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grandparent maybe,” Norman persisted. “Sometimes people are surprised by the wealth of information that old folks carry around in their head. You could sit and talk with a great-grandmother for example and learn all sorts of things about
her
great-grandmother—and much of the rest of the family too.”
    I thought about that, slowly shaking my head. On my father’s side, there were no old folks left. My great-grandparents were long dead by the time I was born, my grandmother died of cancer when I was twelve, and my grandfather had passed just a year after that from an aortic aneurism. I told Norman as much, and he suggested I do a little genealogical work of my own anyway. He was convinced that the Beauharnais Rubies were some sort of family heirloom, and if I traced back the family tree I should be able to find the point at which they had probably been handed down to some other branch.
    “What do you want to bet some distant cousin is running around in those rubies right now, while you’re the one getting attacked by mistake?”
    “Maybe so.”
    “Or, for all you know, the man who showed up at your house this morning
is
a distant cousin, one who thinks you got the rubies instead of him! No telling what the whole story is, but I think this would be the best place to start. You might also get a lot more information once the police have had a chance to interrogate the guy.”
    That was true, though I knew it might take a while before he was out of surgery and coherent enough to be interrogated. In the meantime, I decided to focus on finding my brother. Considering the timing, his disappearance and my break-in were likely related somehow.
    I thanked Norman and rolled back to my desk. From there I opened several different applications on my computer and then dialed the number of the phone shanty yet again. Lydia answered this time, apologizing that she hadn’t been able to hear the phone before. I apologized as well for taking so long to get back to her, but for the sake of time I didn’t recount the morning’s trauma in full; I simply gave her an abbreviated version. Mostly, I wanted to know if she’d ever heard of the Beauharnais Rubies, but she sounded as clueless as I was.
    “Any word yet from Bobby?” I asked, changing the subject.
    “No, Anna. Is like he simply disappeared from the face of the earth.”
    “He’s out there somewhere,” I said, “but if I’m going to hunt him down, I need all of your personal account numbers, including his Social Security number.”
    “
Yah,
I can do that. I still have the box of our important papers.”
    She promised to call me back in a few minutes, so while I waited I began Googling the term “Beauharnais Rubies.” I tried every spelling I could think of—bornays, barnhaze, bernaze, bernais—but no matter what entry I typed in, it came back with nothing even remotely relevant. Whatever that man had wanted, I sure wasn’t going to figure it out easily.
    When Lydia called back with the information, I pulled up my usual skip tracing form, thinking I might as well go about this in my standard, systematic way, even if it was my own brother I was looking for. As always, I began by entering “known data.” Of course, the form didn’t ask for thethings I
did
know, such as how Bobby loved the way his son Isaac’s hair reflected a million shades of reddish brown in the sun, or how he much he enjoyed hanging out with his Amish buddy who trained race horses, speeding around the track on horseback at breakneck speed. Instead, the form wanted data I didn’t know so well, such as any current and former mailing addresses, his credit history, his job title. These things I got from Lydia, who read them off from the papers one by one.
    It wasn’t that Bobby and I didn’t keep up with the basics, I thought as I typed in a credit card number. He and I usually spoke on the phone once or twice a month, and I was always bugging him to get a computer at home so we could communicate