Jake Danvers’ mom wanted to like him, but she didn’t know how anymore and anyway she’d run out of time.

I’d called Marlene Thomas Sunday night after I talked to Wood. She’d already talked to McConegal; she didn’t want to talk to me. I suggested maybe it would be a good idea if she did, you know, with the cops looking for her boy. The cops were pretty upset about these kids being killed, and they could go overboard if they found the guy who did it. So maybe if her kid was involved and if the public knew the cops were looking for him, maybe the cops would think at least twice before they did anything drastic to the boy. It was plausible; who knew if it was true?

Marlene sighed. I think she decided that at this late stage in her boy’s upbringing talking to me was the least she could do.

Marlene worked two jobs: packing lubricants at a factory and cashier at a convenience store. She got off the first at 7 a.m. and started at the second at 8. I offered to buy her breakfast at 7:15. We agreed to meet at a place in Salem County not unlike Hack’s, one of a host of fine Wabash Valley diners with which I am acquainted.

Marlene filled the door when she lumbered into the diner and stopped to look around. She was way bigger than me. She had short, mousy brown, lank hair that hung around a pudgy face and sunken, tired, BB eyes. We were well on our way to winter, but she wore a sleeveless, smudged, flower-print blouse over a pair of thin, beige, cotton pants. Her upper arms were the shape and nearly the size of zeppelins and the color of peeled potatoes. She would not let me rise to greet her. She placed her massive frame at the end of the booth where I sat, and demanded, “You the reporter?”

I said I was, gave her my name again, and stuck out my hand. She ignored it.

“They gonna hurt him, Jake?”

I could only shrug.

“They’ve got to find him first and then probably not if they find out what they want to know. Sit down and tell me about him.”

She drove the table into my gut when she shoved it away to make room on the booth bench across from me.

Marlene was 31 years old, which put her at the same age as Jake when she conceived. She was single and raising three younger children. Only two of the kids had the same last name, and none of the names were hers. She worked graveyard at the factory, went home to get her kids to school, then cashiered for another four, five hours at a convenience store. After that, she slept until 3 when her kids got home from school.

Marlene talked between bites of a double western omelet and toast. She ate like a woman in a hurry or maybe somebody who hadn’t seen food in a day or so.

Marlene didn’t know the Russells, the Crawfords, or Aunt Lotty, and neither did Jake. Well, she admitted, least not so far as she knew.

The kid only had about two real friends, but she wasn’t even sure about them anymore. Jake’d taken to not coming home after school in the last few months. She didn’t know where he went or who he went with. She asked. He wouldn’t tell her. She didn’t like it necessarily, but it wasn’t like she didn’t have other kids to look after and she’d already given him his shot at mother love. But he wasn’t a violent boy, she said.

“Fact of the matter, he’s kind of a weenie. He’d let those little bastards who said they was his friends call me a whore and boss him around.”

“What little bastards would those be?”

“Those goodie, goodie kids, church kids, 4-H kids. Them.”

I thought about the three bodies on the floor of Lottie’s trailer and the testimonies to their goodness I’d heard at their funerals.

“If somebody told him to shoot some goodie kids, would he do it?”

The question caught a forkful of omelet halfway to her mouth. She stared into the air between us and thought about it for some time. Her mouth closed. What looked like a tear glistened in one eye before she blinked it back, took her bite, and chewed. She shook her head indifferently, not so much to tell me no as to tell me she would not answer.

“He take your car?”

“A set of keys is gone. Nothing else. Has to be him, don’t it? I can’t think of anybody else.”

“Where would he go?”

“With a car? South, I ’magine.” She didn’t hesitate; she’d already thought about it. “He thinks his daddy’s down there. Promised him once they’d see mermaids.”

“Mermaids.”

“Place called Weeki Wachee,” she said. “Florida. They’ve got some damned show where girls dress up like mermaids, breath through tubes, swim.”

“You tell the cops that?”

“Sure.”

“Is that where his father is?”

“Who knows. That was 10 years ago, last I heard’a that sorry son of a bitch.”

