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hard to abort her sniveling. “You know I don’t cry. But—maybe I did say or do something to . . . piss Tuttle off or something. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if it was true or not, or made any sense, I just know my stepfather probably believed it. He was always giving me crap about being boy-crazy, guys sniffing around. It didn’t take much for him to blame my sluttiness for—whatever. We really didn’t get along anyway and we pretty much stopped talking after Stevie died.”
    “Man,” said Mann. “I hate it for you. I’ll go up there with you if you want,” he lied.
    “Yeah, right.” Mary Byrd paused. “Thank god my stepfather is dead. Okay. I’ve gotta get my ass in gear and get the kids and tell Charles what’s going on. I’ll call you later. Thanks, Mann.”
    “You okay?”
    “Course. Always am.”
    “Tough girl,” he said.
    “Ha.”
    “You know what that guy—what’s his name? Don Walsh?—says on every America’s Most Wanted show? ‘ And remember: YOU can make a difference.’ Just do it.”
    “ John is that guy’s name,” she said. “I don’t know if you watch too much TV, or not enough.”
    They hung up. Mary Byrd didn’t feel any better. It wasn’t about feeling better, there wasn’t any feeling better about Stevie. It was a matter of feeling less as time went on, but not better . She guessed it felt safer for somebody to know what a little hell she was in. She couldn’t even stand to mention the note that Ned Tuttle had written her, which seemed to definitely point to her . . . involvement. How was it that the reporter seemed to know something about all that?
    Mary Byrd stepped out of the booze closet and wandered back into the study, heading for a box of old family photos. She dug through the piles for a small manila envelope that held the few family snapshots with Stevie. She hadn’t looked at them in forever. All but one was black and white and she supposed had been taken with her old Brownie. Here was the only shot of the whole family together at the bay, standing in the sand in front of the family cottage. Pop, smoking a cigar, handsome and fat, her teeny mom with cool shades and a Jackie Kennedy scarf over her hair, holding Baby Pete. Nick stood sideways, flexing his biceps, practically black with a tan, holding a dead crab; that was his MO, picking up dead crap on the beach and pretending he’d caught it. James and Stevie knelt in the sand, James imitating Stevie who was imitating Nick, all flexing their pathetic muscles, squinting into the sun like they were badasses. Everyone was in a bathing suit but Mary Byrd, who wore a sweatshirt and cutoffs; she’d rather have died than be in her two-piece in a family photo. She stood off to the side, looking enormous—as big as Pop! It must have been the summer before Stevie died. Who’d taken that picture?
    Here was another shot of her, Nick, Stevie, and James stacked up in order on the sliding board in the backyard. She wore a madras kerchief and one of her mom’s old bathing suits, a black tank she could barely squeeze into. She’d loved it because it had great falsies. The big boys were shirtless in shorts, and James wore only a droopy, probably damp, cloth diaper. Boys never wore clothes or shoes in summer back then. William and his friends never went shirtless or barefoot, or even wanted to. Funny.
    The other two pictures were just of Stevie. In one, the color photo, he sat at the kitchen table, leaning on his crossed arms, smiling a tight-lipped, satisfied smile. Lined up before him was a row of his little metal trucks. He was obsessed with them, especially his yellow and green dump truck, whose doors opened and the dumper thing actually dumped. He had a thing he’d say to himself over and over, down on the floor or in the yard, playing intently, “Pickin’ up dirt, brrrrooom, dump truck ,” as he made the dumper dump. It looked like he’d loaded it with—what? Peanuts? Or maybe pumpkin seeds; her mother toasted