Macey checked the newspaper index to find another fire, see how it compared. There’d been one a month earlier, on November 1, 1959. She scrolled to that. November 1 turned out to be an oven fire. “Thirty-three firemen respond,” said the headline.

So … thirty-three men arrived to put out a fire in an oven, but twenty-seven arrived and did not put out a fire in a barn.

Well, she was not a firefighter. Maybe the oven was in a three-family home with a dozen little kids at risk. Maybe the barn, roaring hot, huge old timbers ready to collapse, posed too big a risk for the firemen to get near.

She rewound slowly, stopping to catch headlines, see if she could wrap her fingers around this elusive year, 1959. October and November were about the upcoming presidential election: Kennedy and Johnson against Nixon and Lodge. It sounded so antique. She had never heard of Lodge.

When the librarian had a minute, Macey asked, “Are there phone books going back to 1959?”

“Better than that.” The librarian showed her something called a city directory. There was one per year for the last eighty-five years. Macey hauled the fat old orange 1959 volume off the shelf. The front half of the book was alphabetical by last name, like a regular phone book; the back half, however, truly cool, was alphabetical by street.

She looked up Shell Road. It listed every house, telling who lived there, whether they owned or rented, and their phone numbers. There were her grandparents, Putnam and Leandra Macey, same address, of course, and Austin’s grandparents, Henry and Monica Fent.

There were no other names Macey recognized.

There was no listing for Mr. Sibley. There was no listing of a barn apartment at all. She got 1958 off the shelf, and that year did have a barn listing: a Miss Fortunato had lived there. So … Mr. Sibley had not lived in the barn after all? She had the whole story wrong?

She flipped to the last-name section in the 1959 volume. There he was. And now she had his full name: Wade Sibley. But his address was Schoolhouse Road instead of Shell Road. How odd.

Back to the second half of the book. She looked up Schoolhouse Road. Mr. Sibley was listed under the junior high itself. So they had not listed him where he lived, but where he worked. There had to have been dozens of teachers in the junior high … but only Mr. Sibley was listed as if he lived in the classroom.

Macey thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the books she had checked out of the library. “You are harried by day,” he once wrote, “and haunted by night. Humiliated by signs reading White and Colored. Your first name is nigger. Your middle name is boy. You are living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what is next.…”