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about a twelve-minute mile. Behr checked his notes as he made the next turn, onto Mooresville, then followed it to Lynhurst. The route was an ambitious one mileage-wise. The kid had carried plenty of papers a good distance.
    As he left Lynhurst, Behr passed an old Civic hatchback coming from the other direction. A Hispanic man was driving while another, the size of a jockey, was crouching in the back and hurling papers toward houses. The kid’s replacements, Behr thought, as he drove on to the end of the route. The neighborhood yielded nothing; the houses were blank facades. Behr sat in his idling car and ate a ham sandwich, looking down the street he had just driven. He let his mind wander. Someone leaving for work, so early and as such not thinking about traffic, backs out of the driveway and, boom, hits a kid on a bike. No one else is awake at that time, the boy’s down, not moving, so the driver scoops up the kid and the bike and drives out of town to dump him.
    Behr shook his head. Chances were that Jamie never even rode his route that day. Any number of things could have distracted him from his usual routine, which would mean that the cops had been looking in the completely wrong place, and he was, too.
    Behr flipped through the file he was building on the case. He got to one of the articles he’d printed from the newspaper’s online archive. It was from page two, under the fold, three days after the boy had disappeared. There was no picture. Goddamn toddler goes missing for half an hour they’re running front-page photos and features on the television news. A kid gets old enough to have his own ideas, it raises too much doubt about what could have happened, renders it unnewsworthy. Behr finished the sandwich, crumpled up the wax paper it had been wrapped in, and drove back to the head of the route to start in on the canvass.
    The number of people at home on door-to-door canvasses always surprised Behr. Not just housewives, old people, and invalids, but young, working-age men and women — they were usually at home. At first he figured they should all be at work, but much of the time they were not: They worked the late shift, or the early shift, or they had a day off or were between jobs. Eighty percent of the bells he rang in some neighborhoods got answered. Then there was Mount Auburn. These were working people. Even at a quarter to nine in the morning, almost no one was at home, and that meant no information for him. He checked the police report and saw that the cops had swept three times — prework, midday, and evening — and still owed on completion. Behr got a couple of cleaning ladies, none of whom had worked there at the time of the event, and two home owners with fuzzy recollections of the date, it being so far back.
    He went off from Richards, retracing the streets he had driven. He collected contacts and had brief interviews with the few people who answered their doors, but he had no real luck until he reached 3 Tibbs, the second house on the block. The home, according to his street listing, belonged to a Mrs. Esther Conyard. The house was ill kept compared with those surrounding it, and as soon as Behr saw her through the Plexiglas outer door, he knew why. She was old, nearing ninety, and not a spry ninety at that. She wore a heavy knit sweater over a housecoat over a robe, the type of elderly woman who felt a draft when it was eighty-five and humid. She was past going outside at all, much less doing house upkeep.
    “Are you Mrs. Conyard?” Behr asked when she arrived at the door.
    “I am. But I’m not buying anything. See, I’m on a fixed income,” she told him.
    “I’m not selling, ma’am,” Behr began. “I’m investigating a boy who went missing around here last year.” He appraised her to see if this rang any bells, but she remained blank. He continued. “Maybe you heard something about it? He was a paperboy … ?” This seemed to register, and she made a show of nodding, but Behr