“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you know where I can find Jeff now? Is there a cell number you can give me?”

Somehow that convinced her I was a girlfriend. She’d love to see her boy settle down with a really nice girl and I sounded like a nice girl. She asked if I had a job and I mumbled something about my own small business. My stock was rising. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been treated like a whore and then a pathetic discard. All of a sudden I’d turned into a good catch. Mrs. Warren asked what church I went to, and I struggled to remember the name of the parochial school where I had spent the worst two months of my six-year-old life.

“Sacred Heart, ma’am.”

Dead silence. Obviously, Catholic wasn’t as good as Protestant, but at least Jeff wasn’t dating a heathen. Mrs. Warren regrouped quickly. It was okay-she was sure I was nice anyway. If I stayed on the phone with her much longer, she’d have me converted and us engaged.

She didn’t know if the number she had was his latest. Jeff changed numbers a lot, and Mrs. Warren hated to cross any of them out, as if doing so was erasing a part of his life. My guess was that changing numbers was less about his adventurous lifestyle than it was about staying one step ahead of the bill collectors and his ex-wives.

“I suppose the best way to reach him right now is through Leroy.” I could hear Mrs. Warren flipping through a phone book that I imagined looked like my mother’s, pages falling out, slightly sticky from being in the kitchen for the last thirty years, with numbers and addresses written in blue ballpoint ink in beautiful copperplate script, except for their children’s, which had been crossed out and changed over and over while everyone else’s stayed the same. (Note to self: Call Mom!)

“Here it is, Leroy Donnelley.”

Suddenly, my heart was racing. “Leroy Donnelley? Any relation to Edward Donnelley?”

I scribbled notes as fast as I could while Mrs. Warren gave me the extended family tree of all the Donnelleys and their kin. Off the top of her head she recited a veritable Book of Donnelley-who they’d married, who their kids were, and where they’d gone to school. If she had used the word begat it could not have been more biblical or more complete. It was as if I had stumbled upon the town historian.

Now, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Jeff Warren had bumped into his old high school friend, Monica, and accidentally or intentionally mentioned it to a relative of one of the people she’d been arrested with. I still wasn’t sure how they found her. Warren knew she was going by the name Caroline and had been seen in Springfield, but as far as I knew, that was all.

Kate Gustafson, the other woman in the case, served only two years. After she was released, she’d been killed in a suspicious fire. The man, Eddie Donnelley, served his entire sentence, all twenty years. Could you carry a grudge for that long because one of your partners in crime had gotten away? It’s been known to happen.

Mrs. Warren was still rambling on, but I felt sure I’d already gotten the lion’s share of the story. Somehow I didn’t think the health issues of the current crop of Donnelleys was going to help me, Grant, or Caroline; but, as is often the case with seniors when they’re on the phone, if they sense you’re ready to hang up, they dig in their heels and tear into another long-winded anecdote, frequently about the azaleas, the garbageman, or something equally mundane just to keep you hanging on.

“Of course, they never did find all that money they said was missing,” she said, wheezing, daring me to hang up.

I had to hand it to her: Mama Warren knew how to tell a story. I switched my phone to the other ear, sharpened my pencil, and got comfortable. This anecdote I did want to hear.

Two hours later Grant Sturgis called me from a hotel room in Michigan. Caroline had told him I hadn’t been the one to give away her secret, and he was calling to apologize.

I had a lot to tell him about Caroline and Jeff’s accidental meeting in the diner and what I thought had happened afterward.

“But why?” he asked.

“Grant, Donnelley served twenty years in prison. Not even time off for good behavior.” (I had thought everyone got time off for good behavior.) “Caroline walked away after eighteen months. And then to learn that she’s been living a pretty cushy life in suburban Connecticut, it might have ticked him off. I mean, he wasn’t one of life’s noblemen before he went to jail. Something tells me he didn’t see the error of his ways while behind bars. The man was angry.”

And then there was the missing money. Mama Warren wasn’t sure how much, but the police had suggested the forty-seven grand found in Caroline’s gym bag was just the tip of the iceberg. Over seven hundred fifty thousand dollars was unaccounted for, the drug money having funded an extensive college sports gambling ring. A tidy sum then and not too shabby now. Maybe Donnelley had reclaimed it when he got out of prison, or maybe he couldn’t find it and was looking for the person he thought still had it. Or had used it to buy a nice big house in Connecticut once she thought no one would be looking for her.

Grant was quiet. Had I gone too far? This was, after all, the woman he loved. What had he called her in a tone that suggested sainthood-“the mother of his children”? He took a deep breath.

“Except for one thing,” he said. “Even if the judge and the jury didn’t know it, Eddie Donnelley did and I do. Caroline was entirely innocent.”

Twenty-three

If half of what Grant Sturgis told me next was true, Caroline had lived through a succession of nightmarish events equaled only by Jean Valjean; right out of Les Misérables.

Caroline started dating Eddie Donnelley when she was a senior at Newtonville High School and he was a sophomore at Nixon County Community College. She was flattered by his attentions. He was an older man, relatively speaking, and the town was so small that, as pretty as she was, she’d already been through all the interesting boys her own age. Not in a slutty, town pump kind of way-she just had an idea of what she wanted and was quick to realize when she hadn’t found it, so she kept looking.

Kate Gustafson was Eddie’s ex-girlfriend, who was surprisingly cordial to her replacement. At least it was surprising to me. Where I grew up, you didn’t want to be in the same time zone with your boyfriend’s ex, much less hang out with her, but Newtonville, Michigan, was a far cry from Brooklyn, New York.

Attractive and popular, Caroline was a capable student but more interested in creative pursuits than academics-painting and dancing were two of her passions. Beyond the Twinkletoes ballet classes which she’d outgrown by the age of twelve, there was no dance studio in town, so Caroline turned to cheerleading. And she pursued it with a vengeance. They said she was fearless and would cheerfully and accurately fling her body into whatever formation the coach asked, landing with her trademark happy face without even breaking a sweat.

As the school’s head cheerleader she went to all the varsity events on the road and was invited to every postgame party. Eddie and Kate went everywhere with her, Eddie following the school bus that carried the team and the cheerleaders, driving to the games and meets that were out of the city, with Kate tagging along, as a pal and chaperone. At least that was what they told Caroline’s dad, who by that time was consoling himself for the loss of his wife every day with a quart of scotch and a six-pack of beer and every night with a hairdresser named Rita.

At first, the invitations were just for Caroline. After all, who wouldn’t want the prettiest girl in school at their party? But later all three were invited because Caroline’s friends could pretty much get you anything you wanted. According to Grant, unbeknownst to Caroline, they’d used her to open a whole new line of distribution for the drugs they were selling-mostly speed, some pot, and eventually heroin, at schools all over the county. Place your orders now for next week’s postgame party. It didn’t take long for interested parties to get involved in betting on the games. That’s when the stakes were really jacked up.