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Throughout all this, and even when he lay flat, he held his drink up above his head like a man trying to keep a pistol dry while crossing a river. I noticed that not a drop was spilled, as did my father, who looked over at me and whispered, “Nice touch.”
    I put the pencil down and closed the notebook with a feeling of accomplishment. Jim had Botch Town, Mary had her imaginary world, my mother had her wine, my father his jobs, Nan the cards, and Pop his mandolin. Instead of writing about the footprint or Mrs. Conrad’s scream, I planned to fill the notebook with the lives of my neighbors, creating a Botch Town of my own between two covers.
    When I went down into the cellar to tell Jim about my decision, I found him holding the plastic soldier up to the lightbulb. Big white circles had been painted over his eyes, and his hands, which had once held the machine gun and grenade, had been chopped off and replaced with straight pins that jutted dangerously, points out, from the stubs of his arms.
    â€œWatch this: glow-in-the-dark paint,” said Jim, standing the figure upright on the board between our house and the Conrads’. He then leaned way out over Botch Town and pulled the lightbulb string. The cellar went dark.
    â€œThe eyes,” he said, and I looked down to see the twin circles on the soldier’s face glowing in the shadows of the handmade town. The sight of him there, like something from a nightmare, gave me a chill.
    Jim stood quietly, admiring his creation, and I told him what I had decided to do with the notebook. I thought he would be mad at me for not following his orders.
    â€œGood work,” he said. “Everyone is a suspect.”

He Walks the Earth
    Saturday afternoon I sat with Mary back amid the forsythias and read to her the descriptions of the people I had written about in my notebook so far. That morning I’d gone out on my bike early, scouring the neighborhood for likely suspects to turn into words, and had caught sight of Mrs. Harrington, whom I had nicknamed “the Colossus” for her mesmerizing girth, and Mitchell Erikson, a kid who shared my birthday and who, for every school assembly and holiday party, played “Lady of Spain” on his accordion.
    I doled them out to Mary, starting with Mr. Farley, reading in the same rapid whisper I used when relaying a chapter of a Perno Shell adventure. Mary was a good audience. She sat still, only nodding occasionally as she did when she sat with Pop while he figured the horses. Each nod told me that she had taken in and understood the information up to that point. She was not obviously saddened when Mrs. Harrington’s diminutive potato-head husband died, nor did she laugh at my description of Mitchell’s smile when bowing to scanty applause. Her nod told me she was tabulating the results of my effort, though, and that was all I needed.
    When I was done and had closed the notebook, she sat for a moment in silence. Finally she looked at me and said, “I’ll take Mrs. Harrington to place.”
    Our mother called us in then. Since it was the weekend, my father had just gotten home from work, and it was time for us to visit our aunt Laura. We piled into the white Biscayne, Jim and me in the back with Mary between us. My father drove with the window open, his elbow leaning out in the sun, a cigarette going between his fingers. I hadn’t seen him all week, and he looked tired. Adjusting the rearview mirror, he peered back at us and smiled. “All aboard,” he said.
    St. Anselm’s was somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island, nearly an hour’s drive from our house. The ride was usually solemn, but my father sometimes played the radio for us, or if he was in a good mood, he’d tell us a story about when he was a boy. Our favorites were about the ancient, swaybacked plow horse, Pegasus, dirty white and ploddingly dangerous, that he and his brother kept as kids in Amityville.
    This