Genevieve was looking up the staircase. “Let me see what’s going on,” she said.

I leaned against the railing of the staircase, waiting, as Genevieve went up. I heard her knock on the door frame of her daughter’s room and not find her inside. Her voice, as she went through the other upstairs rooms, took on an increasingly questioning sound, but not quite worried.

“Sarah.” Shiloh’s mild voice caught my attention. I turned to look at him, and he nodded toward the back of the house and the sliding glass door. The door was closed, but beyond that I saw footprints in the fresh snow.

Genevieve’s house shared a kind of open backyard with the neighbors to the south, the Myers. There was no fence, so I could see straight across to the back of their house. And although I couldn’t see their front driveway, the bushes that lined it to the side were visible. Red lights flickered on them in a familiar pattern.

Kamareia, I thought, and knew something was terribly wrong. It never occurred to me that it could have been one of the Myers who had been injured somehow, and Kam had gone over there to give assistance and call 911.

The Myers weren’t at home. As in Genevieve’s house, the entire first floor was darkened, and all the noise and light was coming from the top of the stairs. I went up two steps at a time. On the landing was a two-foot-long section of pipe, splashed with blood. Streaks of blood on the floor, footprints of blood.

Unlike the rest of the house, the bedroom was brightly lit. Electric light immersed the two EMTs, the phone that was tangled on the floor, and Kamareia, naked from the waist down, her thighs and lower legs smeared with red. There was a lot of blood on the floor. Too much. I thought of the pipe outside and knew she’d been beaten with it.

I reversed so fast I nearly skidded on the hardwood floors and plunged back through the doorway. Genevieve was halfway up the stairs with Shiloh behind her. I met Shiloh’s eyes and shook my head quickly, just once, no. He took my meaning right away and caught Genevieve from behind, stopping her.

I went back into the bedroom and knelt next to Kamareia. Her eyes, when I could bear to look at her face, were open, but I don’t know how well she saw me.

“Stay back, please.” The paramedic’s voice was as clipped as her southern accent could allow.

“I’m a friend of the family. Her mother’s here,” I told her. “If you can, get her covered up a little.”

Outside, I heard Genevieve screaming at Shiloh to let her go. She’d seen the pipe and the bloodstains.

“Maybe you should go take care of the mother,” the other EMT, a young man, suggested.

Shiloh was having a hard time with her, to be sure. “Kamareia’s been hurt. I don’t know how bad,” I said sharply from the top of the stairs. “She can hear you. If you want to help, shut up and stay calm.”

Gen kept trying to look past me, through the doorway, but she stopped yelling at Shiloh. He kept his grip on her shoulders anyway.

“That’s good,” I told Genevieve. “You’ve got to be tough for her like you would for anyone else on the job.”

“What happened to her?” Genevieve’s voice was high, foreign to me.

That was when they brought Kamareia out. She was covered with a blanket, but her face said it all anyway. Her nose and mouth, under the oxygen mask, was a delta of drying blood; she’d obviously been hit several times in the face. Her blood was visible on the clothes of the EMTs and it made bright streaks on the pale latex gloves on their hands.

Genevieve broke free of Shiloh’s grasp and touched her daughter’s face, then she put her hand to her own face like she was ready to pass out. Shiloh pulled her back and eased her down to the floor.

“Can you stay and take care of her?” I asked him.

Shiloh had a bit more medical training than I did, from his days in Montana where the small-town cops did all kinds of emergency work, and he nodded. His eyes weren’t on me; they were on Kamareia, being carried away from us.

I caught up with the paramedics outside. “I’ll go with you,” I said abruptly. The young man was in the back with Kamareia already; the woman was just about to close the doors.

She gave me a sharp glance. Under her teased ash-blond hair and plucked eyebrows she had eyes as level and unshakable as any doctor’s. She was entirely in charge here, and no one likes to be told how to do their job.

“I mean, I’d like to go with you,” I amended. “Her mother’s not functioning well enough to do it, but Kam needs someone with her.” I stepped a little closer. “And if you didn’t radio for a crime-scene unit already, you should do it on the way. We’ll need one here.”

She understood then that I was a cop. “I will,” she said. “Get in.”

The Evanses, the neighbors who had Genevieve’s key, were working people. I was fortunate, though: they had a college-age daughter living at home, and she was there when I got to Genevieve’s neighborhood, a peaceful street of tall, narrow homes. “This’ll probably take me fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” I told the Evans girl.

I thought I might have to hunt around, if the shoebox wasn’t in the spot Genevieve had suggested, or the photos weren’t in the shoebox.

I stood for a moment on Genevieve’s front porch, thinking of February, then I slipped the key in and shot the dead bolt back.

Inside, the house had the kind of clean stillness that greets you when you come home after a long absence. Gen had done a housecleaning before she’d left. I could see vacuum marks on the carpet, and a few fresh footprints. Those would be the tracks of the Evans girl, I thought. There were plants on the windowsill and the shelves, still green and full-leaved, and somebody had to be keeping them watered.

The room looked bigger and emptier than I remembered. The last occasion on which I’d spent a lot of time here, there’d been a fat, bushy fir tree in the corner laced with colored lights, a happy and slightly drunk crowd of cops and probation officers around, and Kamareia had been taking pictures.

Upstairs, I flipped on the lights in the room that used to be Kamareia’s. I’d never really been inside, but it was obvious that it was exactly as she’d kept it in life.

The room was done in light shades: a peach down comforter on the twin bed, a blond wood desk. It was Standard Schoolgirl from Dayton-Hudson, except for Tupac Shakur glow-ering down from the wall.

Kamareia had loved poetry, and unlike Shiloh she’d put thought into her bookshelf, organizing from the oldest, The Canterbury Tales, to the newest, a collection by poet Rita Dove. One volume, a collection of Maya Angelou’s work, was vaguely familiar to me. Its cover design was a bright patchwork of color, and I had a vivid, isolated memory of seeing it in Shiloh’s hands.

I sat on my heels and pulled the book off the low bookshelf. Shiloh’s writing was on the inside front cover. TO KAMAREIA THE WORDSMITH, the simple inscription read.

Her backpack from school sat on the floor next to the desk, looking as if it were ready to be picked up and hauled to class. It wasn’t what I had come for, but I sat on my heels next to it to see what was inside: a spiral notebook, a calculus text, Conversations with Amiri Baraka.

They were likely the very things she had carried home from school the day she died; the backpack’s undisturbed contents testified to the abruptness with which Genevieve had closed the door on this room.

Genevieve had known her daughter well. The shoebox was on the top shelf, and inside were several envelopes from the photomat. Each was dated. I found the one marked 12/27.

Inside was a parade of candid shots, some of colleagues and friends of mine, some of strangers. Here was one of me, with Shiloh’s arm around my shoulder, his expression uncharacteristically unguarded.

I took the photo of the two of us, and another of Shiloh standing with Genevieve by the cheerful, squat Christmas tree. It was a good picture, well lit. You could see his face clearly, and almost his whole body; it gave a good impression of his height.