When I’d first moved in with Shiloh, Mrs. Muzio had cast a forbidding eye on me. Her paranoia had marked me as an instant enemy. “Why you steal?” she’d yell when Snoopy went missing, or she’d shout “Strega!” when she saw me. Witch, she was saying; I looked it up in an Italian-English dictionary. Shiloh, amused, told me about the warnings she’d whisper to him about that woman, afraid for his well-being.

Then, for no reason that I could see, maybe just the wind blowing north-northwest, she stopped. Mrs. Muzio warmed to me. I was no longer strega. I wasn’t even just Shiloh’s girlfriend to her; I was fidanzata, his fiancée.

As I approached her house, I looked with worry at her front walk. It needed tending. The concrete was breaking up, tectonic plates rising and falling under the forces of Minnesota summers and winters. She could easily trip someday, coming or going. Maybe I’d mention this to Shiloh when I saw him again.

I knocked on the door, pounding with the side of my fist instead of my knuckles. It wasn’t rudeness; Mrs. Muzio was hard-of-hearing.

“Hello, Mrs. Muzio, can I come in?” I asked when she appeared in the doorway.

Five-foot-two and stooped, she turned a benign, blank face up to me.

“You know who I am, right?” I prompted her.

“The fidanzata,” she said, her face creasing into a smile.

“Not anymore. We’re married,” I explained. She didn’t respond.

“Can I come in?” I repeated, wiping my boots on her mat as an illustration and a cue.

I liked the inside of Mrs. Muzio’s home. She cooked a lot, scratch meals with her garden vegetables, and as a result her home smelled of Italian cooking instead of the must of age that hung in the homes of many people in their eighties.

In the kitchen, she made coffee. I stood on her cracked, pale-pink linoleum and watched. She hadn’t understood me when I’d told her that Shiloh and I had married. It didn’t really matter, yet if I couldn’t communicate that concept clearly to her, how well would this whole interview go? Could I make her understand anything?

I caught her eye. “I’m not Shiloh’s fidanzata anymore. We’re married.” She looked at me with incomprehension. I held up my hand, showing her the ring. “Married. See?”

Understanding dawned and she smiled. “That’s lovely,” she said. Her accent made it thatsa lovely, the speech of a B-movie Italian widow. She poured the coffee and we settled at her kitchen table.

“How’s Snoopy?” I asked.

“Snoopy?” she repeated. She nodded toward the back door, near which I saw gray-muzzled Snoopy sleeping near her empty food bowl. “Snoopy is-a…” she considered, “old. Like me.” She laughed at herself, her eyes flashing.

Unexpectedly I saw a young girl six decades ago in Sicily, with dark eyes and a ready laugh and a strong body. I’d never seen her before in this widow’s stooped form and that made me ashamed of myself.

“Listen, Mrs. Muzio,” I said. “I need to talk to you. My husband, you know, Mike?” I paused.

“Mike?” she said.

“Right.” I nodded affirmatively. “Have you seen him recently?”

“He fixed the gate,” she said.

“That was months ago,” I said. “Just this week, have you seen Mike? When was the last time you saw Mike?” I kept trying to hit the key words hard.

“I see him walking down the street,” she said.

“What day?”

She squinted like she was making out Shiloh’s form. “Yesterday?” she suggested.

“I don’t think it was yesterday,” I said. “Can you think of something else that happened on the same day that would narrow it down?”

“The governor was talking on the radio.”

“About what?”

She shook her head. “He was talking on the radio. He sounded angry.”

“That was the same day you saw Mike walking?” I asked.

“Yes. Mike is walking in the street. He looks angry. Very serious face.”

“Okay,” I said. “Have you seen anything strange lately? Especially around our house?” I knew I could be opening a Pandora’s box, remembering the omnipresent “rascals,” but Mrs. Muzio shook her head. If her memory was a bit fuzzy, she wasn’t paranoid today.

I stayed another ten minutes to be polite, talking, winding the conversation back to neighborhood goings-on in hopes of jarring loose anything else that might help, but I learned nothing. I stood and set my empty coffee cup in the sink.

“You are leaving now?” she asked me.

“When Mike comes back we’ll drop by for a visit,” I promised.

Outside, a cool wind had picked up, rattling the dry-leaved branches.

Mrs. Muzio thought she had last seen Shiloh out walking and looking “angry.” That was, by her account, the same day that she’d heard the governor talking on the radio and sounding “angry.” Everyone seemed to be angry in Mrs. Muzio’s world. I wondered how much faith I could put in her observations.

Then again, Shiloh, when he was deep in thought, often had a guarded, inward expression that some people might read as anger. Maybe old Mrs. Muzio was right.

She had said she’d seen Shiloh walking. Not out running, not in somebody’s car. That squared with my theory that he’d gone out somewhere in the neighborhood on foot and not come back.

I’d done my hardest interview. It made sense to work from hardest to easiest. That made Darryl Hawkins next. I checked the time on my cell phone. Almost three o’clock; it was still too early. He and his wife wouldn’t be home from work until around five. I needed an errand to take up the interim time.

I still lacked a good picture of my husband. I had only one, and I didn’t think that Shiloh knew I had it.

Annelise Eliot had never really believed she was going to be identified and arrested after over a decade of peaceful life under an assumed name. When Shiloh finally came to her with an arrest warrant, she’d lost control. In an impulse that must have mirrored her thirteen-year-old crime, Annelise grabbed a letter opener off her desk and tried to stab him. He’d gotten a hand up in time, but she’d sliced a deep gash into his palm.

The local media hadn’t been tipped to the arrest, but they were ready the next day for the arraignment at the US courthouse in St. Paul.

The Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press had run virtually the same photo: Shiloh among a small cadre of uniformed cops, bringing Annelise Eliot in for her first court appearance, a courteous but controlling hand on her arm. The bandage on his hand, from where she’d cut him, was clearly visible.

That image was the quintessential Shiloh to me, and I’d clipped it for that reason. But it wouldn’t work to show to strangers. He’d turned his face away from the photographers, so that he was in profile.

When I got home, I picked up the phone and I dialed a number I’d come to know by heart.

When Deborah put Genevieve on the line, I said, “It’s me. I need to ask you for a strange favor.”

Silence on the other end.

“Are you there?” I asked.

“I’m here,” she said.

“At your Christmas party, Kamareia had a camera.” When the name Kamareia was hard to say, I realized I hadn’t mentioned her directly all during my visit. “She was taking a lot of photos of people, including Shiloh. I need to go to your place and get one of those pictures.”

There was another silence, but this time Genevieve broke it without prompting. “All right.”

“I need to know where they might be,” I added.

“Well,” Genevieve said slowly, “there’s a shoebox she keeps on the shelf in her closet. I’ve seen a lot of photos in there.”

“All right,” I said, “good. But your place is locked, right?”

“Mmm, yes,” Genevieve said. “But the Evanses across the street have my spare key right now.” She seemed to think again. “I’ll call and tell them you’re coming.”

“Thanks, Gen,” I said. Then I asked: “Have you spoken to Shiloh recently?”

“No,” she said. “Not for a long time.”

Time and again, on the job, we’d asked loved ones for recent photos of missing persons. It was perhaps the most crucial item in a search.