Weeks later, when she was missing and increasingly presumed dead according to the articles I read in the Sunpapers, I sent a bill for the things that I had done at cost, marked it “Third and Final Notice” in large red letters, as if I didn’t even know what was going on. She was just an address to me. Her parents paid it, even apologized for their daughter being so irresponsible, buying all this stuff she couldn’t afford. I told them I understood, having my own college-age kids and all. I said I was so sorry for what had happened and that I hoped they found her soon. I do feel sorry for them. They can’t begin to cover the monthly payments on the place, so it’s headed toward foreclosure. The bank will make a nice profit, as long as the agents gloss over the reason for the sale; people don’t like a house with even the hint of a sordid history.

And I’m glad now that I put in the wine cellar. Makes it less likely that the new owner will want to dig out the basement, risk its collapse, and the discovery of what will one day be a little bag of bones, nothing more.

The Melville family had Preakness coming and going, as Dontay’s Granny M liked to say. From their rowhouse south of Pimlico, the loose assemblage of three generations-sometimes as many as twelve people in the three-bedroom house, never fewer than eight-squeezed every coin they could from the third Saturday in May, and they were always looking for new ways. Revenue streams, as Dontay had learned to call them in Pimlico Middle’s stock-picking club. Last year, for example, the Melvilles had tried a barbecue stand, selling racegoers hamburgers and hot dogs, but the city health people had shut them down before noon. So they were going to try bottled water this year, maybe some sodas, although sly-like, because they could bust you for not charging sales tax, too. They had considered salted nuts, but that was more of a Camden Yards thing. People going to the track didn’t seem to want nuts as much, not even pistachios. Candy melted no matter how cool the day, and it was hard to be competitive on chips unless you went off-brand, and Baltimore was an Utz city.

Parking was the big moneymaker, anyway. Over the years, the Melvilles had figured they could make exactly six spaces in their front yard, plus two in the driveway. They charged $30 a spot, which was a fair price, close as they were to the entrance, and that $30 included true vigilance, as Uncle Marcus liked to say to the people who tried to negotiate. These days, most of their business was repeat customers, old-timers who had figured out that the houses south of the racetrack were much closer to the entrance than the places on the other side of Northern Parkway. The first-timers, now they were a little nervous about coming south of the track, but once they made that long, long trek back to the Northern Parkway side, they started looking south.

So, eight vehicles times thirty-that was $240. But they weren’t done yet. All the young ones ran shopping carts, not just for the Melvilles’ own parkers but for the on-the-street ones who couldn’t make it the whole way with their coolers and grocery sacks. Dontay and his cousins couldn’t charge as much as the north side boys, given the shorter distance, but they made more trips, so it came out about the same. Most of the folks gave you at least ten dollars to haul a cooler, although there was always some woe-is-me motherfucker-that’s what Uncle Marcus called them, outside Granny M’s hearing-who tried to find a reason to short you at the gate.

The money didn’t end just because the race did. On the day after Preakness, the older Melvilles all signed up for cleanup duty in the infield, and there wasn’t a year that went by that someone didn’t find a winning ticket in the debris. Never anything huge, but often good for twenty bucks or so. People got drunk, threw the wrong tickets down. You just had to keep the Sunpapers in your back pocket, familiarize yourself with the race results. This was going to be Dontay’s first year on cleanup, and he couldn’t help hoping that he would find a winning ticket. His uncle had lied about his age to get him a spot on the crew, so he’d make the minimum wage up front. But the draw was what you might find-not just tickets, but perfectly good cartons of soda and beer, maybe even jewelry and wallets without ID.

But Preakness itself was the best day, the biggest haul. The night before, Dontay oiled his cart’s wheels and polished his pitch. There was a right way to do it, bold but not too much so. People didn’t like to feel hustled. He also pondered the downside to Preakness: no one needed the carts to carry stuff away because the coolers were always empty by day’s end, light enough for the weakest, most sissified men to heave onto their shoulders or drag on the pavement behind them. Which was a shame, because people were looser by the end of the day, wavy with liquor and their winnings. Dontay was still thinking on how to develop a service that people needed when the race was over. The main thing everyone wanted was a fast getaway, another virtue of the Melvilles’ location, which had several ways out of the neighborhood. What would people pay to ride a helicopter, though? There had to be other possibilities. Dontay thought on it. Besides, more and more people were bringing in wheeled coolers, a troubling development.

Dontay was a Melville and all the Melvilles were industrious by nature. True, some had focused their energies on less legal businesses, which is why the number of the people in the house tended to fluctuate. They were at the high end right now, with Uncle Stevie home from Hagerstown and Delia’s twins staying with them, while Delia was spending time on the West Side, in that place that Granny M called “thereabouts.” When’s our mama coming? the twins asked late at night, when they were sleepy and forgetful. Where’s our mama? “Thereabouts,” Granny M said. “She’ll be coming home shortly.” Granny M pledged that her house was open to all her children and her children’s children and, when the time came, and it was coming, her children’s children’s children, but she had rules. Church was optional if you were over twelve. Sobriety was not. That’s why she had squashed Uncle Marcus’s plan to buy some cheap tallboys, layer them beneath the bottled waters and sodas, in case some folks had second thoughts about paying track prices for beer or decided they hadn’t brought enough beer of their own.

THE TRACK DIDN’T OPEN ITS DOORS until nine, but the Melvilles’ Preakness Day started at 7 A.M., with Uncle Marcus and Ronnie Moe, a shirttail relation, taking the two cars over to the Wabash metro stop, then cabbing back before traffic started peaking. Weather for Preakness was seldom fine-either it fell short of its potential and ended up rainy and cool or it overshot spring altogether, delivering a full-blown Baltimore scorcher with air that felt like feathers. Today was a chilly one, and Dontay was on a roll, ferrying coolers faster than he ever had before, his money piling up in the Tupperware container that Granny M had marked with his name. He would have liked to keep his bills in his pocket, a fat roll to stroke from time to time, but he knew better. Even with the streets crowded as they were today, with uniformed police officers everywhere, the bigger boys, the lazy ones who didn’t like to extend themselves, wouldn’t hesitate to knock him down and take his money.

In his head, he tried to add up what he had made so far. Granny M took a cut for the collection plate, but he’d still have enough for the new version of Grand Theft Auto. Or should he buy some new Nikes? But Granny M would buy him shoes, no matter how much she bitched and moaned and threatened to get him no-brands at the outlets. Beneath her complaints, she knew that shoes mattered. Even when Uncle Marcus was a kid, so long ago that there weren’t any Nikes, just Keds and Jack Purcell’s, it had been death to come to school in no-brands. Fishheads, they called them then. Granny M wouldn’t do that to him, as long as he passed all his classes, which he had more than done. Dontay not only had almost all B’s going into the final grading period, his stock-picking club had come in third in the state for all middle schools. And Dontay deserved most of the credit for that because he had said they should buy Apple before Christmas, then drop it quick, all those people buying iPods and shit.