Macey put her phone down sadly. “Oh, Aus! What was it like for Mr. Sibley? If that woman was welcoming, he must have felt as if he were living in a freezer.”

They hugged to find the warmth Mr. Sibley had not received. It was a quick, neighborly hug. Austin did not want to be neighbors with Macey. But that’s what this is about, he thought. Neighbors, and what they are.

“Mace,” he said, and he could hardly swallow, hardly think. He absolutely could not talk about Mr. Sibley another minute. He could not think about Miss McCune’s poem, or divorce, or parents, or grandparents. “Let’s go to a movie tonight.”

She smiled as if he were a prince, the kind who carved marshmallow sticks, the kind whose T-shirt would hang forever in the back porch of their memories. “Yes. Let’s.”

9

Mrs. Johnson had forced a local history project upon Aus. She stuck him with railroads. He would just as soon lie down on the tracks as waste his time researching railroads in Connecticut. Every time he thought about it, he went into a coma, or else had to go outside and shift some stone wall. So far he had not collected a single fact about railroads in Connecticut. The month of May was rushing right along, and soon the project would be due.

But his first date with Macey had left him giddy and light of heart.

He wanted to scrap all events unrelated to Macey and throw himself into all things that touched her. So railroads were stupid and pointless, but 1959 was interesting after all.

“I want to pry into somebody’s life, Graff,” said Austin. “Are there books on how to do that?”

“Very popular hobby,” said Graff, handing him two books.

Austin checked them both out.

“Look at all this stuff that’s public record!” he said to Macey, mesmerized by what he could find out about strangers. “Things we could find on file in the Fairfield County judicial offices in Bridgeport,” he said excitedly, “include affidavits, breach of whatever, tax liens, certificates of title, changes of name, deeds, fictious names, judgments, powers of attorney, pet licenses!”

“Did Mr. Sibley have any of those?” she said dubiously. “And if they didn’t save records from voting, are they going to save pet licenses? Come on, Aus.”

They were sitting on the carpet in the hall outside the media center. Theirs was a school of hall sitters, so that many pairs of legs stuck out on both sides, making the usable corridor very narrow, unless you ran down the hall, leaping over legs like a high jumper. Macey and Austin ignored the treads and heels that passed airborne over their flat knees.

“What we need to go after,” said Austin, “is driving history. We send in his date of birth and twenty-five dollars, and we get Wade Sibley’s driving history.”

“We can’t do that.”