To Austin, Macey looked like a goddess; a primitive creature of beauty and rage. If her short locks had turned to snakes, he would not have been surprised.

Austin thought: We’re here at last. This is where we needed to come out. Not how Mr. Sibley conducted himself. But how we conducted ourselves.

His need for his parents was so intense at that moment that he did not know how people grew up; how they went out into the world alone; how they survived at all.

“Where is Mr. Sibley standing?” said Macey, tapping the lineup photo. “You’re wearing heavy jackets. It must have been very cold. Did you offer him a coat? Did you bring him a cup of coffee? Did he spend the night here?”

There was no answer.

“Your neighbor has no home, and no clothes, and no car, and no food, and no friends. Grandfather. What did you and Grandmother do?”

Her grandfather wilted. He took his wife’s hand, the hand he had held for over half a century. He sank down beside her like a baked apple, getting smaller and lower and more wrinkled.

It was her grandmother who finally answered. “We did nothing,” she said. “We went back inside.”

They live in the right state, thought Austin.

This is where we do nothing, and go back inside. Austin’s grandparents were not amused to be summoned into their own living room at almost midnight by two unsmiling teenagers.

“What have you two been up to? This is a ridiculous hour.”

“Either they wrecked the car or they’re going to have a baby,” said his grandmother.

Austin actually felt his amazement at this remark. “Once I learned that you were the banker who refused a checking account to Wade Sibley because he was black, Grandfather, I had to go on researching that barn fire.”

His grandfather’s jaw lifted as if to duke it out with fists; as if his grandson planned to strike him and he planned to strike back. But Austin, who enjoyed fighting, who thought wrestling and boxing were great sports, was not up for combat tonight. He handed Macey’s seven photographs to his grandfather. Grandfather looked at them without interest and passed them on to Austin’s grandmother, who leafed through the same short stack.

“Times were different then,” said Grandfather irritably. “There is no reason for you to stir the ashes. Those were ugly days, and we were witnesses to some of the ugliness. But it’s ancient. It’s history.”

“And were you just witnesses?”

“Exactly what do you mean by that?” snapped Grandfather.

“Did you set the fire?”

“You are completely out of line!” said his grandfather. “We were asleep in bed, and when we got up, a fire was raging, and the occupant of the building was safely outside.”

“He wasn’t an occupant,” said Macey. “He was a man named Wade Sibley.”