He gave me the first hesitant smile of my visit. “Eight o’clock for breakfast. Work as soon as we’re finished eating. Bring an extra coffee.”

I said I would and I drove into town and got myself a room for the night.

—

I was back at the stroke of eight. He had shoveled in front of the carport so there was room for me to park. As I reached the door, he opened it.

“Come on in. I’ve cleared a place where we can sit.”

The place was a table in the kitchen area. Yesterday it had been buried under what looked to me like debris, but one man’s art is another’s debris, as most of us have learned. We sat and ate a hearty breakfast with eggs and sausage and muffins, juice and coffee.

“Better when someone else cooks it,” he said.

“Jack sends his regards. He told me you were always nice to women.”

“Most cops are.”

I thought that was rather gallant, considering. “I think we have some business to conduct before we go on.” I had talked to Sandy last night, and he was willing to spend more than I had imagined on this project.

“We’ll talk business later. I was up most of the night working. Come over here.”

I had wanted to clean up the table first, but he had no time for that. He led me to a cloth-covered object set about shoulder height and pulled the sheet off. A white, bald-headed Natalie looked at me.

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“It needs the right wig and I don’t have one. Do you have a scarf?”

I got the long wool scarf that I wrapped around my neck in cold weather. He put it over Natalie’s head and crossed it along the front of her neck.

“It’s fantastic,” I said.

“It needs some color, but I’ll take care of that later. I use white clay and I don’t fire it. If you’re going to fire it, you have to cut it open around here—” he pointed to the place where the eyebrows would be “—and scoop out the inside so it’ll dry, which takes a few weeks, and I figure you want this yesterday. You’re using this for photos, right?”

“Right,” I said. “And I have her cosmetics. Her husband gave them to me.” I took a small plastic bag out of my shoulder bag and gave it to him. Her lipsticks were in there, her foundation, her powder.

“This is good, gives me an idea of her color preferences.” He took the foundation and smeared it on the white clay face and it sprang to life. I half expected to see the lips move, to hear Natalie’s voice.

“It must be the Pinocchio syndrome,” I said. “I thought I saw her move.”

This time I got a real smile. “I live with these guys. They’re pretty quiet.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“From here I take her back. You said you couldn’t find anything about her before five years ago. I think she made herself over, straightened her teeth, capped the bad ones, changed her hairstyle and color. I’ve been looking at that nose and I can almost give you the name of the plastic surgeon.”

“You think she had her nose fixed?”

“I’m almost sure of it. I think she made herself from a plain little girl, maybe even a homely little girl, into a good-looking woman.”

“How old do you think she is?”

“I could be off, but I’d say thirty-eight, forty.”

That was Susan Hartswell’s guess, more or less. “What will you take her back to?”

“Say, twenty years. The people who went to high school with her will remember her. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“I want the person who may have kidnapped her. Maybe her old high school friends can put me onto him.”

“Can I make a suggestion you won’t like?”

“Go on. I’ll take all the professional help I can get.”

“Have you checked out the husband?”

“The detective who inherited the case checked him out and seemed convinced it was a happy marriage, and there were no rumors about him. He really acts as though he wants to find her.”

“Because he’s the guy to check out first. It could be he never took her to the parade.”

“There’s a picture of her in the crowd.”

“It’s easy to take a picture in a crowd. You see the strip of negatives with the balloons in the one before her and the one after her?”

I hadn’t. I shook my head.

“Could have been taken at a baseball game. You have to see if the people in the crowd fit, if the clothes are right for the time of year. Little things like that can tell you a lot.”

“I don’t think he did it,” I said. “He got a phone call the other day from someone who read the ad I put in the paper.”

“How do you know he got a phone call? Because he told you? If I’d killed my wife, I’d tell you the same thing. But I’d come up with a better story.”

“I see what you mean,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

“You’re a nice girl. Jack Brooks did himself a favor when he married you. You’ve got a good face, too, nice bone structure.”

“Me?”

“You. OK. The question was, where do we go from here? From here on, I work alone. You give me your phone number, and when I have something to show you, I call you. There’s nothing you can do here except look over my shoulder, and I don’t work that way.”

“So I go home.”

“And wait for my call.”

“You want me to leave the pictures?”

“I tell you what. Take the wedding album. Leave the rest. They’re safe here.”

“Then I’ll be going.” I got my coat and put it on. Then I turned and looked at the sculpted face with the lipstick. It was about to undergo what a lot of people would sell a soul for, taking off twenty years. “You seem in a much better mood today, Sergeant,” I said.

“It’s like Jack told you. I’m nice to women.”

—

I called Sandy in midafternoon when I reached home. He sounded ecstatic, almost as though his missing wife were on the verge of being delivered to his doorstep. I had very little hope that that would ever happen.

Jack listened to my story when he came home from law school. “So it’s really remote,” he said after my description of DiMartino’s house.

“I doubt whether he sees anyone besides the people in the supermarket and the bank.”

“And he probably picks up his mail at the post office. Does he have a phone?”

“I didn’t see one, but he said he’d call me when I should come back for the sculptures. Was he a drinker when you knew him?”

“It’s not unheard-of for a guy on the job to take a sip now and then.”

“This was more than that. He kept an open bottle where he could reach it. Though this morning I noticed it wasn’t there. I think he was energized by having an assignment, especially one he’d be paid for.”

“Work does magic. So what’s the game plan?”

“I guess I just sit and wait for DiMartino’s call. I’ve followed up on just about everything I can. The next move has to be another ad in the Indiana paper with the picture of Natalie as a nineteen- or twenty-year-old. If she grew up there, there have to be people who remember her. There has to be a high school yearbook with a picture that’ll be close to what DiMartino’s going to give me.”

“So we wait for the phone to ring.”

“It won’t be the first time.”

—

On Friday morning I decided to talk to Sandy for the first time about Natalie’s mysterious “brother.”

“Of course you’re not bothering me,” he said over the phone. “I always have time for this. Is something up?”

I told him about my conversations with Dickie Foster and the super at Natalie’s former apartment near Gramercy Park.

“She had no brothers,” he said. “No brothers and no sisters. The feeling I got, although she never came out and said it, was that she was illegitimate, given up by her mother, and raised by a foster family. Whether they were related by blood or not, I wasn’t sure from the way she told it.”

“But you know, if her natural mother married later, she might have had more children that would be related to Natalie.”

“She was pretty emphatic about being an only child.”

“The question is who this man is. Maybe he’s the abusive husband we’ve talked about.”