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the beer had been served at a girlie show, the bump had been more like a punch, and that his pal Luke had hauled him to jail for it.
    Still, Miranda Barrett hugged her grandson around the middle anyway. Her head barely cleared the center of his broad boxer’s chest. She released him, shook her head as if she couldn’t believe even the tame tale he was telling her, and she turned her eagle eye on me.

    “You must be Jamie Sinclair. Thank you for bringing Adam home.”
    I opened my mouth to speak.
    But before I could get a word in edgewise, Barrett said, “Jamie isn’t staying, Gram.”
    “Oh?” The lady blinked from me to him and back again. “Why not?”
    “She just stopped by on her way to Vermont.”
    But that was another lie.
    And Barrett’s grandma knew it.
    “I see,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height and still not even reaching Barrett’s shoulder. “Well, let me tell you something, young man. I telephoned Miss Sinclair last night and invited her to visit me. She is my guest and she’ll stay as long as she likes. Is that clear to you?”
    Barrett’s face registered nothing. “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Good. Then bring her things into the house.”
    And to my surprise, Barrett did as he was told.
    While he extracted my suitcase from the trunk of my car, Mrs. Barrett slipped an arm through mine and led me indoors. The wood-framed screen door, I noted, could be secured by nothing hardier than a pot-metal hook and eye. The proper front door was another matter, however. Solid and sturdy, its lock had been formed of heavy cast brass in an age when things were built to last. Unless Mrs. Barrett was the hospitable kind who left the doors unlocked, no one was getting into her house without an invitation.
    “You must be tired,” she said, “after your long drive.”
    I murmured something appropriate, followed her into an old-fashioned parlor. Well-kept furniture upholstered in an abundance of cabbage roses filled the middle of the room. An upright piano stood against one wall. A stone fireplace ranged across another. On the polished mantel, framed photographs sat atop handmade doilies. In several of the snapshots, Barrett’s sister, Elise, smiled alongside her husband and children. Barrett, as a boy, a teen, and a man, grinned from several of them himself.

    There were daguerreotypes of old-timers, too, printed on silvery plates, and a jaunty fellow I took to be Barrett’s grandfather beamed from black-and-whites taken in the 1940s. Anyone who could’ve passed for Barrett’s mother, though, was conspicuously absent from this little gallery. But there was one more picture I did recognize. It was a portrait of Barrett’s father in a U.S. Army uniform.
    Before his life had been cut short by that unidentified drunk driver, Barrett’s father had been a Tomb Sentinel—a soldier selected to honor our nation’s war dead by keeping watch at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But more than that, he would’ve been Miranda Barrett’s son. She’d no doubt loved him, and she’d lost him, so it was little wonder she worried over her son’s son now.
    He entered the house behind us, set my suitcase in the foyer with a thud.
    “Adam,” my hostess said, “show our guest upstairs.”
    Barrett leveled a hard look at her. A muscle in his jaw jumped with the effort of keeping his mouth shut. But Barrett picked up my suitcase and started up the stairs.
    The fourth step complained under his foot and creaked under mine, but we made it to the second floor just fine. I noted a darkened bedroom—probably belonging to the lady of the house—at the far end of the corridor and a tidy bathroom along the hall. Another bedroom, in the kind of blue-and-brown plaid that would’ve made The Brady Bunch boys feel at home, came next. Model cars, textbooks, and baseball trophies still lined the dresser and shelves. And I bet I could’ve bounced a quarter on the quilted coverlet tucked around the