“Yeah?”

“May I speak to you for a moment, ma'am?” It had been years since he had done this himself, and he suddenly remembered how difficult it was to win people's trust. He suddenly recalled how many doors had slammed in his face in the old days.

“You a cop?” It was a familiar question.

“No, I'm not. I'm looking for a woman named Hilary Walker. She lived here a long time ago; when she was a little girl. Would you have any idea where she might be today?”

The woman shook her head and seemed to be looking John over. “What you want with her?”

“A friend of her parents wants to find her.”

“They shouldda looked for her twenty-five years ago. Poor kid …” She shook her head, remembering, and John knew he'd struck pay dirt. She was still talking to him through the screen door, but slowly it swung open, and she stood there in a house dress and slippers, staring at John, but not inviting him in. “That so-called uncle of hers beat her to within an inch of her life. She crawled out of that place in the pouring rain and damn near died on my doorstep. My husband and I, we took her to the hospital, and she almost didn't make it. They said he'd tried to rape her.”

“Did anyone bring charges against him?” Chapman stared at her, horrified. The story was getting worse. Hilary's fate had truly been a nightmare.

But she only shook her head. “She was too scared … little Hilary.” She shook her head. “I'd forgotten her all this time.”

“What happened after that?”

“She went to a couple of foster homes, and eventually I think she just stayed in juvie. We went to see her twice, I think it was, but it was like … well, there was somethin' missin' outta that girl, not that you could blame her. She didn't warm up to no one.” It was easy to understand that, in the face of what he was hearing.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” So that was the reason for juvenile hall, not that she had broken the law herself. Or maybe she'd done that too eventually. Sometimes that was the way it happened.

But in her case, it hadn't. They handed the files to him the first thing the next morning. The judge had signed the order without a problem. But the file of Hilary Walker was far from exciting. She had been a model student, had given no problems to the State, had been in two foster homes, whose addresses were given, and had then spent three years in juvenile hall without event. She had been given two hundred and eighty-seven dollars upon completion of her last year of high school, and five days later, she had left, never to be heard from again. It was a slim file, and told him precious little about the girl, except that her caseworkers' reports said that she was withdrawn, had no known friends, but posed no disciplinary problem either. The caseworkers who had known her then were all long since gone, and he imagined that both foster homes had disappeared too, but just to be sure, he went to the addresses listed in her file. The first woman was, amazingly, still alive and at the same address, and she thought she remembered her although she wasn't sure.

“She was the one who was so high and mighty. Didn't stay long neither. Can't remember how she worked. She started pining, and they sent her back to the hall. That's all I remember 'bout her now.” But it was enough, the woman's harsh words about other girls, the home itself told its own tale. And the second foster home had been torn down for a development years before. No wonder the woman at CBA knew nothing about her. The girl who had been here had gone God knows where to finish her life in the same kind of misery and squalor it had started, or been condemned to at the age of eight, when her father killed her mother, and then committed suicide and their best friend had abandoned her, after taking her sisters from her. In some ways, John felt as though Arthur had led her to slaughter. And it was easy to understand why she had come to Arthur's office twenty-two years before to vent her hatred. The question was, where had she gone from there? The trail was as cold as death, and he had no idea where to go from here. Where did one begin looking for a girl who had known so much pain and misery at such an early age? He had run her rap sheet through various states and the FBI, and nothing had turned up, but that didn't mean anything. She could have changed her name, gotten married several times. She could have died in the past twenty-two years. She could have done a number of things. But if she was still in New York, John promised himself he would find her.

He left Jacksonville without regret, and with a sense of relief to be escaping the humidity and the squalor he had seen there. He could only imagine how Hilary felt on her way to New York to find her sisters, only to find that Arthur had not kept track of them, any more than he had of her. What a bitter disappointment it must have been for her.

He got home on Thursday night, and left a message on Sasha's answering machine. He knew it was the night of her big performance, but it was ten o'clock when he finally got home, and he was exhausted.

