“Came in like locusts before the body was cold,” she said, bitterly. “Put a new lock on the door while Nick was still in the hospital and wouldn’t let him back in even to get his clothes, poor boy.”

“They have no legal right to keep him from getting his things out of the apartment,” I said. “When I find him, I’ll tell him so.”

Her face softened. “I’m forgetting my manners. Let me make you a cup of tea.”

Over Irish Breakfast tea and Vanilla Wafers, I learned quite a bit about Mrs. Peggy Donohue and her upstairs neighbors.

“I grew up around the corner, on Diamond Street,” she began. “Married a boy from down the block.”

“Childhood sweetheart?” I ventured.

“No, his best friend. The one who came back from the war alive. Married thirty-five years, two kids. Maggie met a boy from L.A. when she was at State and they live down south now. Timmy was drafted to Viet Nam in sixty-seven. He died there.” She tipped her head toward a folded flag mounted in a shadow box on the wall. “That’s all I have left of him.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Donohue.”

“Oh, call me Peg.” She sipped her tea. She made it as strong as my grandmother had brewed her Lipton, to rouse her ancient taste buds. “The kids were right about that war. We had no business there. Too late now. Have another cookie.”

“Thank you.” I bit into the brown wafer and felt I had entered, not her house, but the old woman’s memory. Even the light smearing the windows seemed to be falling from a long-ago sun.

“My husband Jim died in nineteen-seventy-one. The neighborhood was already changing by then. The old folks were dying. Their kids were moving out, down to the peninsula to those new houses where their kids had yards to play in, instead of the streets. I stayed put, with the other old women, the widows.” She fixed her blue eyes on me. “Jim and I bought this place after the war and rented out the top to help with the mortgage. In seventy-three, my tenants moved out. By then, young men had started to move into the neighborhood. The church says it’s a sin, what these boys were, so a lot of us old people wanted nothing to do with them.”

I sipped my tea as she collected her thoughts,