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rose-carpeted place where the upholstered furniture looked used and comfortable, the slate fireplace ready for the chilly nights to come. Lined up on the mantel were family pictures: the three kids as babies; in Halloween costumes; on the floor in front of a Christmas tree surrounded by toys and torn wrapping paper and untied ribbons. One photo showed Gary in a football uniform, helmet under his arm, wide grin on his face. The black grease smeared on his cheekbones mocked the dark circles I’d seen last night under his eyes.
    There were photos, too, of adults I didn’t know, probably Scott’s parents; and there was a small one, a snapshot really, of my mother, framed now behind glass, but bent and tattered. In the picture, my mother wore a sunhat, and she smiled, and she was younger than Helen was now. It struck me that Helen must have taken that picture with her twenty-five years ago, when she left.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” Helen asked me again. As it had at the door, it sounded like not quite the right question.
    The answer was wrong, too, but I stuck to the narrow path: “I want to find Gary,” I said. “I need to know why he went to New York.”
    Helen hesitated. “Scott told you to leave it alone. He said he’d find him.”
    â€œDo you think he can?”
    She looked away, not answering that.
    â€œForget everything else,” I said. “I’m a detective. This is what I do. Gary’s in trouble, Helen.”
    She looked at me swiftly, resentment in her eyes. “He’s a good boy.”
    â€œA good boy in trouble. It can happen.”
    I let that wait, and the sounds of cars and children’s voices from outside the windows seemed to surround but not penetrate the silence between us.
    â€œMom?” came tentatively from the wide doorway into the hall. Jennifer and Paula stood there, backpacks strapped on, sneakers tied. Jennifer said, “We better go.”
    Helen looked at me. “I have to walk the girls to school.”
    â€œI’ll come along.”
    She nodded, put the dog on a leash, and lifted a jacket off a peg as we trooped through the vestibule. We went down the walk, past the Chevy Blazer in the driveway with the WARRENSTOWN WARRIORS sticker on the bumper, and made our way through the curving subdivision to the sidewalks of the older part of town. Here the streets were straight and the trees were large and old, their arching branches offering shelter from the full glare of the morning sun. The trees near Helen’s house were too young to do that, yet.
    â€œThey could go on the bus,” Helen said as we walked, the girls kicking at fallen leaves. “But I like to take them.”
    I wasn’t sure why she told me that. It seemed to me she wasn’t sure, either.

three
    For a while we said nothing as we walked, Helen and I, and I let that be. Helen greeted kids and their mothers as we passed them, and girls called out the open windows of the school bus to Jennifer and Paula. They’d only been at this school, in this town, a couple of months. But the younger you were when you came to a new place, the easier it was to make friends, to belong. I remembered that. I also remembered that leaving again was just as hard.
    We didn’t speak, just strolled through the suburban streets as though this were something we’d done many times before, my sister and her children and I. Every now and then I caught Jennifer’s dark eyes on me, though I pretended I didn’t see. I wondered if it bothered her, how much I looked like her brother; I wondered what the girls had been told about Gary being gone.
    We turned a corner and the school came into view, a group of long low brick buildings with big windows, set back on a broad lawn. WARRENSTOWN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL spread in bronze letters above the open glass doors. A walkway ran between young maple trees wearing their November burgundy, and the air was filled with