And the next day at the office, he reported to Arthur Patterson what he'd found, and there was a long, sad silence at the other end. John Chapman couldn't see the silent tears rolling down Arthur's cheeks as he listened.

“After she visited you, the trail's cold. I have no idea where she went from there, but I'm working on it.” He had already given one of his assistants a list of things he wanted, he wanted him to check out schools, hospitals, employment agencies, youth hostels, hotels, all the way back to 1966. It was no small task, but somewhere something would turn up, and they could go on from there. Meanwhile, he was going to start looking for Alexandra. “I'll need to come down to your office on Monday. I want to go through the files on George Gorham's estate. I want to see if they contacted his widow recently.” Arthur nodded his head, and brushed away the tears he had shed for Hilary. John Chapman was certainly thorough.

It was a terrible thought to realize what had been Hilary's fate … but how could he have known … if only … he began coughing terribly as he thought of it, and eventually had to hang up the phone. And John went back to work. There was a mountain of files waiting for him on his desk, after being in Florida all week, and he stayed in the office until seven-thirty, and then stopped for a hamburger at the Auto Pub on the way home. It was nine o'clock when he got home, and the phone was ringing. It was Sasha.

“Where've you been all night long?” She sounded suspicious and angry.

“At my office. And I stopped and had something to eat on the way home. And how are you, Miss Riva?” There had been no preamble, no inquiry as to how he was, and she hadn't called him in Florida all week, even though he'd left his number on her machine, but he knew she'd been busy with rehearsals.

“I'm all right. I thought I'd done something to one of my tendons yesterday, but thank God I didn't.” Nothing had changed in his absence.

“I'm glad. Want to come over for a drink?.” He half wanted to see her and half didn't. The week in Florida had been incredibly depressing and he needed cheering up, but on the other hand he didn't want to listen to the familiar litany about her ligaments and her tendons.

“I'm exhausted. I'm already at the apartment. But I'm free this weekend. We could do something tomorrow.”

“Why don't we go somewhere? How about the Hamptons or Fire Island?” The summer had already set in, and it was hot everywhere. It was going to be a beautiful weekend.

“Dominique Montaigne is having a birthday party on Sunday. I promised him I'd be there, and I can't let him down. I'm really sorry.” Ballet, ballerinas, dancers, rehearsals, performances. It was endless.

“That's all right. We could go for the day. I'd love to get out of town and lie on a beach somewhere.”

“So would I.” But he knew she would lie down for exactly half an hour and then she would start prancing around and flexing muscles, so nothing got stiff while she was relaxing. And there were times when it was extremely unnerving.

“I'll pick you up at nine o'clock. Okay?” She agreed, and he hung up, feeling suddenly sad, and indescribably lonely. She was never there for him when he needed her, and instead he found himself thinking about a girl he didn't know, who had been bounced between foster homes and juvenile hall more than twenty years before. It was crazy to be thinking about her now. He felt like Eloise with her imaginary characters. It made about as much sense, but she had become so real to him in the last week. Much more than he wanted.

The next day he and Sasha went to the beach. In the end they just went to Montauk, on Long Island, and it was relaxing and nice. He jogged along the beach while she exercised, and they stopped for a lobster dinner on the way home. It was eleven-thirty that night before they got back to his apartment, and fell into bed like two kids. She was in a good mood, and they made love without Sasha's complaining once that his passion was going to do her great bodily harm or permanent damage. And wrapped around each other, they slept until ten o'clock the next morning, when she bounded out of bed, looked at her watch, and gave a shriek that woke him.

“What's wrong? … where are you? …” He squinted in the sunlight streaming across his room, and saw her rushing into the bathroom, and heard her turn on the shower. He threw back the sheets, and lumbered slowly in to see what she was up to. “What are you doing in there?” The bathroom was full of steam, she had her hair tied in a knot on top of her head, and her face was turned full into the shower.

“What does it look like?”

“What are you doing up so early?”