My eye went to the small, empty hook where we usually keep the extra key. The one Cynthia had noticed missing the other morning.

“Can you have an officer park out front?” Cynthia asked. “To keep an eye on the house? In case anyone tries to get in again? But just to stop them, see who it is, not hurt them. I don’t want you hurting whoever it is.”

“Cyn,” I said.

“Ma’am, I’m afraid there’s no call for that. And we don’t have the manpower to put a car out front of your house, not without good reason,” the woman cop said. “But if you have any more problems, you be sure to give us a call.”

With that, they excused themselves. And in all likelihood, got back in their car and had a good laugh at our expense. I could see us on the police blotter. Responded to report of strange hat. Everyone at the station would get a good chuckle out of that.

Once they were gone, we both took a seat at the kitchen table, the hat between us, neither of us saying a word.

Grace came into the kitchen, having slipped down the stairs noiselessly, pointed to the hat, grinned, and said, “Can I wear it?”

Cynthia grabbed the hat. “No,” she said.

“Go to bed, honey,” I said, and Grace toddled off. Cynthia didn’t release her grip on the hat until we went up to bed.

That night, staring at the ceiling again, I thought about how Cynthia had forgotten, at the last minute, to take along her shoebox to the station for that disastrous meeting with the psychic. How she’d had to run back into the house, just for a minute, while Grace and I waited in the car.

How, even though I’d offered to run in and get the box for her, she beat me to it.

She was in the house a long time, just to grab a box. Took an Advil, she told me when she got back into the car.

Not possible, I told myself, glancing over at Cynthia, sleeping next to me.

Surely not.

I had a free period, so I poked my head into Rolly Carruthers’s office. “I’m on a prep. You got a minute?”

Rolly looked at the stack of stuff on his desk. Reports from the board office, teacher evaluations, budget estimates. He was drowning in paperwork. “If you only need a minute, I’ll have to say no. If you need at least an hour, however, I might be able to help you out.”

“An hour sounds about right.”

“You had lunch?”

“No.”

“Let’s go over to the Stonebridge. You drive. I may decide to get smashed.” He slipped on his sport jacket, told his secretary he’d be out of the school for a while but she could reach him on his cell if the building caught fire. “So I’ll know that I don’t need to come back,” he said.

His secretary insisted he speak to one of the superintendents, who was holding, so he signaled to me that he would be just a couple of minutes. I stepped outside the office, right in the path of Jane Scavullo, who was bearing down the hall at high speed, no doubt for a date to beat the shit out of some other girl in the schoolyard.

The handful of books she was carrying scattered across the hallway. “Fucking hell,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, and knelt down to help her pick them up.

“It’s okay,” she said, scrambling to get to the books before I did. But she wasn’t quick enough. I already had Foxfire, the Joyce Carol Oates book I’d recommended to her, in my hand.

She snatched it away from me, tucked it in with the rest of her stuff. I said, without a trace of I-told-you-so in my voice, “How are you liking it?”

“It’s good,” Jane said. “Those girls are seriously messed up. Why’d you suggest I read it? You think I’m as bad as the girls in this story?”

“Those girls aren’t all bad,” I said. “And no, I don’t think you’re like them. But I thought you’d appreciate the writing.”

She snapped her gum. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What do you care?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you care? About what I read, about my writing, that shit.”

“You think I’m a teacher just to get rich?”

She looked as though she was almost going to smile, and then caught herself. “I gotta go,” she said, and did.

The lunch crowd had thinned by the time Rolly and I got to the Stonebridge. He ordered some coconut shrimp and a beer to start, and I settled on a large bowl of New England clam chowder with extra crackers, and coffee.

Rolly was talking about putting their house on the market soon, that they’d have a lot of money left over after they paid for the mobile home in Bradenton. There’d be money to put in the bank, they could invest it, take the odd trip. And Rolly was going to buy a boat so he could fish along the Manatee River. It’s like he was already finished being a principal. He was someplace else.

“I got stuff on my mind,” I said.

Rolly took a sip of Sam Adams. “This about Lauren Wells?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “What made you think I wanted to talk about Wells?”

He shrugged. “I noticed you talking to her in the hall.”

“She’s a wingnut,” I said.

Rolly smiled. “A well-packaged wingnut.”

“I don’t know what it is. I think, in her world, Cynthia and I have achieved some sort of celebrity status. Lauren rarely spoke to me until we appeared on that show.”

“Can I have your autograph?” Rolly asked.

“Bite me,” I said. I waited a moment, as if to signal that I was changing gears here, and said, “Cynthia’s always thought of you like an uncle, you know? I know you looked out for her, after what happened. So I feel I can come to you, talk to you about her, when there’s a problem.”

“Go on.”

“I’m starting to wonder whether Cynthia’s losing it.”

Rolly put his glass of beer down on the table, licked his lips. “Aren’t the two of you already seeing some shrink, what’s-her-name, Krinkle or something?”

“Kinzler. Yeah. Every couple of weeks or so.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

“No. It’s tricky. I mean, there are times when she talks to us separately. I could bring it up. But, it’s not like it’s any one thing. It’s all these little things put together.”

“Like what?”

I filled him in. The anxiety over the brown car. The anonymous phone call from someone saying her family had forgiven her, how she’d accidentally erased the call. Chasing the guy in the mall, thinking he was her brother. The hat in the middle of the table.

“What?” Rolly said. “Clayton’s hat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Evidently. I mean, I suppose she could have had it tucked away in a box all these years. But it did have this little marking inside, his first initial, under the lining.”

Rolly thought about that. “If she put the hat there, she could have written in the initial herself.”

That had never occurred to me. Cyn had let me look for the initials, rather than take the hat away from me and do it herself. Her expression of shock had been pretty convincing.

But I supposed what Rolly was suggesting was possible.

“And it doesn’t even have to be her father’s hat. It could be any hat. She could have bought it at a secondhand store, said it was his hat.”

“She smelled it,” I said. “When she smelled it, she said for sure it was her father’s hat.”

Rolly looked at me like I was one of his dumb high school students. “And she could have let you smell it, too, to prove it. But that proves nothing.”

“She could be making everything up,” I said. “I can’t believe my mind’s going there.”

“Cynthia doesn’t strike me as mentally unbalanced,” Rolly said. “Under tremendous stress, yes. But delusional?”

“No,” I said. “She’s not like that.”

“Or fabricating things? Why would she be making these things up? Why would she pretend to get that phone call? Why would she set up something like the hat?”

“I don’t know.” I struggled to come up with an answer. “To get attention? So that, what? The police, whoever, would reopen the case? Finally find out what happened to her family?”