“I’m aware of that. I’m resigned to it, although no way do I believe she ran off.”

“I thought about where I would start,” I said, not responding to his forceful dissent to my suggestion, “who I would talk to, for example, and I came up blank. I can’t believe there’s anything on Seventy-fourth Street or anyone who was there that day that could help me.”

“I agree with you. I think the parade isn’t the place to start.” He pointed at the carton on the floor. “I think that is. I’ve collected everything I could find in the house and put it all in that box. It’s yours to look at, go through, whatever you want. Then make a decision.”

“You’re a very persuasive man. Does anyone ever say no to you?”

“All the time. But I don’t want you to be one of them.”

“Sandy, I feel very sad about your wife’s disappearance.”

“You’re leading up to a no and I don’t want to hear it. Will you do this for me? Go through the carton. OK?”

“I will.”

“Thanks. We’ll talk again.”

—

Maybe that’s why I do it, take on investigations that will lead me away from the safe and the ordinary, that innate desire to know about people’s lives, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what makes them tick, if anything. The carton sitting on the floor of my living room was too tempting to set aside. I lifted it onto the coffee table and pulled open the four flaps that had been neatly folded into each other. Since I was in my second year and fourth semester of teaching the same course, I had a great lesson plan prepared, and although I changed and updated it regularly, I had little to do to prepare for next Tuesday’s class. And I would get to Arnold’s work later. The carton won.

On top was a small, white leather photograph album that said OUR WEDDING in gold on the cover. The pages were plastic envelopes and each one was filled, front and back, with a picture the size of the page. The first few pages showed a bride dressing, a white, street-length dress going over her head, her carefully coiffed hair being brushed into place by a man with a brush and a very dedicated expression, mascara being applied in a mirror shot that focused on her reflection.

Sandy had not exaggerated. She was beautiful, with reddish brown hair and a smile as lovely as it was natural. The dress was simple and elegant, the short veil, when she finally had it put on, very fine-looking. There were a few snapshots also of the ceremony, which took place under the traditional canopy of a Jewish wedding. In one picture, Sandy was stamping on a white package on the floor, probably the glass he was to break to assure good luck to the couple. The luck hadn’t lasted very long.

It was a small wedding, with the groom’s father, gray-haired and considerably shorter than Sandy, a woman who was probably his sister, two children who were surely his. His bride, however, seemed to have only a single attendant, a pretty woman about her age in a peach-colored dress. If Natalie Gordon had had any other friends or any relatives, they had not attended, or at least not participated in the ceremony.

It struck me that my own wedding had resembled this one in some degree. My parents and aunt are gone, and except for my cousin Gene, I am pretty much without family. But I count all the nuns of St. Stephen’s as my friends, and it was there that our wedding took place. Natalie had apparently come to Sandy without family.

None of the faces in the second half of the book looked familiar. I suppose second weddings are smaller and less lavish than first ones, and only the closest members of the circle are invited. The food looked wonderful, the guests at the handful of tables happy, and the final pictures of the couple being showered with rice a classic conclusion to a wedding.

I set the small album aside on the coffee table. I must admit I was itching to open my notebook and make some notes, not a good sign for someone who has turned down a case. I restrained myself and continued into the carton. There were a few books near the top—there seemed no organization to the contents; Sandy had probably just gathered things and stuffed them in—and I looked at them with interest. The first one was an anthology of modern American and English poetry, well read, from the look of the jacket. I opened it and found an inscription: “To Natalie with love forever, or for as long as it takes. Ron.” The date was eight years ago. I leafed through the pages, but it was a thick book and I didn’t notice anything special on the pages I saw.

The second book was quite different, a small, maroon leather-bound volume of Othello, the pages tipped with gold, surely part of a set and perhaps picked up in an antiquarian bookshop. This one had a surprising inscription: “To Scottie, For all the right reasons. With love, Natalie.” Either it was a book she had given to Scottie and he had returned it, or she had inscribed it and never got to present it to him, or decided not to. In any case, it seemed a small treasure.

The last of the three books was another gift, a cookbook for a person living alone. The message in this one was, “To Natalie, So you don’t cook your goose. Love, Mom.” It was dated about seven years ago and was identified in no other way. At least Natalie had had one parent not too long ago.

There were envelopes of snapshots deeper in the carton. Sandy must have taken a camera with him everywhere they went, because there were pictures from the vacations he had described, pictures of their home, pictures taken both indoors and outdoors, with and without other people present, and even a few snapshots from the Thanksgiving Day parade. If I thought these last would give me a point of departure, I was disappointed. Most of them were of Macy’s balloons, including Babar, coming down Central Park West far above where people stood watching them. There was only one picture of Natalie—proof, if I needed it, that she had gone to the parade—with her head raised in profile to look up at what was going by. There were no identifiable people, no balloon man, no hot dog man, no candy man.

The last envelope was quite different. It had a return address from a man with D.D.S. after his name. Inside were some copies of dental records and a letter, dated last year, written in layman’s English to Sandy. It said that in discussions with Mrs. Gordon when she first visited him, she had acknowledged having orthodontia as an adult. From his own examination, he had been able to determine that Mrs. Gordon had had extensive cosmetic work done on her teeth, namely crowns on teeth he identified with numbers. Thus, I assumed, the perfect smile.

I set the letter and all the photographs aside with the books and looked at the rest of the things in the carton. For the most part they were quite impersonal. A copy of New York magazine was open to the middle of an article. A yellow telephone message said “Sandy” for the person called, “Marty” for the caller, and there were check marks next to TELEPHONED and PLEASE CALL. No message was written, but an N appeared at the bottom line. The piece of paper was undated and had no time on it.

An expensive-looking black satin evening bag with a gold frame and a long gold chain caught my eye and I took it out. Since I am now affluent enough to own two purses, I have discovered that I leave certain things in the one I’m not using, sometimes a receipt stuffed inside when I bought something or a memento of a place I have visited. This one was no different. Besides several carefully folded clean tissues, there was a folded card that said MR. AND MRS. SANDY GORDON on the outside and TABLE 12 on the inside. A matchbook from Lutèce indicated the kind of restaurants the Gordons frequented, and a small ivory comb attested to expensive taste. But there were no receipts, no notes, no scribblings.

A recipe file was filled mostly with recipes cut out of magazines and newspapers and occasionally some written for Natalie by other people. A few of them were on printed cards that said FROM THE RECIPE FILE OF, followed by a name. Although I went through the whole file, I found nothing written in Natalie’s hand except a notation to bake a cake forty minutes instead of thirty-five.