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    I actually liked the idea of a tree house. Tarzan had a good one, according to the old Johnny Weismuller movies. It would be nice to have one like his, complete with Cheeta and Jane, but that was probably beyond my scope. Something smaller, maybe.
    â€œLet’s go look at the tree,” I said.
    We went out and stood beneath the big beech tree in the backyard. It was huge and old and had many branches, some of which swept the ground.
    We circled the tree and commented upon possible places to build our tree house. After a while we zeroed in on what seemed to be the right spot. Then, with me giving the children a hand and trying not to grit my teeth too hard as we got higher, we climbed up to our chosen branches and viewed them at close hand. They still looked good.
    We inched down to the ground. Why is it that parents are afraid to have their kids do what they themselves used to do fearlessly when they were kids? As the poet said, down we forget as up we grow.
    Like a lot of people who were raised without too much money, I keep a supply of stuff that I don’t really need right now but might need some day. I store my collection in a corral out by the shed. Included is my private lumberyard, which is made up of scraps of good wood left over from jobs or salvaged from somewhere or other.
    We scouted the lumber pile, then had lunch, and then worked for two hours, sorting boards and timber, until it was nap time for Joshua and Diana.
    While they slept, I thought about Katherine Bannerman.
    Thornberry Security was good at its work. If Katherine was easy to find, they’d have done it. But that hadn’t happened, so it was probable that one of three scenarios existed: Katherine didn’t know who she was, she was dead or incapacitated, or she didn’t want to be found.
    Although there are cases of amnesiacs living long lives without knowing their own identities or having them discovered, such people are rare. Usually they attract attention and someone figures out who they are. On an island as small as Martha’s Vineyard, it was unlikely that an attractive woman like Katherine Bannerman could be suffering from amnesia without someone knowing about it and trying to help her. So I scratched amnesia from my slate.
    Because of the island’s size, it also seemed unlikely that Katherine had died or become too incapacitated to identify herself without anyone noticing. Since she had spent a summer on the Vineyard, someone would have reported her injury or death to the authorities.
    Unless, of course, someone didn’t want her death known. That was always a possibility. People dropped out of sight every year, and some of them were at the bottom of the sea. But murder, in spite of the headlines it garnered, was a rare crime. I didn’t dismiss homicide from my index of possibilities, but I didn’t put it at the top of the list, either.
    The third possibility was that Katherine hadn’t been found because she didn’t want to be found. If that was the case, she might be elusive indeed, especially if she was smart and if she had planned things out ahead of time.
    On the other hand, even people who want to disappear often fail because of their habits. They keep their old Social Security card. If they played mahjongg before, they still do. If they were in a particular profession before, they enter it again. If they liked small towns before, they live in one now. Most important, they find it almost impossible to stay out of touch with family and friends. Many a criminal on the run has found himself surrounded by cops because he just had to call Mom or an old pal or a girlfriend.
    I opened the Bannerman file and read through it. Thornberry operatives had been on the case since the previous fall, and they’d talked with everyone I would have talked with—James and Frankie Banner-man, Katherine’s friends and neighbors, Bannerman’s employees, the cops, everybody who might know