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Gadsden his successor. It was a horrible moment, the sense of being a ghoul waiting to feast on her sister’s remains. I almost turned around and walked out, but something in my prospective client’s face made me think she was hoping for such a reaction, or at least hoping to make me uncomfortable enough to waive my fee.
    I pulled out a notebook and started taking down such skimpy details as she could offer: the name of the pastor at her church when Lamont was a child. His high school physics teacher, who thought Lamont had promise and ought to go to college.
    “What about his friends?” I asked. “The ones you didn’t approve of?”
    “I don’t remember their names. It’s been forty years.”
    “You know how it is, Miss Ella, these things sometimes come back to us in the middle of the night.” I smiled limpidly to show that I knew she was lying. “In case they do, you can write them down and call me. And the day you last saw him, what was he doing, where was he going?”
    “It was at the dinner table. He didn’t often come home at dinner-time, but there he was, eating bean soup and reading the paper. We got an evening paper then, and he was reading through it while my sister and I were talking. And suddenly he flung down the paper and headed for the door without a by-your-leave.
    “‘Is that what you do? Eat and not even say thank you for the meal?’” I asked. Claudia always thought I was too harsh with Lamont, but I didn’t see why a boy couldn’t learn manners in this life. He didn’t have a job, and there Claudia and I were, me screwing parts together at the phone plant, Claudia cleaning up after spoiled white folks, and Lamont thinking we lived to wait on him!”
    She paused, breathing hard, reliving the resentments that hadn’t eased for being forty years old. “So that night, when I said what I said, he kissed his fingers to me and passed some sarcastic comment on the ‘delightful repast’ before going out the door, just wearing that thin jacket, the kind all those hotshot boys sported in those days. The next day was the big storm, you know. When he didn’t come home, I thought he must have taken shelter somewhere. That jacket wasn’t enough to carry him through a blizzard.”
    Oh yes, the big storm of ’sixty-seven. I’d been ten then, and it seemed like a winter fairyland to me. Two feet of snow fell; drifts rose to the height of buildings. The blizzard briefly covered the yellow stains that the steel mills left on our car and house, painting everything a dazzling white. For adults, it had been a nightmare. My dad was stuck at the station for the better part of two days while my mother and I struggled to clean the walks and get to a grocery store. Of course, the mills didn’t shut down, and within a day the mounds of snow looked dirty, old, dreary.
    “It was only later we got worried.” Miss Ella’s harsh voice brought me back to her living room. “Later, when we could get out and about, and, by then, we couldn’t find anyone who had seen him.”
    It was when I asked for a photograph that Miss Ella seemed startled. I was surprised, actually, that among all the framed slogans and pictures of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and other black leaders, that I hadn’t seen any family pictures at all.
    “Why do you need one?”
    “If I’m going to look for him, I need to know what he looked like forty years ago. I can scan it and age it, see what he might look like at sixty.”
    Miss Ella returned to the sideboard and fumbled inside for a photo album. She looked through it slowly and finally took out a shot of a young black man in yellow graduation robes. His hair was cropped close to his head in the style of those pre-Afro days. He stared seriously at the camera, his eyes hard and bleak.
    “That was when he graduated high school. Even though he’d started down a wrong road, I made him stay in school until he was done. The rest are all just baby pictures and such. I want this back, and I want it