"So was it before five, or after five, or five?"

"I'd say five."

"Because we got in touch with his cell phone provider, had them check all his incoming and outgoing calls. There was a call at five, made from a pay phone in Milford. There was another one later, from another Milford pay phone, that went through, then later in the day, some calls from his wife that went unanswered."

I had no idea what to make of that.

Cynthia and Grace were getting into the back of the funeral director's Caddy.

Wedmore leaned toward me aggressively, and even though she was probably five inches shorter, she had presence. "Who'd want to kill your aunt, and Abagnall?" she asked.

"Someone who's trying to make sure that the past stays in the past," I said.

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Millicent wanted to take us all out for lunch, but Cynthia said she'd prefer to go straight home, and that was where I took her. Grace had clearly been moved by the service, and the entire morning had been an eye-opener for her-her first funeral-but I was actually glad to see she still had an appet.i.te. The moment we came through the door, she said she was starving and that if she didn't get something to eat immediately, she would die.

Then, "Oh, sorry."

Cynthia smiled at our girl. "How about a tuna sandwich?"

"With celery?"

"If we have any," Cynthia said.

Grace went into the fridge, opened up the crisper. "There's some celery, but it's kind of soft."

"Bring it out," Cynthia said. "We'll have a look."

I hung my suit jacket on the back of a kitchen chair, loosened my tie. I didn't have to dress this well to teach high school, and the formal attire made me feel constricted and awkward. I sat down, put everything that had happened so far that day on the back burner for a moment, and watched my two girls. Cynthia hunted up a tin of tuna and a can opener while Grace put the celery on the counter.

Cynthia drained the oil from the tuna can, dumped it into a bowl, and asked Grace to get the Miracle Whip. She went back to the fridge, brought out the jar, got the lid off, and put it on the counter. She broke off a celery stalk, waved it in the air. It was a piece of rubber.

Playfully, she hit her mother on the arm with it.

Cynthia turned and looked at her, reached over very deliberately and broke off a rubbery stalk of her own, and hit Grace back. Then they used the stalks as swords. "Take that!" said Cynthia. Then they both started to laugh, and slipped their arms around each other.

And I thought, I've always wondered what sort of mother Patricia was like, and the answer's always been here right in front of me.

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Later, after Grace had eaten and gone upstairs to get back into some regular clothes, Cynthia said to me, "You looked nice today."

"You too," I said.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Hmm?"

"I'm sorry. I don't blame you. For Tess. I was wrong to say what I said."

"It's okay. I should have told you everything. Earlier."

She looked at the floor.

"Can I ask you something?" I said, and she nodded. "Why do you think your father would have saved a clipping about a hit-and-run accident?"

"What are you talking about?" she said.

"He saved a clipping about a hit-and-run accident."

The s...o...b..xes were still on the kitchen table, the clipping about fly-fishing, which included the one about the woman from Sharon who was killed by a pa.s.sing motorist, her body dragged and dumped into the ditch, sitting on top.

"Let me see," Cynthia said, rinsing off her hands and drying them off. I handed her the clipping and she accepted it delicately, like parchment. She read it. "I can't believe I've never noticed it before."

"You thought your dad saved the clipping because of the fly-fishing piece."

"Maybe he did save it because of the fly-fishing piece."

"I think, in part, he did," I said. "But what I'm wondering is which came first. Did he see the story about the accident and go to clip it out, but then given his interests, he clipped the fly-fishing story with it? Or did he see the fly-fishing story, then spotted the other one, and, for some reason, clipped it, too? Or," and I paused for a moment, "did he want to clip the hit-and-run story, but worried that clipping it alone would lead to questions should someone, like your mother, find it, but clipping it with the other story, well, that was like camouflaging it?"

Cynthia had handed the clipping back to me and said, "What in the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"G.o.d, I don't know," I said.

"Every time I look through those boxes," Cynthia said, "I keep hoping I'll find something I've never noticed before. It's frustrating, I know. You want to find an answer but it's not there. And yet," she said, "I keep thinking I'll find it. Some tiny clue. Like that one piece in a jigsaw puzzle, the one that helps you place all the others."

"I know," I said. "I know."

"This accident, this woman who got killed-what was her name again?"

"Connie Gormley," I said. "She was twenty-seven."

"I've never heard that name in my life. It doesn't mean a thing. And what if that's it? What if that's the piece?"

"Do you think it is?" I asked.

She shook her head slowly. "No."

Neither did I.

