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a tired voice, her eyes still closed.
    “Then again…” I said.
    Dottie screwed up her blotchy face, looked at me.
    “Helene,” Angie said hurriedly, “it would go a lot faster if we could just ask you some questions alone and be out of your hair.”
    Helene looked at Angie. Then at Lionel. Then at the TV. Finally she focused on the back of Dottie’s head.
    Dottie was still looking at me, confused, trying to decide if the confusion should mutate into anger or not.
    “Dottie,” Helene said, with the air of someone about to deliver a state address, “is my best friend. My best friend. That means something. You want to talk to me, you talk to her.”
    Dottie’s eyes left mine and she turned to look at her best friend, and Helene nudged her knee with her elbow.
    I glanced at Angie. We’ve been working together solong, I could sum up the look on Angie’s face in two words:
    Screw this.
    I met her eyes and nodded. Life was too short to spend another quarter second with either Helene or Dottie.
    I looked at Lionel and he shrugged, his body puddled with resignation.
    We would have walked out right then—in fact, we were starting to—but Beatrice opened her eyes and blocked our path and said, “Please.”
    “No,” Angie said quietly.
    “An hour,” Beatrice said. “Just give us an hour. We’ll pay.”
    “It’s not the money,” Angie said.
    “Please,” Beatrice said. She looked past Angie, locked eyes with me. She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and her shoulders sagged.
    “One more hour,” I said. “That’s it.”
    She smiled and nodded.
    “Patrick, right?” Helene looked up at me. “That’s your name?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Think you could move a little to your left, Patrick?” Helene said. “You’re blocking the TV.”
     
    Half an hour later, we’d learned nothing new.
    Lionel, after a lot of wheedling, had convinced his sister to turn off the TV while we talked, but a lack of TV seemed only to further diminish Helene’s attention span. Several times during our conversation, her eyes darted past me to the blank screen as if hoping it would turn back on through divine intervention.
    Dottie, after all her bitching about sticking by her best friend, left the room as soon as we turned off the TV. We heard her knocking around the kitchen, opening the refrigerator for another beer, rattling through the cupboards for an ashtray.
    Lionel sat beside his sister on the couch, and Angie and I sat on the floor against the entertainment center. Beatricetook the end of the couch as far away from Helene as possible, stretched one leg out in front of her, held the other by the ankle between both hands.
    We asked Helene to tell us everything regarding the day of her daughter’s disappearance, asked if there’d been any sort of argument between the two of them, if Helene had angered anyone who’d have a reason to abduct her daughter as an act of vengeance.
    Helene’s voice bore what seemed a constant tone of exasperation as she explained that she never argued with her daughter. How could you argue with someone who smiled all the time? In between the smiling, it seemed, Amanda had only loved her mother and been loved by her, and they’d spent their time loving and smiling and smiling some more. Helene could think of no one she’d angered, and as she’d told the police, even if she had, who would abduct her child to get back at her? Children took work, Helene said. You had to feed them, she assured us. You had to tuck them in. You had to play with them sometimes.
    Hence, all that smiling.
    In the end, she told us nothing we hadn’t learned already from either news reports or Lionel and Beatrice.
    As for Helene herself—the more time I spent with her, the less I wanted to be in the same room. As we discussed her child’s disappearance, she let us in on the fact that she hated her life. She was lonely; there were no good men left; they needed to put a fence up around Mexico to keep