She wiped her mouth with a pinch of her thumb and index finger and hauled herself out of the booth with a grunt.

Looking down at me, she said, “I give them their names, but I don’t take their money.”

I was confused. I didn’t recall saying anything about money.

“The fathers,” she said. “I don’t take their damned child support, nothing.” Her eyes drifted away. “I see it on your face, too. I ain’t a whore.”

After breakfast with Marlene, I presented myself at the high school and asked a particularly unpleasant and prying secretary if I could purchase the most recent high school yearbook. She remained seated at a desk facing the counter and did not care to raise her eyes from the work spread there. Petulant self-absorption apparently was contagious in a place full of teenagers.

“What do you want it for?” she said.

“I collect yearbooks wherever I go,” I said with a chipper lilt. “I believe they are the clearest evidence that we in America have the best students and the best schools anywhere in the world.”

She looked up for an appraisal. Administrators and school board members talked like that for public consumption, so she didn’t know whether I was shitting her or not. That only made her more hostile.

“What’s your name?”

“How much is the yearbook?”

“I can’t sell it to you without your name?

“You won’t take cash without questions?”

“No.”

“Let me ask you a question.” I said. Do you consider a yearbook to be like a history of this school?”

“Well, yes.”

“And would you agree with me, then, that if it’s a history it’s like a record of the activities of the school?”

She hesitated, not knowing where this was going to go. “Well, I suppose.”

“In fact, it is a record in photographs and words of what went on at this school during a particular school year, is it not?”

She already admitted that it was and hadn’t been harmed by doing so. “Of course,” she said with confidence.

“And as one who works in the administration office of the school, you probably have some familiarity with the laws of the state and what they have to say about how school districts operate, don’t you?”

A wary look passed again across her face with the change in direction, but she wasn’t the type to admit ignorance, regardless of how stupid she might be. “Certainly,” she said and cocked up her chin.

“Well, then you probably know that under the state’s open records law you are obliged to disclose to me as a citizen most records of the school, including a yearbook, regardless of what my name is or what I want it for.” I let a little edge into my voice. “Now, you going to sell it to me or not?”

“What are you?” she asked. “Some damned sort of lawyer?”

An older man in a short-sleeved striped shirt and knit tie with a knot the size of a fist had been stuffing mail slots at the back of the office and listening to the exchange.

“Sell him the yearbook, Marjorie,” he said. “He no damned lawyer, he’s a damned reporter.”

“Sir, please,” I said. “Your language. What kind of example do you set for our youth?

He rolled his eyes. At his age, he’d already set all the examples he intended to.

When I had given Marjorie my money and she had nearly shredded the book tearing out the receipt I asked for, the man came to the other side of the counter and introduced himself as the vice principal and school guidance counselor. He struck me as was one of those calm, steady, capable guys temperamental top dogs can’t get along without.

“Been expecting you,” he said.

“I take it the cops have been here?”

“A skinny state police detective asked me a lot of questions about one of our students.”

“Jake Danvers?”

He ignored the question. “The detective said you’d be along.”

“You mean press.”

“No, you. He said there was a fat, nosy, persistent son of a bitch who’d worry this thing to death.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I wouldn’t. I’m going to ask you to leave now.”

“I’d like to talk with some of your students and teachers about Jake Danvers.”

“Can’t. Privacy laws. You understand.”

“Sure, I understand, but I don’t care.”

He’d dealt with smartasses all his professional life and wasn’t about to mess with the likes of me. He gave me a wry smile and shrugged his shoulders.

“Well,” he said, “let me do a little lawyering here. I’ve asked you once to leave and you haven’t. So now you’re trespassing. Here’s your last warning. If you don’t leave now or if you leave and come back, I call the cops.

“I consider myself educated,” I said and left.

I drove around the school in widening loops through the surrounding neighborhoods until I spotted a couple of fast-food restaurants and a little grocery located in a yellow house about three blocks from the school. I stopped at the grocery for some supplies. When I saw all the cigarette butts scattered over the trampled patch of grass and dirt between the sidewalk and the steps, I thought I might be onto something.

