“What kind of skills?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Gloria nodded. “Look, she’s given you the story. Now you know.”

“Here’s the thing,” Nancy said. “Everything she’s given us so far leads to a dead end. The farm, where all this happened? Gone, subdivided years ago, and there’s no record that any human remains were uncovered.”

“Check the parish school, Sisters of the Little Flower. You’ll find Ruth Leibig on the rolls.”

“Stan Dunham is in a hospice, dying-”

“Good,” she said.

“His wife has been dead for almost ten years. Oh, and the son? He died in an accidental fire just three months ago. In Georgia. Where he was living with Penelope Jackson.”

“He’s dead? Tony’s dead?”

If Willoughby had been younger, he might have shot out of his chair. Infante and Lenhardt, already standing, stiffened in their posture, leaned toward the speaker-box that was bringing the words to them.

“Did you-” Lenhardt began, even as Infante said, “She wasn’t surprised about the father, didn’t give a shit about Penelope Jackson or Georgia, but the son has caught her off guard. And she knew his name, although Nancy didn’t provide it.”

On the other side: “Be still, Heather,” Gloria said. “Now. Nancy, if you would give us a minute.”

“Sure. Take all the time you want.”

NANCY HAD WALKED out of the room, but she was practically prancing when she joined the circle of detectives. The girl was pleased with herself, as well she should be, Willoughby thought. She had done a good job. The thing about Pincharelli was a key omission. And Miriam had always insisted that Heather had taken an unusually large amount of money that day to the mall, because her bank at home was empty.

But it wasn’t good enough. He was the only one in the room who knew they had fallen short of proving she wasn’t Heather Bethany. He’d stake his life on the fact that she was lying, but he couldn’t prove it.

“Well?” she said to the three men.

“We waited for you,” Lenhardt said.

Willoughby picked up the envelope at his feet and opened it, although he knew what he would find inside. A blue denim purse, with red rickrack. Even within the light-deprived confines of an envelope, it had faded a little over the years, yet it was just as it had been described, except for the contents. But that’s only because there were no contents. The purse had been found next to a Dumpster, turned inside out, a tire mark on its side. The supposition had always been that Heather had dropped it during the abduction and that some opportunistic scum had stumbled on it, stripped it of whatever cash or items it contained, and tossed it aside.

Yet they couldn’t contradict her memory of what it had contained, because they didn’t know. Here was the purse, exactly as she’d described it. So if she was Heather Bethany, why didn’t she remember seeing her sister’s music teacher? Had Pincharelli been lying all those years ago? Had he broken down and told Willoughby what he wanted to hear because there was yet another secret he was hiding? He was dead, too. Everywhere they turned, people were dead or dying. That was the natural order of things, over thirty years. Dave was gone. Willoughby ’s Evelyn was gone. Stan Dunham’s wife and son were gone, and the man himself was as good as gone. Penelope Jackson, whoever she was, had disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a green Valiant. And the only thing they’d been able to establish with any certainty was that the woman in the interrogation room was not Penelope Jackson. Yet she had described the purse. Did that make her Heather Bethany? He thought back to the shimmer in the air, the moment he was sure that she was lying.

“Fuck me,” Lenhardt said.

“Well, the mom will be here soon,” Infante said. “It would have been nice if we didn’t have to put her through that, if we could have told her when she landed what was what, but at least DNA’s definitive. When we finally get it. Even with a rush, it will take a day or two.”

“Yeah,” Willoughby said. “About that…”

10:25 P.M.

The plane seemed to drone as sleepily as its passengers, most of whom were tired and disgruntled from being more than two hours past their scheduled arrival. In her first-class window seat, a luxury created by the necessity of buying a last-minute ticket, Miriam couldn’t begin to sleep, and she stared at the floor of clouds below the jet. It took a long time to break through the cloud cover, but Baltimore was finally beneath her, for the first time in almost twenty years. It was vast in a way that did not match her memories, its lights spread across a far wider area, but she hadn’t flown into Baltimore since 1968. The airport had still been called Friendship then, and Miriam was returning from Canada by way of New York. In the summer after the riots, it had seemed a felicitous time to take her children to Ottawa, let them spend an extended vacation with their grandparents. Oh, how dressed up they had gotten for that return trip, the girls in matching dresses purchased by Miriam’s mother at Holt Renfrew-striped shifts with scarves that attached to the collars with snaps. Sunny had been a mess twenty minutes into the journey, but Heather barely had a crease in her dress even upon landing. People could meet you at airport gates then. She remembered Dave, waiting for them inside the terminal, pale and round-shouldered, so beaten down by his job. A few years later, when he approached her with his dream of opening a store, that image came back to her, and she readily said yes. She had wanted him to be happy. Even when she was miserable, she had wanted nothing less for Dave than some sort of peace.

Suddenly there was a dead space beneath the plane, with almost no lights shining at all, an abyss. The plane had turned and was heading up the Chesapeake Bay. Although the final descent was quite smooth, Miriam’s stomach twisted once again from that strange turista-like ailment she had never known in all her years in Mexico, and she fumbled in the seat pocket for an airsickness bag, but there wasn’t one. Perhaps airlines didn’t provide them anymore, perhaps people were supposed to be able to fly without getting ill, at least in first class. Or someone had taken it and the overworked flight attendants hadn’t noticed. Miriam did the only thing possible, given the circumstances. She swallowed.

The last leg of Miriam’s trip to language school was complicated by the fact that she didn’t yet speak Spanish. A true Catch-22, she thought as she stood in the cavernous, chaotic bus station, where she had managed to purchase her first-class ticket to Cuernavaca with a minimum of misunderstanding. She had gotten through customs and finessed the Mexico City cab system to get there and was feeling very proud of herself up until the moment she left the ticket counter, her bus ticket for Cuernavaca clutched in her trembling hand.

But how to find the right bus among those lined up in the lanes outside, rumbling and belching black smoke? The announcements on the PA system were nothing more than bursts of static, incomprehensible in any language. There was no information booth that she could find, no one seemed to speak English, and the halting Spanish she had acquired in her introductory course back in Texas was of little use. People stared at her blankly when she stammered out her questions, then released a torrent of words, peppering her with sounds. They wanted to help. Their faces were kind, their gestures affectionate and warm. They simply did not understand anything she said.

She studied her ticket, noted that it was blue, then began looking at the tickets in others’ hands. There was a woman whose ticket was also blue, a tired-looking woman with the kind of profile that one saw in Mayan art-the noble, hawklike nose, the flat forehead.