Detroit Tigers,” he said.

Twenty

Detroit was big, but Caroline/Monica’s hometown wasn’t. The papers had said she was from Newtonville, one of the smaller specks on the MapQuest page, and a Google search made me think people probably didn’t go there unless they were visiting relatives or were passing through to get to somewhere else. Blue-collar residents commuted to jobs in the bigger cities or simply packed up and moved when their jobs did. The ones who stayed were rich or old, or just didn’t have any other place to go. It seemed like a lot of other towns-nice enough, maybe even wonderful forty years ago, but now still lovely on the surface but quietly dying.

I’d start my Internet research with Caroline’s high school. The papers had said Caroline had been a senior at Newtonville High in 1981. How many kids could have been in her graduating class in a town that size? Or were enrolled during the four years she attended? And how many of them could have had a cleft lip? Wasn’t that pretty rare?

I found the school online and ordered yearbooks from all four years that Caroline attended. If I wasn’t successful, I’d have to eat the cost (and the cost of my eighty-dollar lunch with O’Malley), but if I found out who the tipster was, I knew Grant would reimburse me. And I had my fingers crossed that a pretty and popular girl like Caroline would be in lots of pictures and I’d get a handle on who some of her friends were. There was no guarantee our trucker who talked to Caroline even went to high school with her, but it was the only lead I had from Michigan.

Who knew how long the yearbooks would take to arrive? In the meantime, I took the plunge and said yes to one of the biggest time suckers on the Internet, highschoolmemories.com. I signed in pretending to be Monica Weithorn.

For free, I got the tantalizing “Old friends are trying to find you” page with the names strategically blurred. Of course they are. All those people who ignored you or made your life miserable when you were sixteen really wanted to find you. Why? To make sure that they were still cooler than you? For more specific information, I’d have to upgrade my membership. Fifty bucks got me the whole enchilada and a bag of chips. Every classmate’s name in alphabetical order for the four years Caroline had been enrolled, even the old varsity team schedules and records. And updated background info on everyone who’d been dumb enough to enter their current coordinates.

No one I knew used highschoolmemories.com. Well okay, one person, but she was recently divorced and looking for love, or a reasonable facsimile. Why she thought she’d find it among her former high school classmates was beyond me. Most people would rather eat ground glass than relive their high school years.

I printed out the list of Caroline’s classmates and planned to search the likeliest candidates on Facebook-athletes, cheerleaders, and those with the same zip codes as Caroline had had. I didn’t know the demographics of the average Facebook user, and it was a long shot that there would be a lot of overlap with Caroline’s classmates, but it would keep me busy until the yearbooks arrived, and I might trip over somebody with the initials JW. In my former career I had unearthed more than a few good stories by just doggedly pursuing trails that others had dropped.

I had my own dormant Facebook page that I’d started, under protest, three years earlier. Most of my “friends” were old television contacts, and once I stopped being interested in who had his hand in what cookie jar and who had signed what deal, I stopped checking my Facebook page for invitations and new friend requests, but I was still out there in cyberspace with a three-year-old picture and outdated contact info. Just as well-I looked younger and wasn’t as easy to find, a winning combination.

Maybe I’d get lucky and locate that one perky gal who considers it her mission to reconnect people whether they want it or not. Every school, business, or organization has one, the person who organizes things no one else wanted to bother with-the uncool activities, the obscure charity events. (Hi, want to volunteer for the National Frankfurter Finger Weenie Roast?)

At my school her name was Rena. She wore an ear-to-ear grin from the first day of high school to graduation. A relative of mine, from the cynical side of the family, claims only babies and idiots are that happy. In Rena’s case, she might have been right. Rena always seemed to be cradling a clipboard in her arms as if the sign-up sheet was her baby. She was probably working for a cruise line now, with a steady stream of new people to annoy every week.

I started with the school and the word cheerleader. Two female names popped up but no pictures-presumably they wanted to be remembered as they were, ponytailed, flying through the air, no cellulite, eternally young. Perversely, I was glad. Who wanted to think cheerleaders from twenty-five years ago were still as beautiful and limber as they were back then? No male names appeared.

Next I tried the football and baseball teams. The hat was a Detroit Tigers hat. Maybe our man was an athlete and not just a fan. That coughed up pages of names to scroll through; either Newtonville’s male students were all on Facebook, or every water boy and equipment manager claimed he played a valuable role on some team. And this was interesting: the men were more likely to post pictures of themselves and the women posted avatars or nothing. No matter how saggy, bald, or tubby they got, the males thought they still looked hot. Self-esteem or self-delusion?

I was up to the Fs and getting a little punchy. There was nothing in the fridge, so I ordered a pizza and a two-liter bottle of diet soda for dinner. Good food was going to take time and mine would be there in less than twenty-five minutes or it would be free. My finances being what they were, I found myself hoping for a tiny fender bender somewhere between here and Armando’s Pizza Coliseum, nothing serious, just enough to hold up traffic and make the pizza arrive in twenty-seven minutes.

I stared at my computer screen, wondering how else I might find the man who’d bumped into Caroline if I got to the Zs and didn’t see a guy with a cleft lip. The customer who knew his sports teams also knew Retro Joe, and said that these days Joe was driving for Hutchinson Shipping. If my other research came up empty, I’d try Hutchinson, but I wasn’t relishing that conversation. “Hi, do any of your truckers have scarred or cleft lips?” I’d have hung up on me.