The first floor had been converted into one large room for the store. Along the back wall, the refrigerator case held some milk and bologna but mostly soft drinks and juices in all colors. The rest of the place’s inventory seemed to consist of mostly of bread, jerky, snack cakes, cookies, candy, chips, and crackers. My kind of place. I gathered up an assortment of jerky bits, M&Ms, and Twizzlers. Call it trail mix; I thought I’d camp out for a while.

A woman in her fifties with short, shoe-polish black hair and a deeply lined face sat behind the counter nearly hidden by cigarette and cigar racks. She had watched me suspiciously through a haze of cigarette smoke the whole time. She relaxed her vigilance only when I dumped my purchases on the counter in front of her.

“Looks like you’re lunching early,” she said in the raspy, corrugated voice of a woman who’d sucked down a lot of smoke in her day.

“Not many places left where you can smoke in a grocery store,” I said.

“My place, my smoke,” she said.

“Guessing from what you sell, you get a lot of students from the high school in here, particularly at lunch.”

She stopped in the middle of ringing up my booty.

“You health, excise, or school?”

“None of the above.” I laid my press card on the counter.

“You writing stories about old ladies trying to get by in the grocery business?”

“Not today.”

She shrugged. No harm in talking to me then.

“Don’t get ‘em like I used to,” she said. “They’re supposed to have a closed campus now.”

I repeated to myself what she had just said.

“But you still get some. What? Skippers?”

She shrugged again.

“They don’t take attendance at noon, just lock the doors. You got a friend who’ll let you back in or you put a little wedge in a door, say the door of the football locker room, which nobody pays any attention to at that time of day, you can have a little pop and a smoke. You didn’t hear that from me, ’course.”

“Absolutely not.”

Since she was in a talkative mood, I said, “I’ll be right back.”

I went to my car and brought back my hard-won yearbook. I looked up Jake Danvers’ name in the index and turned to the page with his picture on it.

“This kid ever visit you?”

She reached under the counter and took out a pair of wingtip glasses, which she put on to examine the photo more closely.

“Some,” she said.

“Know him personally?”

She shook her head.

“Any of his friends visit you?”

“There’s a pimply, blond-haired boy he usually shows up with. Pimply smokes, but he don’t like to ask me for cigarettes. Might ruin his grade point. Underage. Like the rest aren’t or I’d give a shit. Lets the other kid do it. I see Pimply giving him money out on the walk before they come in.”

“What’s his brand?”

She said Merits.

“Funny thing,” I said. “That’s mine, too. Give me pack, will you?”

She just stared at me.

“All right,” I said. “How about if I hang out and see if Pimply shows up?

She thought about that.

“Wait in your car and don’t bother none of them until after they been in here. I don’t need you scaring off customers. I make damned little off the little thieves as it is.”

She reached up and pulled the cigarettes I’d asked for from the rack over her head. Who says you can’t find an entrepreneurial libertarian when you need one anymore?

In 1994, when all this took place, Failey lived on the outer rim of cell phone civilization. We knew about mobile phones, but they weren’t common, being as they were expensive to own and victims of signals that were weak and wavering.

Since the paper wouldn’t pay for a cell and I needed a phone to do my job, I kept an eye out. When I arrived, I’d instinctively noted the pay phone attached to the house on the alley side. It was obviously well used, the ground around it covered by cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and perhaps a wasteful roach or two. Since I had time to kill before the lunch hour, I took out the phone card I paid for myself and began what had become daily routine, trying to find Aunt Lottie.

Wood Modine wearily confirmed yet again that Aunt Lottie was in fact alive, that she was recovering satisfactorily from her injuries, that the authorities had hidden her until they had apprehended her assailants, and that he was goddamned tired of answering the same goddamn questions every day.

“Tell me where she is or let me talk to her on the phone and I’ll stop,” I always said.

“Forget it, Clay,” he said.

