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dilapidated carport.
    “She’s here,” he said. “I thought she’d be coming tomorrow.”
    “Today
is
tomorrow,” Molly told him.
    Stroud tiptoed to the window and peeked inside his house, then turned, holding to the wall for support, and stared at me. “Mr. Parker,” he asked, “can you tell that I have been tippling?”
    “It’s pretty obvious.”
    He turned back to the window. “She’s going to have my ass,” he murmured.
    “The horse isn’t in the barn,” Molly said. “She’s out riding.”
    “Mr. Parker,” Stroud said, “would you try that doorknob?”
    I turned the knob. The door was not locked.
    “Now would you go inside and see if there is anyone in the house?”
    “She’s out riding, Mr. Stroud,” Molly said again.
    “That horse can get out of the barn by himself,” Stroud snapped. He was still peering through the window. “Go on, Mr. Parker.”
    I stepped into the doorway. “Who am I looking for?” I asked.
    “You’ll know when you see her,” said Stroud.
    “What do I say if I find her?” I asked.
    “Say something to get her to go out the back door,” Stroud urged. “Then I’ll come in the front.”
    I walked into a large, gloomy room full of overstuffed furniture. There were no lights on in the house. The late-afternoon sun shone through a window whose drapes were lying in a heap beneath the sill.
    “Call to her!” Stroud whispered.
    “What’s her name?” I replied.
    “Sally.”
    I called. There was no answer. I walked through the front room, past a parlor outfitted in cheap vinyl sofa and chairs, through a dining room empty of furniture but littered with piles of books. Down a hallway was a kitchen unmodernized since the original inhabitants, with an iron pump poised above a dusty sink. Layers of shadow covered layers of dust. Despite the moaning of the wind about the roof, the air inside the place seemed shocked into stillness by a crushing sense of emptiness. It was a home for ghosts.
    I walked back to the front room. “Nobody here,” I said.
    “Go upstairs!” Stroud hissed from the doorway.
    “Mr. Stroud, this is stupid,” I said, shaking my head and staring at the floor. I was about to explain that I had reached my limit of foolishness for the day, and that if he did not want this Sally-whoever to catch him drunk, then he’d better just not drink, when I felt a wind rush past me, caught a faint whiff of Garden Mist air freshener, and turned to see Gilliam Stroud loping like a crazed black bear up the stairway, his wrecked lungs shrieking at each step. He disappeared down a hallway, and I heard a door slam.

CHAPTER 6
    On the way back into town I quizzed Molly about the scene we had just witnessed. She told me the girl’s full name: Sally Dean. Otherwise, she was not forthcoming.
    “Well, what’s the story, Molly? Is she his wife?”
    “No.”
    “Girlfriend?”
    “No.”
    “They don’t live together?”
    “No.”
    “She just shows up and rides his horse from time to time?”
    “It’s her horse. She just stables it at the farmhouse.”
    “Is she some sort of nurse?”
    “That’s not her job,” Molly said.
    “Then why was Stroud so scared that she’d catch him drunk?” I asked.
    Molly thought for a moment before answering. “I guess you could say that she kind of nurses Mr. Stroud. He kind of looks at her as a daughter.”
    “Is that a bad thing?” I asked, because her tone suggested that maybe it was. Molly Tunstall struck me as the kind of person who didn’t like to say anything bad about someone else, but also as a person who would never lie. And there was something about Sally Dean that she didn’t want to say.
    “All I know is Mr. Stroud hasn’t come to the end of his drinking days. Until he does, nobody can help him.”
    “And Sally Dean is trying to help him?”
    Molly shrugged. “Sally is a sweet girl. She’s just got a long way to go.” I could not get her to elaborate.
    When we reached Main Street, I dropped Molly off in