But it didn't stop me from going upstairs with the clipping and sitting in front of the computer and looking for any information about a twenty-six-year-old hit-and-run accident that left Connie Gormley dead.

I came up with nothing.

So then I started looking up Gormleys in that part of Connecticut, using the online phone listings, wrote down names and numbers onto a scratch pad, stopped when I had half a dozen, and was about to start calling them when Cynthia poked her head into the room. "What are you doing?" she asked.

I told her.

I don't know whether I was expecting her to protest, or offer encouragement, to grasp onto any thread no matter how slender. Instead, she said, "I'm going to go lie down for a while."

When someone actually answered, I identified myself as Terrence Archer from Milford, said that I probably had the wrong number, but I was trying to track down anyone who might have information about the death of Connie Gormley.

"Sorry, never heard of her," said the person at the first number.

"Who?" said an elderly woman at the second. "I never knew no Connie Gormley, but I have a niece goes by Constance Gormley, and she's a real estate agent in Stratford. She's terrific and if you're looking for a house, she could find you a good one. I've got her number right here if you'll hold on a second." I didn't want to be rude, but after I'd held for five minutes, I hung up.

The third person I reached said, "Oh G.o.d, Connie? It was so long ago."

It turned out that I had managed to reach Howard Gormley, her sixty-five-year-old brother.

"Why would anyone want to know about that, after all these years?" he asked, his voice hoa.r.s.e and tired.

"Honestly, Mr. Gormley, I don't quite know what to tell you," I said. "My wife's family had some trouble a few months after your sister's accident, stuff that we've still been trying to sort out, and an article about Connie was found among some mementos."

"That's kind of strange, isn't it?" Howard Gormley said.

"Yes, it is. If you wouldn't mind answering a few questions, it might clear things up, at least allow me to eliminate any connection between your family's tragedy and ours."

"I suppose."

"First of all, did they ever find out who ran your sister down? I don't have any other information. Was someone finally charged?"

"Nope, never. Cops never found out a thing, never put anyone in jail for it. After a while, they just gave up, I guess."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well, it just about killed our parents. Grief ate away at them. Our mother died a couple years after that, and our dad went a year later. Cancer, both of them, but you ask me, it was the sorrow that overtook them."

"Did the police ever have any leads? Did they ever find out who was driving?"

"Just how up-to-date was that article you found?"

I had it next to the computer, and read it to him.

"That was pretty early on," he said. "That was before they found out the whole thing had kind of been staged."

"Staged?"

"Well, at first, they figured it was a hit-and-run, plain and simple. Maybe a drunk, or just a bad driver. But when they did the autopsy, they noticed something kind of funny."

"What do you mean, funny?"

"I'm no expert, you know? I've been a roofer all my life. Don't really know much about that forensic stuff. But what they told us was, a lot of what happened to Connie, the damage done to her from the car? That happened after she was already dead."

"Wait a sec," I said. "Your sister was already dead when the car hit her."

"That's what I just said. And..."

"Mr. Gormley?"

"It's just, this is hard to talk about, even after all this time. I don't like to say things that reflect badly on Connie, even after all these years, if you understand."

"I do."

"But they said, well, that she might have been with someone shortly before she got left in that ditch."

"You mean..."

"They're not saying she was raped, exactly, although that might have happened, I suppose. But my sister, she kind of got around, if you understand, and they say she met up with someone that evening, most likely. And I've always wondered if that's who it was, who set it up to look like she got hit by a car, dumped her into that ditch."

I didn't know what to say.

"Connie and me was close. I didn't approve of the way she lived her life, but then, I was never no angel myself and was never in any position to point a finger. After all these years, I'm still angry, and wish they'd find the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who did it, but the thing is, it was so long ago, there's a pretty good chance that son of a b.i.t.c.h may be dead himself by now."

"Yes," I said. "That's very possible."

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When I was done talking to Howard Gormley, I just sat there at my desk for a while, staring off into s.p.a.ce, trying to figure out whether it meant anything.

Then, reflexively as I often do, I hit the Mail b.u.t.ton on the computer keyboard to see whether we had any messages. As usual, there were a bunch, most of them offering deals on v.i.a.g.r.a or stock tips or places to get a Rolex cheap or solicitations from widows of wealthy Nigerian gold mine owners looking for a.s.sistance transferring their millions to a North American account. Our anti-spam filter caught only a fraction of these annoyances.

But there was one e-mail, from a Hotmail address that was nothing but numbers-05121983-with the words "It won't be much longer" in the subject line.