She snorts a few times. The dead giveaway one makes her laugh.

“There’s like pages and pages of this stuff,” I say, thumbing through the notebook.

“Save it,” she says.

“For when?”

“When I’m not around? I dunno.”

I read another page or two to myself. One page is titled “Little-Known Bible Verses,” and the first one listed is “The Parboil of the Evil Farmer.” The second starts, “In the beginning, God created light bulbs. Wait. That was General Electric.”

While I don’t know much about the Bible, it seems wacky funny. I like wacky funny. And as much as I know my grandfather left his family and was a drunk and is mostly responsible for my dad being the way he is, I feel like the person who wrote these might actually understand me.

“I think I want to find him,” I say.

“You think we could?” Aisha asks, and I like that she uses the word we.

I pull out my laptop and Google the name Russ Smith, and I find out that there’s a college basketball star with that name. I try Russell, and I get a Wikipedia page devoted to all the famous people with that name. There are eleven. I am about to click on one who is a writer when I realize what I’m doing. Yeah. He’s probably not famous. Not a lot of people disappear and escape detection for thirty years by becoming famous.

I do a census search, and there are 6,713 Russell Smiths. I narrow it to Montana and suddenly there are only thirty-five, and my heart jumps. Then I look closer, and I see that the census search results stop at 1940.

“Dang,” I say.

Surely someone must have done this. My dad must have searched for his own dad online, right? But how the hell can I be sure of that? He’s a drunk. It’s hard to predict what he’s done in his life or on Google. I have no idea.

I soldier on to ancestry.com. I put in Russ’s name, choose a birth date of 1940, and set the parameters to plus or minus ten years. I figure if my dad was born in the 1960s, that’s about right for my grandfather. I specify Billings, Montana.

A bunch of newspaper articles come up with what appear to be baseball box scores with the name Russell in it. Not helpful. This search is futile.

“What about those references in the letter to the pastor?” Aisha asks. She’s busy going through the box.

“Oh yeah.” I pull the letter out of my pocket and scan it. I type KSREF into Google and study the results. “Kenya Sugar Research Foundation. Yeah. Unless he moved to Africa or was looking to become a soccer referee in Kansas, that’s not so helpful.”

I type in “world’s most dangerous and expensive grid.” All sorts of stuff about clean energy and airports come up. I sigh deeply. “Meh. I think we’re back to step one.”

“Who were those people in the letter? From Wyoming?” she asks.

“Thermopolis. Thomas and Laurelei. He also says something about ‘Leff.’ Maybe that’s the last name?”

She grabs my laptop from me and goes to whitepages.com, where she types “thomas and laurelei leff thermopolis wyoming.” As the cursor spins, I think about whether we should ask the pastor again. He must know something. But he didn’t tell us before, and now we’ve stolen stuff from him. It won’t take him long to figure that out.

Up pops an entry for Laurelei V. Leff, age sixty-five to seventy. There’s an address in Thermopolis, but no phone number. Aisha elbows me and she pulls up Google Maps and types in the address. The location appears on-screen, and Aisha asks for directions, putting Billings in as the origin. It’s 190 miles away, and it would take a little over three hours to drive there.

I realize what’s happening, and it fills me with shivers. “We don’t have to,” I say, but I don’t really mean it.

“Of course we do,” she says. “You want to find your grandfather. We have one lead. I got wheels, you got a credit card. We can leave in the morning and be back by dinner.”

I think about the credit card part. I mean, it all comes down to what’s a “reasonable” expense. Coffee is reasonable. A movie. But a trip to Wyoming? Is this reasonable? It’s tough to say. The whole thing is so unreasonable it’s hard to find a lot of reason.

We are interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs, then the back door opening. A strange voice says, “So you’ll give him the morphine rectally when needed?”

My mother says, “Yes.”

I give Aisha an embarrassed look, but she doesn’t react to it.

“He’s in a lot of pain,” the man’s voice says. “That’s typical and to be expected. When these things progress …”

“And it’s progressing?” Mom says.

“Sadly, it appears that way.”

“How much time do we have?”

The man clears his throat. “Maybe a few months.”

“Well, thank you,” my mother says.

“Call if you need anything,” the man says, and we hear the door shut.

Aisha and I look at each other. There are footsteps on the stairs. My mother is paying her first visit to our lair. She rounds the corner, a brave smile on her face. She doesn’t look like my mom, the practiced, controlled woman I know. She looks like she’s trying to be someone else.

“I assume you heard that.” Her voice is softer than usual. This is her in crisis mode.

I nod and keep my head down.

She addresses Aisha. “I’m sure it’s odd to be here for all this family drama.”

Aisha shrugs her shoulders. “I wish I could help.”

My mother says, “Did you give him the phone?”

Aisha nods.

“Thanks, by the way,” I say to my mom. “Really.”

She nods, and then addresses Aisha again. “I feel very glad to know you’re here with Carson. He needs the distraction.” Mom faces me. “I understand that you must feel terribly sad about your father. And I want you to know I feel that too. And it’s okay to feel that.”

I nod, and the chilly, empty feeling in my gut returns.

“I don’t know exactly what it is you’ve found down here, kids, but I have to ask you to not bother your father with that right now. What he needs is to rest.”

I nod again.

“It must be very hard for you to understand what this is all about. Aisha told me you found some information that might mean your grandfather is still alive. What you need to understand is that even if that’s true, he walked out on your father. Even if you found him, your father does not have the strength for some kind of reconciliation. He doesn’t want that. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

I nod a third time.

“Can you say something, Carson?”

“I get it,” I say.

She smiles. “Good. And I do understand that what you were doing was done from the goodness of your heart. What I want to say to you is that you’re a beautiful young man, and the impulse to help is exactly what I’d expect from you. Just not in this way, perhaps.”

“Gotcha.”

My mother heads upstairs, and Aisha and I sit on the bed in silence for a bit. I’m trying to put it all together. My grandfather is still alive. My father is dying, and he doesn’t know his dad is still alive. My father doesn’t want to know. And he’s got maybe months left in his life.

“I just want to know where he is for me, you know?” I say finally. “He’s my grandfather.”

“Yup. Me too, now that I’m like your honorary sister.”

“Yeah, congratulations on that,” I say ruefully.

“Hey, I like your family,” she says.

I’ll have to think about that one for a bit. Like a long bit, probably.

I spend a few more hours poring over the contents of the box. I open every letter. They are all illegible, soggy, faded, blurred. I stare at the unreadable words and try to will them to be as they were before the flood. It’s mostly useless, this box we’ve found. It’s a pulsing beacon in the dark recesses of our basement, pulling us toward a mystery that may never be solved.