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floor. “I warned you about creating a disturbance,” Granite Guy said as he deposited me outside.
    I called Bethany’s parents from the parking lot and told them to come down. Hopefully, they could talk some sense into their child. I waited around till they showed half an hour later, and then I went home. The phone rang about two minutes after I walked through the door.
    It was Bethany’s dad. He just wanted to let me know they’d lost her. She’d jumped out of the family car and run off again. He sounded furious, and I didn’t blame him.
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    The next day, I kept my appointment with Pat Humphrey. She lived in Strathmore, one of the last upscale areas left in the city of Syracuse. The area has a Fort Apache feel, since it sits like a citadel looking down over Onondaga Park, grandly ignoring the slums that are creeping up on all sides of it. It has streets with pretty French names, lilac bushes in the front yards, and houses made of quarried stone and stucco, parquet floors, oak doors, cove molding, and mullioned windows, houses made by craftsmen who expected them to last for a hundred years instead of twenty.
    The cottage Pat Humphrey lived in looked as if it had been built during the Arts and Crafts Movement era. Small and tidy, the outside was painted a teal blue, and the windowsills, a deep matte red. The pillars supporting the wide front-porch roof were made of quarried stone. A rocking chair and three weathered Adirondack chairs faced out to the street. It was easy to imagine myself sitting there, drinking a tall iced coffee, smoking a cigarette, and listening to the cicadas. Alongside the house a stunted perennial border of coneflowers, shasta daisies, and black-eyed Susans, decorative grasses, and deep purple petunias struggled in the afternoon heat.
    I checked one last time to make sure the voice-activated tape recorder in my backpack was working, then got out of my car and rang the bell. A moment later, Pat Humphrey came to the door. She didn’t look the way I’d expected her to, but then I hadn’t expected her to live in a place like this, either. I thought I’d be meeting someone who favored ethnic dresses and wore sandals and large, dangling earrings, someone like Amy. Instead, Pat Humphrey was cool, unwrinkled, and in control. Just looking at her made me feel hot, sweaty, and dirty.
    Tall and thin, she wore her carefully tailored short sleeve beige linen blouse and slacks well. She had a long, narrow nose, eyes set a shade too far apart, and a mouth that looked as if it didn’t get to smile too much. Her hair was an indeterminate shade of blond. Straight, it came to right below her ears and was cut in the sort of style that looks as if it’s easy to do and actually takes hours in front of the mirror with a brush and blow-dryer to accomplish.
    The diamond studs she had on were large enough to be noticed but small enough to be tasteful. But for all the care Pat Humphrey had taken with her appearance, she couldn’t completely conceal the rough red patches across her cheeks and on her chin. Then I noticed she had similar patches on her wrists and arms. Little pinpricks of dried blood marked where’d she’d been scratching. Eczema, I’d be willing to bet. One of my cousins had had it. The doctor had told him it was caused by stress.
    â€œCome in,” she told me, casting a somewhat jaundiced eye on my wrinkled black linen short skirt and bubblegum pink T-shirt. “I should have told you to wear neutral colors. Vivid ones can interfere with reception.”
    â€œNow I know why my TV isn’t working too well,” I quipped as I stepped inside.
    Pat Humphrey smiled politely.
    The house was pleasantly cool. I caught a faint aroma of sandalwood. Everything in it, from the hardwood oak floor to the diamond-leaded windowpanes, sparkled. The walls of the small vestibule I was standing in were covered in an expensive, textured,