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month. There was no check in October, or ever again.
    Rose and Joe were divorced by then, but she counted on him. That just wasn’t like Joe. He had always been a good provider. Rose had gone to a legal aid office when she and Joe split up, and they helped her get the divorce. She also got her GED certificate, a high school degree, after all that time. Rose was only fifty and she still had three children at home. Although Joe’s contributions helped out, she knew she would have to get a job,something she was actually looking forward to. After he vanished, she had no choice but to provide financially for the children.
    Rose applied for a job with See’s Candies and soon became a manager. She had no animosity toward Joe; it was just that their goals in life had grown so far apart. He kept his promise to come home at least twice a year to see their children and they had talked comfortably when he did.
    A few years after her divorce, Rose Tarricone began seeing an aeronautical engineer and they eventually married. He saw how hard she had worked over the years, and he also worried about her chronic migraine headaches. Her new husband wanted her to relax, and she finally agreed to retire from her candy factory job.
    No longer a married man, Joe Tarricone had been ripe for a midlife crisis when he received his divorce papers. In his midfifties, he was still a good-looking man, although his dark, wavy hairline had crept backward several inches. He embraced the style of men’s fashions in the late seventies. Up until then he’d mostly worn work clothes or armed service uniforms. Now he chose brightly colored leisure suits, polyester bell-bottom trousers, wide neckties, or muslin shirts with embroidery. Heavy gold chains were de rigueur for hairy-chested men like Joe, and he soon bought a few.
    He had married so young, he was suddenly single after thirty years, and it somehow felt wrong for a man who had always been part of a Catholic family. There was an emptinessthat Joe wasn’t prepared for, even though he was regularly in touch with his seven children and ex-wife. He wasn’t broken-hearted, but he was lonely, and he was ready to date.
    He was attracted to women a generation—or more—younger than he was. That wasn’t unusual; many men in the grip of a midlife crisis seek to recover their youth by dating women young enough to be their daughters. Joe Tarricone was certainly one of them.
    He was living in Seattle at the time of his divorce, working for Gerard’s Meats. After dating many young women once or twice, Joe ended his frenzied dating and settled down to seeing just two women. They were both pretty and easy to get along with, and he wasn’t sure which of them was right for him. He was honest with them and made no promises.
    One was named Kim. She was the one Joe chose to accompany him to Gypsy’s wedding in July 1977. He had flown the younger kids in from New Mexico, and he picked them up in California and drove them to the wedding in Lake Tahoe. His children liked Kim, and they all had a good time during the festivities. Naturally, Joe cooked for the reception and put together huge antipasto platters with cheeses, meats, peppers, olives, and tomatoes.
    The other woman was Renee Curtiss. Joe first met Renee when he worked at Gerard’s, and he had been very attracted to her, even though she was in her early twenties, thirty years his junior. She was the secretary at Gerard’s Meats, efficient, very pretty, and fun to be around. The onething that bothered Joe about Renee was that she wasn’t taking care of her own daughter, Diana , * and was even rumored to have another child who lived someplace else—a son, Brent. *
    The Carlsons had been mistaken about the relationships in Geri Hesse’s family.
    Diana, an eight-year-old in 1977, wasn’t Geri’s daughter, after all; she was Renee’s daughter. Geri was her grandmother, but she might have told people that Diana was hers—in order to protect Renee’s