“Would you like some fish sticks?”

“Fish sticks?” I replied.

“We have plenty,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said, confessing that she worked as a food demonstrator, enticing supermarket shoppers with free samples as they pushed their carts up and down the aisles. She always brought the leftovers home to feed her family, which now consisted only of herself and her silent husband.

I declined the fish sticks.

“That woman in the paper, are they going to make her pay for hurting my little girl?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. There’s not much physical evidence,” I answered.

“It ain’t fair,” she insisted.

I agreed with her.

Mrs. Donnerbauer was a small woman on the downside of fifty, an age she hadn’t reached without hard struggle. Any resemblance to the young woman in my photographs had been eroded by time. Without prodding, Mrs. Donnerbauer began speaking of her Alison—only not with the hallowed devotion you would expect from a grieving mother. Rather, she spoke of Alison as if she were the wayward daughter of an unpopular neighbor.

“Very peculiar child,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said.

“How so?”

“Well, she wasn’t like the other children.”

“How so?” I repeated.

“For one thing, she was always reading,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said as if she had caught her daughter drinking three-two beer behind the garage. “Reading at the dinner table. Reading in the car. Reading in front of the TV. Reading at night under the covers with a flashlight.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I suggested. “I did much the same thing when I was a kid.”

“War and Peace?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked. “The Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill? Canterbury Tales? In old English! Once I caught her reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was eight years old. Imagine.”

Imagine, indeed.

“And she would never answer when I spoke to her,” the woman added from across the kitchen table. “I would chant her name: Alison, Alison, Alison. Nothing. At first I thought she was deaf or something. Then I thought it was because Alison hadn’t been named until after she was three months old because of a family disagreement.… His mother,” she mouthed silently, gesturing toward the living room. “I thought maybe she didn’t realize that Alison was her name. Of course, I now know that she was just ignoring me, like her father. Isn’t that right, dear?” she asked the man in the living room. When he didn’t reply, she shook her head. “See?”

“Maybe he didn’t hear you.”

“Oh, he heard me fine; he just doesn’t want to say anything.” Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed dramatically. “It’s the cross I bear.”

I didn’t say anything, either. After a moment, Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed again. I took that as a cue.

“It must have been difficult raising a girl who was so intelligent,” I said.

“Very difficult. And a little bit”—Mrs. Donnerbauer searched for a word, settled on—“frightening. Imagine trying to raise a child who’s smarter than you. It was bad enough when she merely thought she was smarter. But then the teachers at the school told us Alison should be in special classes because she was a genius. They tested her—they never asked me if they could, but I guess they test everybody. Anyway, they tested her, and the tests results said Alison was a genius. A genius,” she repeated as if the word made her nauseous. “It gave Alison a reason to ignore me. Suddenly I wasn’t smart enough to tell her when to go to bed or to eat her vegetables or what clothes to wear. I wasn’t smart enough to be her mother. ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone.’ Everyday it was the same thing until finally I just threw up my hands and did leave her alone.”

Mrs. Donnerbauer took time out to stare at something way above my left shoulder. I sipped coffee from the juice glass. At last she said, “I guess Alison found out what happens when you think you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”

I was amazed by the statement and flashed again on the photograph in my car. In the end, Alison couldn’t even depend on her mother.

“She used to say she was blessed,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “Well, I didn’t see it. Where’s the blessing in being so different from everyone else? You tell me. I remember when she was graduated from high school—graduated three weeks before her sixteenth birthday. I was so embarrassed.…”

“Really? I would have thought you would’ve been proud.”

Mrs. Donnerbauer shook her head. “You don’t know what it’s like, having people look at you, stare at you. Having people ask you questions because your daughter is so … different. People asking how she was around the house, like if she ate strange food or something. People asking if I—if I—took vitamins or something when I was carrying her; if I listened to Mozart of something in the delivery room. Imagine! People. Sometimes I don’t know what to think.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what to think, either,” I agreed.

“And of course, she didn’t have any time for boys,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “She was too busy doing genius things.”

“What about Stephen Emerton?”

“That was the one time I put my foot down,” she answered proudly. “Stephen was such a good-looking boy and smart, too. But the way Alison treated him … Well, I practically forced her down the aisle.”

“Alison didn’t want to get married?”

“Oh, of course not. That’s what normal people did. But I knew marriage was the best thing for her. And so …”

“Was she happy do you think?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Was she happily married?”

Mrs. Donnerbauer stared at me as if she had never heard the expression before.

“I heard that she might have been seeing someone else,” I added.

“Committing adultery!” Mrs. Donnerbauer was genuinely shocked.

“I heard—”

“No daughter of mine ever committed adultery. I don’t know where you got your information, young man, but you better go back and get some more, yes sir. We are Catholics in this house. Roman Catholics. We don’t break commandments.”

I was actually relieved to hear her denial. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Offend me? Why should I be offended because a man comes into my home and calls my little girl a trollop!”

“Mrs. Donnerbauer, I deeply apologize, I truly do,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “But you have to understand that when we hear rumors like this, no matter how ridiculous, we have to look into them. It’s the courts that make us do it.”

“The courts,” she repeated and looked around, like she was searching for a place to spit. No one likes the courts. That’s why it’s easy to blame them when you get into a jam.

I tried again. “This rumor says that Alison was involved with a doctor while she worked—”

“No. No. No. My daughter would never get involved with … A doctor, you say? No. I don’t want to hear any more. I think it’s time you left.”

I rose from my chair.

“My daughter is no adulteress.”

I was happy to believe her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Donnerbauer.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “My child never cheated on her husband, I don’t care what that … that brute Raymond Fleck told the newspapers,” she added slowly and carefully in case I was leaving with the wrong impression.

“I never thought she did,” I agreed.

Mrs. Donnerbauer apparently had to think about that. And in the silence that ensued, Mr. Donnerbauer said one word very clearly from his chair in the darkened living room: “Holyfield.”

The word hung in the air like an unpleasant odor.

“No,” Mrs. Donnerbauer muttered.

“What was that, Mr. Donnerbauer?” I stepped toward the arch that separated the two rooms.

“Dr. Robert Holyfield,” he said, without taking his eyes from the TV screen.

“What? What? What are you saying?” Mrs. Donnerbauer pushed past me, practically running to her husband’s chair. “What are you saying? Do you know what you’re saying?”