“You look like a maid,” I said when I met her at the corner to walk her down the trail to the ARCO station.

Sage looked down at her outfit. “That’s the point. Make us look as servile as possible so men feel good when we wait on them with their coffee and slice of pie.”

I hadn’t thought about this before. How almost all waitresses, especially in diners, wore outfits that looked like maids’ uniforms, except in bright colors. That customers wanted this.

“It’s hotter than Hades,” Sage said when we reached the mouth of the trail. It was the kind of thing Charlotte would say. “Oh why, oh why, did I put on the pantyhose?” She reached under her skirt and started to roll them down, unlacing her sneakers and slipping them off only when the hose were round her ankles. She used my arm to balance. The temperature had already reached the nineties, even though it was only early afternoon.

We walked along the narrow section of the trail in single file, Sage in front. It didn’t feel any cooler in the shade. The air was so heavy I felt like I couldn’t get a deep breath. Sage had now slung her waitressing shoes over her shoulder by the laces. She’d wanted to talk but not on the phone, and I was waiting for her to start.

“You know Tony De Martino started working at the diner as a dishwasher?”

Tony De Martino was the youngest. He was Thomas’s age and always out front working on engines. I wondered if he’d also taken potshots at us with his BB gun. I didn’t know he was working with Sage.

“Well, he has, and last night we were sitting in the break room, just smoking and talking. He said he’d heard something about Wilson McVay beating up some guy.” I stopped walking behind her and she stopped, too, and turned around. “Tony said he heard Wilson beat someone so bad he might be dead. But he heard it was about a girl from Valley Forge Elementary who got attacked after getting off the school bus.”

“Wilson killed him?” I had an ache deep in my chest, like the time I had pneumonia and it hurt to breathe in.

“I don’t know. Maybe not. I mean, they have other stuff wrong, like the school bus.”

“But the other night you said they were talking about a girl from the mountain.”

“Well, now they think somewhere else, which is a good thing, right?”

“How did Tony hear?”

“Danny Shields. But you know what he’s like.” Danny was known to exaggerate. Once Sage had a timed ten-second kiss with Danny in a game of spin-the-bottle. He’d bragged for months about an all-nighter. He bragged about everything.

“But he went up there with Wilson?”

“I don’t know who Wilson took.”

“Did you tell Tony anything?”

“No.”