I looked back at Mr. Telford. His head may have been hanging low, but his eyes were piercing right through me, almost daring me to leave. Go ahead, George, get up and go. Go join Mitch White and Cello DiMasi in whatever circle of hell is reserved for those who choose not to do the right thing, who cover up for people who really don’t give a damn about them.

John appeared in front of me, a slip of paper in his hand. I ordered another Manhattan. John got a funny look on his face, but he took the paper back and went to do what I asked.

“All right, Mr. Telford, tell me what it is you think you’ve discovered.”

“Let me start by asking you something,” he said.

He made me look at him. The blue-gray eyes, I saw now, had dark rings around the irises.

“You’re a lifeguard,” he said, “working Dowses Beach here in Osterville, and you want to grab something on your way home to Hyannis, a snack or whatever. Where you likely to stop?”

How would I know? I wasn’t a lifeguard. Except there was really only one way to go from Dowses to Hyannis. Leave the beach parking lot, take East Bay Road to Main. Turn east.

He pointed in that direction. “It’s just down the street.” We were on Main. “Next corner, really.”

I made him tell me.

“The Bon Faire Market.”

I knew it, of course. An upscale grocery that had once been a house. Either that or it was so old that it had been built in a day when markets were made to look like houses. If you wanted French cheeses, sculpted cuts of meat, jams that cost nine bucks a jar, fruits and vegetables that looked like works of art, Bon Faire was the place to go.

“Owned by the Ross family,” Mr. Telford said. “Nice people, but they know their clientele. You can’t blame ’em. They’re not going to push the most famous family on the Cape out their doors by talking about them.”

My drink came, and with it my revised check. It felt like a secret message: Get out of here, George. Drink up and go before the crazy old man ties you to his car and drags you bump, bump, bump through all the torturous streets and potholed lanes of our precious little seaside community.

“They got fresh-baked cookies, those flavored waters, little energy bars, you name it. So the police check and, sure enough, one of the Ross family girls—Rachel, her name is—had a memory of Heidi going in there on her last day. Thing is, she can’t remember anything else.” Bill Telford raised his mug to his lips and took a sip. He made a face, which I assumed was because the coffee was not to his liking. But then he said, “You probably want to know why that’s important, Heidi being in there. Well, it’s one of those things that only her mother and me would know about, and it took us a long time to put it together.”

“You think she met one of the Gregorys in the store.”

“Well, by God, it didn’t take you long.”

He seemed more put out than appreciative.

“Look,” he said, “the Gregorys come down here in the summer, come down from their fancy schools, and they get any girl they want. My daughter and all her friends knew that. Still, it was kind of a thing for them. Good that one of the Gregory boys hit on you—bad if you went along with it. Because, you know, the locals knew these kids weren’t interested in them in the long run. So we just had a little restriction in our house, same as a lot of other families around here. You can go out, you can date, you don’t allow yourself to get picked up by a Gregory.” He wanted me to tell him I understood.

What I was tempted to say was that I knew full well what the Gregorys did with pretty girls. What I actually said was, “Because you felt they were only interested in one thing and you didn’t want your daughter to be known as one of the girls who gave them that thing.”

“It’s true,” he said indignantly, as if I was arguing with him.

But I wasn’t arguing. I was thinking of Kendrick Powell lying on her back, her leg on top of the couch back, while Peter leered over her, his cock in his hand. Except I hadn’t seen his cock, had I? I had seen the red candle, I had seen his fingers, I had seen Jamie’s finger disappearing inside her. I shivered and drank quickly to try to hide it.

“This is how we put it together, my wife and me.” Mr. Telford wiped his mouth as if smoothing the path for what he was about to say. “That dress Heidi was wearing, it was an Ann Taylor dress. Paid more for it than she ever did for any of her other clothes. It was probably a style she picked up at school, quality without looking too sexy, you know what I mean?”

I didn’t know if I did or not. I had not looked at the dress that closely, not thought about it that deeply, didn’t know too much about dresses in the first place. My wife, when we were married, kept most of her dresses at her apartment in Boston.

“Thing is,” Mr. Telford went on, “what was she doing wearing that dress? Like I told you, it wasn’t what she was wearing when she left the house. Second thing, okay, we found some pictures of her when she had worn it before. It had a red belt. Or at least she wore it with a red belt. And red sandals. Accessories, my wife calls them. Both the sandals and the belt are missing. They weren’t in the house and the cops never found them. So it makes sense they were in that bag she was carrying when we last saw her. All of it: the dress folded up, the red belt, the red sandals. And she obviously changed someplace outside the house. Question is, why would she?”

It was his turn to look around, look at the fat couple, at the rambunctious kids behind us, at a new group of post-middle-aged, none-too-fit folks who had just come in and taken a table in front of the fireplace. Then he leaned in closer. “This is the part I’m not real comfortable talking about, Mr. Becket. But my daughter was what you call ‘well endowed.’ You know what I’m saying?”

It was important to him that I understand there was nothing salacious about what he was telling me. It was just a fact to be recognized. Recognized and reckoned with.

I nodded.

“When they found her, she didn’t seem to have been sexually molested, but she wasn’t wearing a bra. Okay, we look at the pictures, the pictures of when she was wearing the dress before, and she was definitely wearing a bra then. The other thing is, the cloth of the dress, it’s good, sturdy cloth. It’s not like you’re going to be able to see all the way through it.”

“Just enough to see that she’s well endowed and not wearing a bra.”

He sat back, embarrassed. But this, apparently, was his point.

“Maybe whoever killed her took off the bra.”

Mr. Telford shook his head. “The way that dress was, it didn’t make sense. We’re back to the part that’s hard for me to talk about, Mr. Becket, but it was like, you’d have to peel the dress down from the top, take off the bra, and then pull the dress back up, you know, to get it the way it was when they found her.”

I flashed back to Kendrick, to what I had tried to do when I was dressing her.

When I focused again on Mr. Telford, he had both hands on the bar, his fingers folded tightly together. “Look, maybe this is just something that only a parent can feel. But that dress is the clue. The dress and the bra.”

“You’re saying she put on a dress because she was going someplace she didn’t want you to know about. It was a conservative dress, which tells you she thought she was going someplace nice. And she took off her bra because she didn’t want whoever she was going to see to think she was too conservative.”

“She was twenty years old, Mr. Becket. I see my other daughter, she thinks she’s gettin’ dressed up when she puts on a denim skirt.”

“I’m just trying to make sure I understand the clue you’re talking about, Mr. Telford.”

“Yeah, you’re understanding, all right. More than Mitch White. I give him the photo, tell him the same thing I’m telling you. Ask, ‘Who would she do all that for, Mr. White?’ He just stares at me.”