When looked at that way, my real job and this new one had blind alleyways and locked doors in common. Only this time I was starting with almost no information. If the call had been from anyone else, I would have turned over the burner to the police and given a statement to go with it.

I set that aside and concentrated on searching the girls’ bedroom. I looked under beds and among the few neatly displayed dolls on a low shelf. None of them looked as if they’d been played with. No comb had ever been yanked through their gleaming hair, no dress had been stripped off repeatedly to fray at the edges. I remembered my dolls, a ragtag, half-naked assortment with dirty faces and limbs askew. They had been beside me in bathtubs and sandboxes, my companions and confessors until I was old enough to range farther afield.

In newer condition, they’d been my best friends during the heart surgeries that had characterized the first years of my life. Decades later, when my mother had suggested we trash them because my own daughters would never want anything so vile, I’d balked. Today my dolls are carefully packed away under my bed in Delray Beach. I’m not particularly sentimental, but I am loyal to a fault.

Which made me think about Teo again.

When I heard the theme from Murder She Wrote, I grabbed the burner before I realized the song was coming from the master bedroom. I crossed the hall and found my cell phone, answering just in time to catch Sophie.

“Checking in,” she said. “Anything new?”

I debated silently, but in the end I told her about the new phone and Wendy’s call.

“She sounds like she’s in this for the long haul,” Sophie said. “You see that, too?”

She was right. I did see it, and it worried me.

She didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re going to be there awhile. I can drive over. Make a list of whatever you need that you didn’t pack.”

“This could all blow over.”

“So give me the guy’s name. Did she spell it for you?”

“Milton Kerns.” I stopped. Had Wendy said Kerns or Kern? And did it have a silent a in the middle? “I think that’s what she said.”

“Hopefully it’s spelled the way it sounded to you.” Sophie quizzed me about the rest of the call, and finished with the question I was asking myself. “Think this is busywork?”

“You mean if I spend my time looking for someone who doesn’t exist, I can’t look for her? I don’t know, but she’s a mother. She must know I’m already immersed in busywork. Showers, meals, homework. And a child who isn’t sleeping.”

“This has to be hard on your nieces. What have you told them about their mom?”

“Not much. They aren’t asking a lot of questions.”

“That seems odd.”

“Everything seems odd. It is odd. Supremely odd.”

“I’ll see what I can find on your sister’s guy.”