“And who look after María Inés? Ma, she got to work, now she saying if I don’t go to school I got to get a job.”

“I’ll make some calls, Julia, and see what kind of help I can find. In the meantime, I want you to come to our practice on Thursday. Bring María Inés. Bring Sammy and Betto: they can watch María Inés in the gym with us while you work out. Will you do that?”

Her eyes were dark pools in the half-light. She clutched my hand tightly and finally mumbled, “Maybe.”

“And before you go out with another boy, you need to learn something about your body, about how you get pregnant, and what you can do to keep from getting pregnant. You and I will talk about that, too. Are you still seeing María Inés’s-father?” I stumbled on the word-the person who got her pregnant wasn’t acting like a father to the baby.

“Sometimes. Just to say, ‘Hi, look, this is your baby.’ I don’t let him do nothing to me, if that’s what you mean. One baby is enough for me.”

“He doesn’t help support María Inés?”

“He got two more children spread around this neighborhood,” she cried. “And he don’t have no job. I ast him and ast him, and he never do nothing, now he cross the street if he see me coming.”

“So is it this Freddy whom you and Josie were mentioning yesterday?”

She nodded again, her silky hair ruffling the nylon pillowcase.

“Who is he?”

“Just a guy. I met him at church, that’s all.”

I wondered if Pastor Andrés, with his stern lectures on sex, ever talked to Freddy about scattering children he couldn’t support around the South Side, but when I put it into words Julia turned away from me. I realized I wasn’t just making her uncomfortable, I was getting pretty far a field from Josie’s disappearance.

“So when Billy stayed here on Friday and Saturday night, did he and Josie have sex together?”

“No,” she said dully. “He said, her and me should sleep together, he didn’t want temptation in their path. He quoted a bunch of Bible verses. It was almost as bad as Pastor Andrés being in the room with me.”

I couldn’t quite stifle a laugh, but I could picture the little room, heavy with religion and hormones. A suffocating combination. “Do you think your sister ran away with Billy?”

She turned back to look at me. “I don’t know for sure, but she left for school, then, an hour later, she came back. She put her toothbrush in her backpack, and a few things, you know, her pajamas, stuff like that. When I asked where she was off to, she said, to see April, but, well, you know, after all these years I know pretty much when Josie is lying to me. And besides, April, she was coming home from the hospital today. Mrs. Czernin, she wouldn’t have let Josie come over to the house, not with April so sick.”

“Any idea where they’d go, Billy and Josie?”

Julia shook her head. “All I know is, he wouldn’t take her to his house, you know, the rich place he lives with his ma and his daddy, ’cause, you know, they don’t want him dating no Mexican girl.”

I talked to her for a few more minutes, but she’d clearly told me all she knew. I squeezed her hand again, firmly, the dismissal squeeze. “I’ll see you Thursday at three o’clock, Julia. Got that?”

She whispered something that might have been assent. When I got up to leave, I saw a shadow move across the baby clothes lining the middle of the room: Rose had been listening in. Maybe just as well. Maybe it was the only way she’d learn a few things about her own daughters.

I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Supposing Billy and Josie are holed up down here, we might find them by finding his little sports car, assuming it’s on the street.” I did some arithmetic in my head. “There are probably only forty or forty-five miles of streets to drive up and down; we could do that in four hours, less if we skipped the alleys.”

Mr. Contreras and I were in the Mustang, where we’d fled from Rose’s overheated emotions. Almost before I’d left the room, she’d begun upbraiding Julia for not telling her own mother what she’d reported to me: “Did I raise you to be a liar?” she’d shouted, before whirling around to demand that I lose no time in finding Josie.

“Where do you suggest I look, Rose?” I’d asked tiredly. “It’s midnight. You say she isn’t at April’s. What other friends would she go to?”

“I don’t know, I can’t think. Sancia, maybe? Only Sancia, she was really Julia’s friend, although she and Josie-”

“I’ll check on Sancia,” I interrupted, “and on the other girls on the team. What about any relatives? Is she in touch with her father?”

“Her father? That gamberro? He hasn’t seen her since she was two. I don’t even know where he’s living right now.”

“But what’s his name? Children sometimes hide meetings with their fathers so that their mothers won’t know.”

When she’d protested that idea-Josie would never do something behind her back-I pointed out that Josie had disappeared behind her back. Rose reluctantly disgorged the man’s name, Benito Dorrado; the last time she’d seen him, eight months ago, he’d been in an Eldorado with some overpainted puta. In the bed behind me, I heard Julia gasp at the word.

“Any other relatives? Do you have any brothers or sisters here in Chicago?”

“My brother is in Joliet. I already called him, but he didn’t hear from her. My sister, she lives in Waco. You don’t think-”

“Rose, you’re distraught, you’re spinning both of us around in circles. Is Josie especially close to your sister? Do you think she would suggest to Billy that they drive a thousand miles to see her?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I just want my girl back.” She started to cry, the loud racking sobs of a person who doesn’t often permit herself to break down.

Mr. Contreras soothed her with much the same language he’d used on the baby. “You give us something that belongs to your girl, some T-shirt or something you haven’t washed. Mitch here will smell it, he’ll track her down, you’ll see.”

The little boys were sitting up on their air mattresses, staring at Rose with large, frightened eyes. It was one thing for their sister to disappear, quite another to see their mother falling apart. To calm everyone down, I said I’d see what I could find out tonight. I gave Rose my cell phone number and told her to call me if she heard anything.

Now my neighbor and I were sitting in my car, trying to figure out what to do next. Mitch was on the narrow backseat, with Josie’s unwashed basketball shirt between his paws. I’ve never thought of him as a star tracker, but you never know.

“You should start with the girls on the team,” Mr. Contreras suggested.

“An address book would help, a phone book, some damn thing.”

I didn’t want to go back up to the apartment to ask for a Chicago directory. Finally, even though it was so late, I called Morrell to see if he would look up the addresses for me. He was still up; in fact, he was watching the football game.

“Two-minute warning, Chiefs down by five,” I reported to Mr. Contreras, who rubbed his hands gleefully, anticipating the pot that waited for him back at my apartment.

I heard Morrell’s uneven step as he limped up the hallway to get his laptop and his phone directories. In a couple of minutes, he’d read out addresses to me of all the girls on the team who had phones, including Celine Jackman, although I couldn’t imagine Josie going to April’s archenemy on the team. I sketched out a map of the neighborhood and jotted the addresses onto the grid of streets. The addresses covered over a mile going north to south, but didn’t range more than four blocks east to west, except for April’s father. Benito Dorrado had moved out of South Chicago to the East Side, a relatively stable, marginally more prosperous neighborhood nearby.

It took well over an hour to poke around the streets and alleys near the homes of the girls on my squad. I didn’t feel like rousing any of them to ask after Josie: a late-night visit from the coach, looking for an errant player, would only get everyone on the team completely freaked out. With Mitch next to me on a short leash, I peered into the garages we found-most of the girls lived in the bungalows that dominate the neighborhood, and these often had garages in the alleys behind the houses. In one of the garages, we’d surprised a gang meeting, eight or ten young men whose flat-eyed menace made my skin crawl. They’d thought about jumping us, but Mitch’s low-throated growl made them back away long enough for us to beat a retreat.