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I got a call from a Mr. Hiram Byrnes, who I believe is one of your editors.”
    “He is our editor.”
    She paused, not understanding the difference. “Mr. Byrnes was very generous. He apologized for having that man harass me all these months. He said it wouldn’t happen again. He mentioned your name, so I feel I have you to thank for that.”
    “You were right and we were wrong. It’s as simple as that.”
    “I felt I had to call you. I was terrible to you when you came to see me.”
    “Ah, the infamous thirty-second meeting.” He laughed, thinking about it. Thirty seconds of frustration, before she had slammed a door in his face. “I’m sorry if the Tribune caused you any embarrassment.”
    “You’re very gracious, Mr. Walker.”
    He had been called many things in his life, but never that. It brought out the worst in him. He asked her for a date.
    She paused, actually considering it. Then she said, “I don’t think so. I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”
    “Okay, I won’t press you.”
    “You are a gracious man. Not my image of reporters at all.”
    “You’re not my image of Rockettes either.”
    There was another moment of silence.
    “Goodbye, Mr. Walker. And thanks again.”
    He found himself thinking, as he always did when he had just been turned down by a woman he found especially interesting, it’s just as well. Women had a way of complicating his life, right when he needed it least. The Marilyn Jacksons of the world. Jesus, there was a name from the dim past. The Anne Rinkers. A girl named Lois Berman, whose parents fussed so much about her dating a non-Jew that they drove her crazy. And that crazy blond kid he had married a lifetime ago, her face now a pale white blur in his mind. Elena. The ghosts of a slow Thursday, spent as usual alone, with too much time on his hands.
    Pushing Diana Yoder aside with the rest of them, he began to change his clothes. After he got into old jeans and a flannel shirt, he put on a heavy jacket against the cool night and walked to the cemetery. Black clouds formed over the sun as it settled in the west. In another hour it would be dark. He walked quickly, past paper racks displaying his morning’s work. It was letter-perfect, the story, the play, everything. Even the headline was perfect. Streamed across the top of the page, just above the political crap from Washington, it said, IN THE COLD DARKNESS OF PLOT 33, A LITTLE GIRL SLEEPS . He couldn’t have asked for a better shot.
    Now, if this didn’t work, he faced two choices equally grim. He could abandon the story or keep checking school rosters as Donovan had suggested. At first that had seemed his best choice: check the schools in a given radius, find out how many little girls had suddenly dropped out for whatever reason, then go through them in a slow process of elimination. He had expected a big job, but even so he wasn’t prepared for what he got: 112 names, all kids between first and third grades, all attending schools in the densely populated Jersey suburbs, all transferred for one reason or another. He had worked through five names before understanding the full scope of the nightmare he had carved out for himself. One mother had remarried and moved to California, taking her kid with her. Another family had moved to Maine. A third little girl had had an accident, falling from a horse on a vacation in upstate New York. She was still in a coma. The fourth had transferred to Brooklyn. The fifth belonged to a State Department family, and the father was on his way to Belgium. It had taken Walker seven days to check out those five names to his own satisfaction. Then, as the funeral story came to a head, he formed his grand plan.
    He walked through the cemetery gates, past the caretaker’s cottage and along the tree-lined road where the respectable people were buried. At the far end of the cemetery proper, he left the trees and came out along a barren hillside that dipped gradually toward the river.