“All right, any arrests?”

“No.”

“Any new leads?”

“We’re following all leads.”

“Any new ones?”

“I can’t discuss the investigation with you.”

“Sure you can, you just won’t.”

“True.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to call you again tomorrow. Let’s try and have some different answers ready.”

Wood hung up without saying goodbye.

I then called Orlo and assured him yet again that Lottie was alive and recovering, although still in hiding. I called him every day because: I liked him, he was genuinely concerned about Lottie, he was watching her place as a favor, he seemed the most likely person to be in touch with Lotty, he wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, and he might tell me where she was if he knew.

The incongruity of it all sometimes gave me pause, but I learned long ago Fitzgerald was right. Diametrically opposed thoughts are merely the mark of a first-rate intelligence. They pose little or no risk of insanity.

“Know where she is, Orlo?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you did, Orlo?”

“Not if she didn’t want me to.”

“Does she want you to?”

We were getting to know each other pretty well. He was going to think about that one for a moment.

“I think you’re trying to trick me,” he said.

“Have you talked you her, Orlo?”

“No. You going to call me tomorry?”

“I am.”

“Well, then,” he said. “Goodbye.”

I had already called the utility companies to see if they would tell me where they were sending her bills. Normally, they are pretty closed mouth about account information, but in this case, they were only too happy to tell me they had been directed to send all future bills to the sheriff’s office. Same with her bank. All inquiries were directed to the sheriff’s office.

Lottie had no family and few close friends. Since she’d never married or lived in town, she did not hang out with the flocks of widows who descended on the fast-food restaurants at 4 or 5 each day for company and to look out for each other.

I was down to the telephone book and a county map. For the past week, whenever I had a little spare time, I called a neighbor or two, widening the search out from the double-wide. As a pretext, I told the people I called I was doing a profile of Lottie. It was thankless work; they either hung up on me or told me things I already knew. For example, I already had a pretty clear picture of Lottie as fiercely independent, as someone who did a lot for others, but allowed others to do only a little for her.

Lottie’s careful cultivation of her privacy led me nowhere, but it worked well for her. The people who would talk to me said they sure wished they did know where she was. They’d like to help her.

Billy Masters was what my surly, adolescent, racially deaf nephew in Chicago disdained as a wigger, a white kid trying to pass as a gangsta. He was short, chunky kid with bleached blond, spiky hair and freckles enough to make him look age ten for the rest of his life. The kid had money judging by the Tommy Hilfiger labels on his baggy jacket and jeans and $150 hightops. I could hear the rap music spilling out of the headphones he wore. In a small, white town like this one, the whole package probably drove his parents and their friends nuts, which was, no doubt, the desired effect.

Kids had been coming and going for a half hour or more, but he was the only one who slumped up to the store and stopped outside, shuffling his feet and screwing up his courage. Fear and guilt were rare qualities on display among underage thugs dredged up in Chicago. I took this kid’s discomfort accordingly as a measure of how insular these little towns are. It was also refreshing and more than a little helpful.

Billy jumped when I put a hand on his elbow, then cocked his head twice like a damned bird when I tried to introduce myself. Since it was obvious he wasn’t going to turn down the music, I hooked a finger under the headset and flipped it back onto his neck.

“You know Jake Danvers?” I asked him.

“I asked you who’re you?”

“No, you didn’t. You just cocked your head.” I told him who I was anyway.

“Fuck you,” he said. “I already talked to the cops.”

I folded my arms and leaned back against my car. He didn’t seem impressed that my weight rocked it, so I tried another tack. For all the attitude, I figured this kid still didn’t like trouble.

“How about I call that guidance counselor at the school, the old guy with the fat knot in his tie, and tell him you skipped out at lunch to buy smokes? How about I tell him about the trick with propping the football locker room door? Maybe that ruins the deal for everybody else who skips and they get pissed off at you. Maybe it shows up on your record and you don’t get into Harvard.”

His eyes widened, a good measure of the effectiveness of the verbal stick. But then how hard is it to intimidate a kid who’s afraid to buy cigarettes?

