Macey thought. “This person was a teacher. Would there be a record … I don’t know … school records, somehow?”

“That would be in the personnel department of the board of education, but even if they would let you look in a personnel file, which they wouldn’t, it wouldn’t include voter status, and they don’t keep anything after ten years anyway. You should have asked twenty years ago. But hey—I bet you weren’t born then.”

They both smiled. “Who are you looking for?” the woman asked.

“A man named Wade Sibley.”

“Who was he? What did he do?”

“He was my mother’s seventh-grade teacher,” said Macey, and a truly brilliant lie came to her. “I’m trying to track him down to invite him to a fiftieth-birthday party for my mom.” Why am I lying? she thought.

“That’s so neat!” cried the clerk, looking around with an eager frown, ready to throw herself into the search for Wade Sibley. But there was no place to look.

Papa picked her up. “Macey, darling, your parents will be very late in the city, catching up on work they missed from going to San Francisco, so you’ll stay over with us. Did you have a good day? How was school?”

“School was fine. Papa, rack your brains. Remember something about Mr. Sibley and the barn fire for me.”

“Are you still bogged down in 1959?” said Papa, laughing. “It’s your hair. Tell you what, we’ll get you a wig. Want to be a frosted bouffant blonde?”

Last night she’d asked Mom about 1959, and Mom had replied that she’d gotten her first Barbie that year.

If they thought talking about teased hair and Barbie dolls would make her forget Mr. Sibley and 1959, they had a crummy strategy. The more they slid away from her questions, the more she noticed.

Mrs. Loomis’s letter entered Macey’s soul again, and the taste of her cinnamon-icing sticky buns suddenly came into Macey’s mouth—a food memory to go along with her smoke memory.

At the intersection, they had to wait for about twenty cars to turn in front of them.

Every driver and every passenger was white.

The only colors the town came in were white and pink.

It was true in school.

It was true on Shell Road.

It was true in church.

It was true in town hall.

It was true. This was a pink-and-white town. And in 1959, it was not only pink and white, if it took burning down barns to do it, the town meant to stay that way.

And it had.

She looked at her grandfather and thought, Which neighbor did set that fire?

She killed the thought. It was too sick, too horrible. But she was tasting smoke again, and she said, “Papa, who were Mom’s other teachers? They’d have known Mr. Sibley. Are any of them still around?”