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like she’s afraid of the light. I don’t think she works, unless it’s over the telephone. The new daddy, he has a van with something about upholstery work written on the side, so maybe he does upholstery at home. But my guess is he isn’t a working fool. And then there’s the former Daddy Greg, who I guess is just Greg now. He comes around now and then. No telling what Jazzy sees. That girl needs a better home life.”
    â€œBless her heart,” Mom said. “Jazzy is a smart little thing. She can learn anything.”
    â€œShe’s being wasted,” Dad said.
    Mom patted Dad’s hand. “I know, but all we can do is stay on Protective Services.”
    Jimmy and I went over to the cabinet for some coffee cups, got coffee from the coffeemaker and sat down at the table.
    â€œShe’ll spend the night here,” Mom said. “And I bet her mother and her newest daddy won’t even miss her.”
    â€œDrunk bastards,” Dad said. “Or maybe it’s something else they’re hopped up on. Or maybe they aren’t hopped up on anything, it’s just the way they act. Hard to tell.”
    â€œHopped up?” Jimmy said. “People still say that?”
    â€œI do,” said Dad.
    â€œHow about twenty-three skidoo?” Jimmy said.
    â€œOr Oh you, kid,” I said.
    â€œOr the bee’s knees,” Trixie said.
    Dad grinned at us. “You’re asking for it, busters. And you too, young lady.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    That night, after my brother and his wife left and everyone had gone to bed, I sat at my old desk and glanced through the file Mercury had put together for me. I found myself looking at Caroline’s picture over and over. I read through all the notes and filled my head with all the facts that were available. It was like planting seeds in my gray matter, trying to get them to take root and break through and bloom.
    I looked for clues as if I might find them: Colonel Mustard in the study with the wrench. That sort of thing. I thought of how terrible and surprising it might have been for her, attacked by someone she trusted most likely, since that’s the way it usually worked out.
    It wasn’t a pleasant thing to think about before bedtime, but I stayed with it, tried to figure a little of this and a little of that. There were no parents to talk to. No relatives she was really connected to. There was just the girl who said she hadn’t paid her movie rental bill, her library fine. The girl’s name was Ronnie Fisher and there was an address for her, but I didn’t see much in that. Still, I made a note to contact her. I finally went to bed. This time I didn’t dream.

11
    A month went by, and for some reason, though it interested me the most, I couldn’t get up enough of a head of steam to write about Caroline Allison. I knew how I wanted to write about her, but for whatever reason I didn’t have enough gas in the tank. I think the business with Gabby had evaporated my fuel.
    There were people I ought to interview so I could get a larger picture of who she was and what might have happened to her, but I wasn’t up to it. I was having a hard enough time just learning to be me again, not waking up and thinking I was still in Iraq and that pretty soon I’d be on the streets with my rifle and my asshole clenched, hoping today wouldn’t be the day I got my head blown off.
    In the meantime I wrote columns on stem cell research, people who took the Bible literally, and even wrote one on gardening gleaned from Francine’s old notes. It was an easy thing to do, to use those notes, and I took advantage of it and got my column written quickly that week. It gave me more time to read through the research I had on Caroline, though what I had I had read a half-dozen times.
    Then, one morning, all the notes, all my thoughts came together and I wrote a kind of lest-we-forget piece with the