Walter walked to the fire, then squatted to stab at it with the poker before speaking again.

“I’ve been married to Lee for thirty-nine years now. If I’d cheated on her, and the other woman became pregnant, I don’t think Lee would have taken kindly to a suggestion that we raise the child alongside our own daughters.”

“Even if something had happened to the mother?”

Walter thought about it. “Again, I can only speak from experience, but the strain that would put on a marriage would be almost unendurable. You know, to be faced every day with the fruit of your husband’s infidelity, to have to pretend that this child was loved as much as another, to treat it the same way as one’s own child.” He shook his head. “No, it’s too difficult. I’m still inclined toward the first option: adoption.”

But they had no other children, I thought. Would that have changed things?

“But why keep it from me?” I asked, putting that thought aside. “There’s no shame to it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t an official adoption, and they were frightened that you might be taken from them. In that case, it would have been better to B qen better keep it quiet until you were an adult.”

“I was a student when my mother died. Enough time had passed by then for her to have told me.”

“Yeah, but look at what she’d gone through. Her husband takes his own life, branded a killer. She leaves the state, takes her son back to Maine with her, then she contracts cancer. It could be that you were all she had left, and she didn’t want to lose you as her son, whatever the truth might have been.”

He rose from the fire and resumed his seat. Walter was older than me by almost twenty years and, in that moment, the relationship between us seemed more like that of a father and a son than two men who had served together.

“Because here’s the thing of it, Charlie: no matter what you discover, they were your mother and your father. They were the ones who raised you, who sheltered you, who loved you. What you’re chasing is some kind of medical definition of a parent, and I understand that. It has meaning for you. In your shoes, I’d probably do the same. But don’t mistake this for the real thing: Will and Elaine Parker were your father and your mother, and don’t let anything that you discover obscure that fact.”

He gripped my arm once, tightly, before releasing me.

“So what now?”

“My lawyer has the papers prepared for an exhumation order,” I said. “I could have my DNA checked against my father’s.”

“You could, but you haven’t. Not ready for that yet, right?”

I nodded.

“When do you go back to Maine?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, after I speak to Eddie Grace.”

“Who?”

“Another of my father’s cop friends. He’s been ill, but his daughter says that he might be up to a few minutes with me now, if I don’t tax him.”

“And if you don’t get anything from him?”

“I put the squeeze on Jimmy.”

“If Jimmy’s hidden something, then he’s hidden it well. Cops gossip. You know that. They’re like fishwives: hard to keep anything quiet once it gets out. Even now, I know who’s screwing around behind his wife’s back, who’s fallen off the wagon, who’s using blow or taking kickbacks from hookers and dealers. It’s the way of things. And after those two kids died, IAD went over your father’s life and career with a magnifying glass and tweezers in an effort to find out why it happened.”

“The official investigation uncovered nothing.”

“Screw the official investigation. You, more than anyone, should know how these things work. There would have been the official inquiry, and the shadow one: one that was recorded and open to examination, and one that was conducted quietly and then buried in a pit.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’ll ask around. I still have favors owed. Let’s see if there was a loose thread anywhere that somebody p B qt somebodulled. In the meantime, you do what you have to do.”

He finished his wine.

“Now, let’s call it a night. In the morning, I’ll give you a ride out to Pearl River. I always did like to see how the Micks live. Made me feel better about not being one.”

EDDIE GRACE HAD RECENTLY been released from the hospital into the care of his daughter, Amanda. Eddie had been ailing for a long time, and I’d been told that he wasn’t well enough to talk to anyone and spent most of his time sleeping, but it seemed that he had rallied in recent weeks. He wanted to return home, and the hospital was content to let him leave, as there was nothing more that its staff could do for him. The medication to control his pain could just as easily be given to him in his own bed as in a hospital room, and he would be less anxious and troubled if surrounded by his family. Amanda had left a message on my phone in response to my earlier inquiries, informing me that Eddie was willing and, it appeared, able to meet with me at her home.

Amanda lived up on Summit Street, within praying distance of St. Margaret of Antioch Church and on the other side of the tracks from our old house on Franklin Street. Walter dropped me off at the church and went for coffee. Amanda answered the door seconds after I rang the bell, as though she had been waiting in the hallway for me to arrive. Her hair was long and brown, with a hint of some tone from a bottle that was not so far from her natural color as to be jarring. She was small, a little over five two, with freckled skin and very light brown eyes. Her lipstick looked freshly applied, and she smelled of some citrus fragrance that, like her, managed the trick of being both unassuming yet striking.

I’d had a crush on Amanda Grace while we were at Pearl River High School together. She was a year older than I, and hung with a crowd that favored black nail polish and obscure English groups. She was the kind of girl jocks pretended to abhor but about whom they secretly fantasized when their perky blond girlfriends were performing acts that didn’t require their boyfriends to look them in the eyes. About a year before my father died, she began dating Michael Ryan, whose main aims in life were to fix cars and open a bowling alley, not worthless ends in themselves but not the level of ambition that I ever believed was going to satisfy a girl like Amanda Grace. Mike Ryan wasn’t a bad guy, but his conversational skills were limited, and he wanted to live and die in Pearl River. Amanda used to talk about visiting Europe, and studying at the Sorbonne. It was hard to see where common ground could lie between her and Mike, unless it was somewhere on a rock in the mid-Atlantic.

Now here she was, and although there were lines where there had not been lines before, she was, like the town itself, largely unaltered. She smiled.

“Charlie Parker,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

I wasn’t sure how to greet her. I reached out a hand, but she slipped by it and hugged me, shaking her head against me as she did so.

“Still the same awkward boy,” she said, not, I thought, without a hint of fondness. She released her hold, and looked at C anô‡ me with amusement.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You visit a good-looking woman, and you offer to shake her hand.”

“Well, it’s been a long time. I don’t like to make assumptions. How’s your husband? Still playing with bowling pins?”

She giggled. “You make it sound kind of gay.”

“Big man, stroking hard phallic objects. Difficult not to draw those conclusions.”

“You can tell him that when you see him. I’m sure he’ll take it under advisement.”

“I’m sure; that, or try to kick my ass from here to Jersey.”

The look on her face changed. Something of the good humor vanished, and what replaced it was speculative.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think he’d try that with you.”