"I appreciate you coming," Laticia said, setting a mug of coffee in front of Ellen as they sat at her round table. The kitchen was small and neat, the cabinets refaced with dark wood and the Formica counters covered with Pyrex oblongs of cakes, cookie tins, and two pies covered with tinfoil, which Laticia had said were "too ugly" to serve.

"Not at all, I appreciate your talking to me at a time like this," Ellen said, having already expressed her condolences. "The only thing I hate about my job is barging into people's houses at the worst time of their lives. Again, I'm so sorry for your loss."

"Thank you." Laticia sat down with a weary smile, showing the gold rim of her front tooth. "I want it to be in the paper, so everybody know what's happenin'. So they know kids are gettin' killed every day. So it's not just a number, like Powerball."

"That's the point. That's what I'm here to do. Make them see it and understand what it's like to lose Lateef this way."

"I cried all I can cry, we all have. But you know what they don't understand? What they're never gonna understand?"

"Tell me."

"That with me, and with Dianne down the block, who lost her child, it's different. We're mad, too. Mad as all hell. Sick to death of all this dyin'." Laticia's voice rose and fell, with a cadence almost like a prayer. "All the mothers are sick our kids are bein" shot at, like it's a damn shootin' gallery, and it makes no never mind. Ain't nothin' gonna change here, and this is America."

Ellen absorbed her words, and her emotion. She wondered if she could convey all that feeling in the piece.

"It's like Katrina, we're livin' in a different country. We got two sets of rules, two sets of laws, two things you can get outta life, whether you're white or black, rich or poor. That's the thing in a nutshell." Laticia pointed a stiff index finger at Ellen. "You live in America, but I don't. You live in Philadelphia, but I don't."

Ellen didn't know how to respond, so she didn't.

"Where I live, my kid can get shot on the street, and nobody sees nothin'. You wanna blame them, tell people to snitch, I know, but you can't blame people. I can't and I don't. If they snitch, they're dead. Their family's dead. Their kids are dead."

Ellen didn't want to interrupt Laticia with a question. Nothing could be as valuable as what she was saying and she deserved at least that much.

"So I could sit here and tell you all about Teef and how cute he was, "cause he was." Laticia smiled briefly, light returning to her angry eyes, softening them for just an instant. "He was a funny child, a goof-ball. He cracked us up. At the last reunion, he was freestylin', he tore it up. I miss him every minute."

Ellen thought of Susan Sulaman, talking about her son. And Carol Braverman, praying for a miracle on her website.

"But even though Teef was mine, what matters is he isn't the only one killed here." Laticia put her hand to her chest, resting on the painted photo of her son's face. "Three other kids were killed in this neighborhood, all of them shot to death. Lemme ask you, that happen where you live?"

"No."

"And that jus' this year. You figure in the year before that and the one before that, we got eight kids killed. You can make a big pile outta those bodies."

Ellen tried to make sense of the number. Everybody counted bodies, to quantify the cost. But whether it cost nine kids or twelve, it was no worse than one. One child was enough. One body was one too many. One was the only number.

"We don't have kids walkin' around here, we got ghosts. This neighborhood's full a ghosts. Pretty soon they'll be nobody left to kill. Philly's gonna be a ghost town, like in the wild wild west. A ghost town."

Ellen heard the bitterness in her words, and she realized that Laticia Williams and Susan Sulaman, two very different women from two very different cities in the same city, had that much in common. Both of them were haunted, and they always would be. She wondered if

Carol Braverman felt the same way, and it nagged at her. She thought of the files, waiting for her in the garage. Answers would be inside.

"You got a child?" Laticia asked, abruptly.

"Yes," Ellen answered. "A boy."

"That's good." Laticia smiled, the gold winking again. "You hold that baby close, you hear? Hold him close. You never know when you gonna lose him."

Ellen nodded, because for a minute, she couldn't speak.

Chapter Twenty-one

Ellen surveyed the garage, her breath chalky in the cold. Kids' bicycles stood propped up in front of metal shelves that held Nerf footballs, a black plastic mountain of Rollerblades and kneepads, and a spare jug of sea-blue antifreeze. There were greasy jars of Turtle Wax and Bug-B-Gone, and an exercise bicycle had been relegated to a corner, wedged behind a workbench. Fluorescent panels overhead cast light on the left well of the garage, where Rick Musko must park, because there were a few grease spots on the concrete floor. In the other well, where Karen Batz's car would have been, sat cardboard boxes piled like a Rubik's Cube. An old green tennis ball hung uselessly from the ceiling, resting on the top of the boxes, its string slack.

Dead files.

Ellen fastened her down coat, went over to the boxes, and started moving them aside. They were piled alphabetically, and she searched for the Go's. Ten minutes later, boxes lay all around the garage floor, and she wasn't cold anymore. She wedged off the lid of a box labeled Ga-Go and looked inside. It held manila folders packed tight, and she took out a batch at the front, allowing them to move freely. Each file had a white label with the client's name, last name first. Ellen started at the beginning, and predictably, most of them were couples: Galletta, Bill and Kalpanna; Gardner, David, and Melissa McKane; Gentry, Robert and Xinwei; and Gibbs, Michael, and Penny Carbone. Her heart was pounding by the time she got to Gilbert, Dylan and Angela, but the next file wasn't Gleeson, Ellen. It was Goel, John, and Lucy Redd.

She thumbed past Gold, Howard and Mojdeh; and Gold, Steven and Calina, and even onto Goldberger, Darja. No Gleeson. Not even misfiled. She skipped ahead to Golden, Golen, Gorman, then to Grant and Green. Still no Gleeson. Puzzled, she looked up at the pile of boxes, then eyed the ones she'd left lying around the floor. There had been other G boxes, and Gleeson could be misfiled anywhere. She took a deep breath and got busy. She was finished two hours later, but still hadn't found her file.

What gives?

She was putting the Rubik's Cube back together when she heard the loud rumbling of a car engine, and the garage door slid up noisily, leaving her in the blinding glare of the high beams from an SUV. The driver stepped out, walked toward her, and introduced himself as Rick Musko.

"You're still here?" he asked, stepping into the fluorescent lights. He was tall and bald, in his fifties, older than Karen.

"Sorry, but I can't find my file. I'm almost finished putting all the boxes back."

"Wait a minute." Musko blinked. "I know you. Aren't you the reporter who did the story on the baby you adopted?"

"Yes, right." Ellen introduced herself again.

"Your name didn't register, when we spoke. I was in the middle of something." Musko extended his hand, and they shook. "I was pretty rude to you, I wish I had known who you were. That story you wrote made Karen so happy."

"She was a great lawyer. I'm so sorry about your loss."

"Thank you."

"Do you know where my file could be?" Ellen picked up a box and heaved it on top of another. "Could it be with the lawyer who bought her practice? I figured I'd call him tomorrow morning."

"No, he won't have it." Musko picked up a box. "He went through all of Karen's files with a fine-tooth comb and took only her active files, mostly divorces and custody fights. Said he didn't have the space for the dead files. That, I believe." Musko straightened the tower of boxes and gave them a pat. "These have been sitting here all this time.