“It’s easy. You just give your phone number and then you get points—”

“I don’t want a card.”

“OK, no worries. That’ll be fourteen dollars and eighty-seven cents. Do you need a bag?”

“Yes, please.”

“Not a problem.”

As she dropped the test kit into a way-too-big plastic Walgreens sack, Kiersten Kindergaard sighed and said, “Another little one. Congratulations. Some girls have all the luck.”

She exited Walgreens by the main door and a scene on the sidewalk startled her. A sharp-edged heavy chunk of pink granite. A rusty railroad spike. A metal fork. A broken piece of road reflector. Nearby under a dirty blanket huddled a teenage boy, a wide-eyed and unwashed, a skinned-kneed, barefoot child, scrawling with chalk on the sidewalk.

She stopped and stared. His face seemed tear-streaked but he grinned. He had drawn a many-colored peace sign, three feet wide. The earnestly lopsided drawing made her heart ache.

“Can I help? I’m a…”

What did she mean to say? She was a mother? A cop? The cops don’t give a damn. A homeless man goes missing, nobody cares. Did she tell him that she knew of a homeless shelter run by a priest who would watch out for him?

“Do you need help? Can I take you somewhere?”

Deliberate as an ocean snail, he withdrew beneath the blanket. Then with invisible motility he moved his wrinkly shell and covered his drawing. From underneath, he hissed, “Chickenshit!”

“Call Leroy Fanta,” she commanded her phone yet again just minutes later, because southbound on the highway, heading home with a heavy heart, she had just honked at the editor’s old green Tercel heading the opposite direction into La Crosse. She thought Fanta looked more than usually disheveled as they whipped past each other and she caught a glimpse of his long gray hair tangling in the window breeze.

She left a new message: “Grape, is everything OK with you? That was me honking. I have some historical stuff to ask you about, so call me back.”

She let a long moment pass, a long bolt of asphalt beneath her, feeling speechless but not complete.

“Grape, please, I’m worried.”

She saw an email had dropped in from Oppo, sent at 4:33 A.M. Not now. Not on the highway.

She touched speed-dial 1.

“Denise, never mind, please, why I was in La Crosse, but I just ran into someone who needs Father McCartney.”

CHAPTER 22

Sammy Hot Dog throws his bedspread off and fills his lungs with a gasp. The street and sidewalk are empty again. The drugstore parking lot is empty again. The woman in the smock still watches him out the window. He knees back from his drawing and stands. He has added something—actually subtracted something—that he remembers Cassie often said.