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anybody in, but you know Lewis. Or I guess you don’t.”
    “We’ve met.”
    We sit there quietly for maybe ten minutes, and then Lewis Witt comes out. She hasn’t had time to do what you do when you’re fifty and want to get your game face on before you meet the world. Her mouth is a grim, tight line.
    “She’s gone.”
    Her husband gets up and embraces her. There are others in the room, strangers with their own grief. She looks over her husband’s shoulder and sees me.
    “Who are you?” she asks me, in a surprisingly strong voice. And then she remembers.
    “You’re that reporter,” she says. “Get out.”
    Nobody seems to have much use for journalists invading their most private moments these days. Go figure.
    I express my sympathy as I back out the door. I really mean it. What I remember about Alicia Simpson is almost all good. She was a competent writer who was not averse to the concept that someone else might know something about the craft that she didn’t. She was a little fragile, I thought, a little too jumpy to be a good newspaper reporter. But she was blessed with enough family money that she never had to find that out.
    Whatever happened that night at the Quarry, twenty-eight years ago, I’ll never know, but both Alicia Simpson and Richard Slade definitely were the worse for it.
    Back at the paper, I blog a few paragraphs so our potential readers don’t have to actually buy the Sunday paper. I try to leave something really juicy out of the blogs to tease them (“Tune in to the Sunday paper, folks, for the full story”), but the circulation numbers tell me that’s not working so well.
    My cellphone rings. It really does ring, like a damn phone is supposed to. What is so cool about having your phone play “Billy Jean” or “Stairway to Heaven”? It’s like that singing fish thing that was so big a few years back. Funny once, maybe twice, then you just want to shoot it.
    It’s Peggy.
    “He’s gone again.”
    Les. This happens now and then, and I usually know where to look.
    I tell her I’ll be there in half an hour. I have a couple of hours before I’m expected at the paper.
    Les Hacker, the light of my addled mother’s life and the guy who saved my butt from being barbecued last year, has gone walking.
    We haven’t had to get him off the roof lately, but he is prone to occasionally wandering off. Les’s body is still in pretty good shape. The last time I got the cops to find him, he was all the way out of town, headed toward Williamsburg. When they stopped him, they said he looked confused, like somebody who’s just woke up from a dream.
    He reminds me of a comedy bit I heard once: “Grandma’s walking five miles a day now, and we have no idea where she is.”
    I always try to find him myself first. I start in the neighborhood, then expand my search into Blackwell and the Fan. I don’t want social services coming over and telling Peggy she’s got to put him in some damn home.
    When my mother opens the front door, I am temporarily overwhelmed by the sweet smell of wacky weed, but Peggy seems relatively coherent. The day is young.
    “He was right here,” she says, “watching that ESPN. I went to do the dishes and then took a shower, and when I got back, he was gone.”
    This time, it’s easy. I look in their bedroom closet and see that the old catcher’s mitt, remnant of his last pro baseball stop with the Richmond V’s, is missing.
    So, I get in my ancient but indestructible Honda and head toward The Diamond. It’s been more than twenty years since they demolished Parker Field, where Les once played, and built something with a newer, more hip name (even if the damn thing is falling down now). Hey, I’m no mossback, but things have to change names for about fifty years before I really buy in. Holding back the hands of time, one of our younger reporters told me once, when I was ranting about texting and tweeting, is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.
    Sure enough, I find Les,