“Or,” I said, “how about you have a couple of smokes.” I took the Merits out of my pocket and put them in his hand. “And tell me about your boy, Danvers.”

“You going to use my name?”

“Let’s see what you have to say first.”

He said he wanted to get away from there so the other kids didn’t see. I said I wasn’t about to drive away with an underage boy in my car.

“My experience has been that it’s better to hide in plain sight,” I told him. “What secrets’re you going to tell when everybody else can see you? Tell ‘em I’m your Uncle Clay come for a visit.”

“Yeah,” he said in a tone that made me want to smack him.

Turned out, Billy’s opinion of Jake was not much different from that of Jake’s mother. He used to like Jake, but not anymore.

“Sumbitch,” young William said. “Sumbitch tried to set me up.”

“How’d he do that, exactly?”

“Wanted my stubs, man,” Billy said.

“You don’t look like an amputee to me.”

“Ticket stubs, asshole.”

When it comes to decisions about what sources I’m willing to take shit from to get a story, I usually make them on the fly. Worrying about consistency, policy, or hypocrisy was something to do in my spare time. In Billy’s case, I flicked the cigarette he had dangling out the corner of his mouth into street with the back of my hand.

“Keep a civil tongue, Billy. And talk to me in English.”

Jake had asked Billy for the ticket stubs to some alternative band concert that Billy had gone to in Indianapolis, ninety miles away.

“Why?”

“Said he needed to show his Moms, that he’d gone somewhere else but he’d told her like he was with me, the sumbitch.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said no way. See, the band wore masks and shit and like it was pretty cool and I didn’t really want to give ‘em to him ’cause they were like a souvenir.”

“You know, Billy, I had you figured more for a rap, hip-hop concertgoer.”

“Naw, man,” he said, very seriously dropping into a ghetto rhythm he could only have heard on TV, “a guy like me, motherfucking white guy, get his ass shot off. You know what I’m saying.”

The urge to guffaw was almost overwhelming. I pulled a cigarette out of the pack in Billy’s jacket pocket, handed it to him, took his lighter from the same pocket, and lighted his cigarette.

“Why’d the band wear masks, Billy?”

I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

“’Cause the concert was the night before fucking Halloween, man.”

I pretended like it didn’t mean anything to me.

“So why does him asking you for the stubs make you think he was setting you up?

“That’s dumb fucking question.”

It is sometimes my job to ask dumb, obvious questions so I can write in the fourth person. That doesn’t mean that I like little snivelers telling me a question is dumb. I fixed Billy with a stare.

“Well, shit,” Billy said. “That’s the night those kids got whacked south of here. The cops said it was Jake’s mom’s car they saw around the old lady’s trailer. Sumbitch was like trying to make me an accessory or something.”

He pronounced it excessory. “Kind of like a necklace or a handbag,” I said, half amused at his incorrect use of a word he’d heard on television and half pissed he’d blown the quote by swearing.

He stared at me blankly then shook his head.

“What the fuck’re you talking about?”

“Maybe it would be more accurate to say he was looking to you to give him an alibi.”

He gave me a wide over-the-shoulder sweep of his arm with his fingers pointed this way and that, something he’d seen rappers do.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Could he have done it?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I don’t run with him much anymore. He found somebody else to hang out with.”

“Who?”

“Some older guy. Wouldn’t tell me who.” Billy was warmed up now, ready to talk. “Said this guy was teaching him stuff, like how to be a man, since Jake didn’t have a dad. I think he was kind of keeping this guy to himself. Maybe the guy’s like some perv preying on boys. Or maybe the guy was just scoring him dope and that’s why he wouldn’t tell me. Anyway, Jake and him were going to take off and find his old man someday. That’s what Jake said.”

“What’d did he mean when he said the guy was teaching how to be a man?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t say.”

“You think this guy was showing Jake how to use a gun, kill people?”

“No doubt.”

