So instead of a phone number, I put down my e-mail address. “Just have her contact me there and tell her I have something of hers.” I left the piece of paper on the counter by the sink.

“Her driver’s license.”

“Sure. And a couple of other things. I think she’ll know.”

“Like I said, I don’t think I’ll be seeing her. She don’t choose to drop by here.”

“Maybe if you got a dog,” I offered.

She scowled. I turned and went for the front door, stepping gingerly, scanning the floor from side to side, occasionally glancing overhead. There was no sign of Quincy. As I squeezed out the front door, I heard Jimmy shout from the back of the house: “Mom, get the darts!” I ran back to the car as quickly as I could.

Once behind the wheel, I looked at the slip of paper Stefanie’s mother had given me. Rambling Rose Circle. When this was all over, and I’d pulled myself together, I was going to call that Carpington guy, our local councilman, and demand that a new bylaw be drafted requiring all future streets to be named “Main” or “South” or “Hill.”

I opted to try her house, rather than the Valley Forest Estates sales office. It was, I suspected, long past closing time, and I didn’t want this to be hanging over me until the next day. I looked in my map book again and found Rambling Rose, a cul-de-sac on the north side of Oakwood in another newly developed part of town that was even closer to the grocery store than our house. This, I was discovering, was what Oakwood was: one Valley Forest Estates after another. Thousands and thousands of acres stripped of trees and bulldozed flat so a seemingly infinite number of cookie-cutter homes could be built and moved into by families who had fled the city for the good life.

On the way, I stopped at a phone booth and looked for any Knights in the phone book on Rambling Rose, found an S. Knight at number 17, made a note of the phone number on the scrap of paper Stefanie’s mother had given me, and got back into the car.

It was getting to be dusk, around 7 P.M., when I pulled up out front. It was everything you’d expect a new home in a new subdivision to be. An all-brick house devoid of any distinctive architectural touches, dropped on a thirty-foot lot. Accommodating the two-car garage and driveway meant that from the street, the house was one huge rectangular door with a couple of windows above it on the second floor. Cement patio stones ran down the left of the garage, leading to a front door.