Harry sat down on the chair, painted the same color as the desk. He carefully slid the drawer all the way out. Most of what he found was paid bills, bank statements, an insurance policy for the station wagon. There were no letters from a private investigator. He did find an expired passport that had been issued when Alice was just nineteen years old. He’d never seen a picture of his stepmother when she’d been young. She was makeup-free, her skin as pale as it was now, but her eyes seemed even larger in her face, her face a little bit rounder. She was beautiful, and Harry wondered what she’d been like as a teenager. It was somehow impossible to imagine her any different than she was now. He stared at the picture for a long time, and she seemed to stare back, telling him nothing.

He flipped through the passport to see where she’d been, and a photograph fell out. It was a picture of a young Alice standing with a man Harry didn’t recognize on a cobblestone street, a stone building behind them with the word Funiculaire in metal letters on its side. Both Alice and the man were wearing long, heavy coats. The photographer had focused more on the building behind them, the rail tracks leading up a steep slope, and less on Alice and the man, both a little blurry. Even so, it was clear that the man was quite a bit older than Alice. His arm was draped possessively over Alice’s slim shoulders. Her father, probably. Harry tried to remember if he knew anything about Alice’s family, but all he could recall was his own father telling him that Alice’s parents were dead, and that she wasn’t close to anyone in her extended family.

Bill hadn’t talked too much about Alice, except for the time he said she reminded him of Maine. For some reason, that description had stuck. Harry heard a noise coming from the front of the house. He quickly returned the passport to where he’d found it, shoved the drawer shut, and went to look. The mailman had pushed the mail through the front door’s slot. Harry picked up an envelope from a bank and a Nordstrom catalogue, and brought them to the kitchen counter. He considered a second cup of coffee but decided he was already jumpy enough. He drank a glass of orange juice instead, flipping through the catalogue, barely seeing the pictures. Then he checked his phone. Nothing from Grace, not that he was expecting something.