April is the cruelest month, he said out loud, repeating each word again as he wrote it, two lines high in his careful cursive. He put in a long slash mark after month and wrote, And it’s not even April yet.

Ray thought about the line and the poem. April is the cruelest month, breeding  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  Memory and desire, stirring  Dull roots with spring rain. Then he penned, Memory and Desire, also using two lines. He sensed a melancholy in the phrase.

He remembered the class where he first studied the poem, an undergraduate course in 20^th century British and American poetry. He started filling lines, then several pages in the journal about the class and the teacher, Alice Bingley, a fragile-looking woman who was quite brilliant, but routinely brutalized her students because they were not.

He remembered how the class of 20-some had shrunk to four by the end of the semester: a beautiful and distant girl who often talked to the professor in French and Italian; a tall, thin black woman who articulated most of the best answers to the professor’s probing questions and then Ray and his friend, Zeigler.

The first day of class in early January, Zeigler showed up late and seemed to immediately earn the instructor’s enmity. He was wearing athletic department sweats and a stocking cap. Ray recorded the dialogue as he remembered it.

“Are you a football player, Mr. Zeigler?”

“Yes ma’m.”

“And what position do you play, Mr. Zeigler?”

“Defensive tackle, mostly, ma’m.”

“And why are you taking this class?”

A long silence followed as Zeigler considered his answer. “My advisor, Professor Foster, recommended the class, and you.”

“Really, I must have a word with Milton.”

Ray then recorded how he and Ernie Zeigler became friends and study partners. Ray reflected that he had come to college from an exceedingly modest home, but Zeigler had come from real poverty. His mother had died in his infancy, and his father—alcoholic and mostly unemployed—did his best to palm off young Ernie for weeks, sometimes months at a time, to family members, sympathetic neighbors, and girlfriends.

Fortunately, by junior high his size and athleticism had drawn the attention of the coaches, and other teachers found that the huge kid in tatters was enormously likeable and exceptionally bright. Ray based this part of his commentary on things Zeigler told him during their many rambling conversations. Ernie came to college with the clothes on his back, nothing more, not even a suitcase. He didn’t have an athletic scholarship, and he wasn’t a starter. But the equipment manager and some of coaches found him clothes, shoes, even a place to live. Fortunately, it was also a time when the citizens of Michigan were still funding their universities at a level where students of limited means could cover their tuition costs with part-time and summer jobs.

One of Professor Bingley’s first assignments of the semester was the close study of T. S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland.” Ray recorded how lost he was the first time he tried to read the poem. He couldn’t begin to decipher the meaning of the text. He and Zeigler spent hours in the library pouring over scholarly guides, and they both struggled to answer Bingley’s classroom interrogations, which seemed designed more to inflict pain than to elucidate the text.

From that point forward in the semester, Zeigler would say, “Hey, Elkins, April is the Cruelest Month. That’s when she’s going to flunk our sorry asses.” There seemed some truth to that possibility. They both got C minus on their midterms. Ray had three minuses on his bluebook after the C, and Ernie had four. They laughed about the minuses over a pitcher of beer. But in the end they’d both managed to survive Bingley. Ray remembered how startled he was to find a B, no minuses, when he opened his grade report.

Months later, in the fall, he ran into Zeigler crossing campus. “You won’t effing believe this!” Zeigler blurted out loudly from 20 or 30 yards. “She gave me a B.”

The memories had managed to brighten Ray’s mood. And maybe in England, April is the cruelest month, he thought, the beginning of spring. In Michigan that would be late May or June. March is the cruelest month here because spring doesn’t seem possible.

14

Mackenzie woke with a start. There was a sound, a new noise that she hadn’t heard before. She lay for several minutes listening, trying to determine the source. Finally she decided that it had to be rain hitting the skylight or perhaps dripping off the long overhangs onto the deck.

She was uncomfortable in the bedroom. It was far too large for her tastes. The king-size bed looked minuscule on the expanse of white carpeting. The six-drawer dresser—three sets of two drawers, a long low modern piece—did little to absorb the available space. And the vaulted ceiling added to her feeling of unease. The room was just too big, too open. Her decision to take the master suite was based on the convenience of having the adjoining bathroom. She now considered switching to one of the other guest bedrooms.

Lifting her left arm above her head, she gazed at the luminescent face of the military style watch, 4:47. Rolling over on her side, she tried to find a comfortable position, pulling one pillow under her head, pushing another between her knees. She couldn’t remember a time in her adult life when she had been so filled with misgivings.

This project was different from anything she had ever encountered. And it was heavily loaded with memories and emotions. Mackenzie was better at dealing with data; feelings were not her strong suit.

Years before, Mackenzie had traced her mother, not that she ever desired to have any contact with her. Sally Hallen’s trail had been easy to follow, littered as it was with numerous arrests for petty crimes, the occasional incarceration, and ending in a late-night motorcycle accident where she and her companion were killed in a high-speed collision with a pickup truck.

She had also used her considerable technical skills to see if anyone could find anything on herself and her twin sisters, all three who had left Sandville decades ago in the company of two elderly relatives. There was nothing. She wondered if it would still be possible today for three children from an impoverished background to completely disappear without a paper or digital trace. She doubted it. But she had long believed that her mother was relieved that the children were gone. How many times had her mother had told her and her sisters that they were only a burden.

Giving up on the possibility of falling back to sleep, Mackenzie crawled out of bed and pulled on some fleece sweats. After switching on the coffee maker, she settled on the couch with her iPad and did a quick check of her e-mail.

Next she opened the planning document and flipped to the Threats page. The first item on the page was labeled Possible Identification. She clicked on the link and another page appeared. On the left was a picture that she had taken the day before. On the right was a photo she’d carried with her for years, the last class picture from Consolidated High. She had scanned it into a jpeg while still in California. She held the iPad up to look closely at the grainy black-and-white image of a young teen whose eyes looked almost too large for her narrow face. The girl had short hair—a jagged cut, inexpertly done with kitchen scissors by her mother or grandmother. The thin smile displayed buckteeth beneath an asymmetrical nose, the result of a fall from a tree a year or two before. There was never money for a visit to a doctor. Her grandmother had straightened it as best she could and packed it with cotton until it stopped bleeding.