Like my nephew and damn near every other teenage boy I’d ever met or been, he yanked judgments out of the air and spoke them aloud, with conviction but not an ounce of thought or evidence.

“But,” I said, “he never told you that.”

Billy looked off, unwilling to answer.

“Where were they going to go? Florida?”

Billy flipped the cigarette out into the street in front of an oncoming car that jerked to avoid it. Billy smirked then frowned.

“You already know this shit,” he said, “why you asking me?”

“Where in Florida?”

“Who knows. Said the guy had ‘connections’, whatever the hell that means.”

I took Billy’s address and phone number, in case I needed to call him again.

“Cops ask you anything I haven’t?”

Billy blinked at the change of pace. “No.”

“You tell them anything you haven’t told me?”

“Nope.”

“I think I hear the bell ringing, Billy.”

I held up my wrist so that he could see my watch. He looked around and saw that no one remained at the store.

“Shit,” he said and ran back toward the school.

As I pulled away, it occurred to me that I knew more than the people I wrote for, but I didn’t know more than the cops. Everybody I’d talked to had already talked to McConegal, and that was annoying.

At the most elemental level, the thing I like best about what I do is knowing more than anybody else. Analyze that however you wish, but it is a fact and I stopped trying to justify it a long time ago.

Driving out of town, I had to admit that then I did not know more than anybody else. Maybe that’s what prompted me to pull over at the hardware store on the end of town.

The exterior was recent, metal siding on pole construction. Inside, the place looked like old times.

The interior was tall and dark, split by merchandise in the middle into two narrow aisles. It smelled of wood and metal and oil and fertilizer, and it was crammed to the ceiling. A skinny guy in a blue nylon vest greeted me from the back of the store. As he approached through the gloom, I decided he looked like Dennis the Menace’s father: middle-aged, black glasses, dark hair combed back high, pipe. I told him who I was.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “We do some advertising in your paper. You’re kind of far afield.”

He was just making conversation, but I didn’t feel like answering a lot of questions. I had brought the yearbook with me. I showed him Danvers’s photo and asked if he knew him.

“Sure,” the guy said. “I know most folks around town. I’ve seen this boy in here but can’t say I know him well.”

“You sell ammunition, shotgun shells?”

“Well, yeah. Over there.” He pointed to a counter behind which were a row of rifles and shotguns and stacks of ammunition boxes.

“Anybody else in town sell ammunition?”

“There’s a K-mart down near your way, but nobody else in this little town. Why? Need some shells?”

“Any age limit on who you can sell shells to?”

“You mean, does somebody have to be so old to buy them?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Nah. Just the guns. I can’t sell those to minors.”

“You ever sell any shells to this kid?”

I pointed once more to the yearbook picture. He looked at the picture for a long time. “Yes, sir,” he said finally. “I believe I did maybe two, three weeks ago.”

“That boy ever buy shells from you before?”

“Well, no, not that I can think of. Why do you ask?”

He had been straight with me; no reason not to be straight with him. I told the guy about the cops looking for Danvers and why, then I watched the color drain out of his face.

“My Lord,” he said as the implications started to sink in.

“The kid try to buy any guns, shotguns?”

“No,” he said, a little hot. “I already told you, I wouldn’t sell them to him if he wasn’t of age.”

“How about adults? Was there an adult, say an older man, with him?”

He hadn’t considered that possibility. He thought about it.

“No,” he said and thought about it some more. “No, not that I remember.”

I worried him with a few more questions about the exact date of the sale, but he was preoccupied with another matter.

“Should I call the police?”

Angels did not sing the Hallelujah Chorus, but I understood the significance of his question.

“I take it the police have not talked to you.”

“No. Should I tell ‘em, you think?”

I hate getting involved in stories. I like knowing things the cops do not. I told him: “Mister, it’s your call. The cops are going to know about it sooner or later, ’cause there’ll be a story in my paper about it, but what you do is up to you.”

“But,” he said, “I mean, what would you do?”

I told him I don’t give advice, thanked him for his time, and left. The more honest answer would have been: “Jeez, I don’t know.”