“Smoots?” she said again, her lips smacking around the word as if it were chocolate. “How come smoots, Patrick?”

“That’s how they measured the bridge,” I said. “They turned Oliver Smoot over and over again, across the bridge.”

“Didn’t they like him?” She looked down at the next yellow smoot marker, her face darkening.

“Yeah, they liked him. Everyone was just playing.”

“A game?” She looked up into my face and smiled.

I nodded. “That’s how they got the Smoot measurements.”

“Smoots,” she said and giggled. “Smoots, smoots.”

A truck rumbled past, shaking the bridge under our feet.

“Time to come down, honey,” Grace said.

“I—”

“Now.”

She hopped off beside me. “Smoots,” she said to me with a crazy grin, as if it were our private joke now.

In 1958, some MIT seniors laid Oliver Smoot end to end across the Mass. Ave. Bridge and declared the bridge to be 364 smoots long, plus an ear. Somehow, the measurement became a treasure to be shared by Boston and Cambridge, and whenever the bridge is touched up, the Smoot markings are freshly painted.

We walked off the bridge and headed east along the river path. It was early evening and the air was the color of scotch and the trees had a burnished glow, the smoky dark gold of the sky contrasting starkly with the explosion of cherry reds, lime greens, and bright yellows in the canopies of leaves stretched above us.

“So run this by me again,” Grace said, wrapping her arm in mine. “Your client met a woman who claimed she was the girlfriend of a mob guy.”

“But she wasn’t, and he has nothing to do with any of this as far as we can tell, and the woman vanished, and we can’t find any record of her having existed in the first place. The kid, Jason, doesn’t seem to have any skeletons in his closet outside of maybe bisexuality, which doesn’t bother the mother. We’ve tracked the kid for a week and a half and come up with nothing but some guy in a goatee who might be having an affair with the kid, but who vanished into the air.”

“And this girl you knew? The one who was killed?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. All her known acquaintances have been cleared, even the scumbags she hung out with, and Devin isn’t taking my calls. It’s sort of fuck—”

“Patrick,” Grace said.

I looked down, saw Mae.

“Whoops,” I said. “It’s sort of messed up.”

“Much better.”

“Scottie,” Mae said. “Scottie.”

Just ahead, a middle-aged couple sat on the lawn by the jogging path, a black Scottish terrier lying beside the man’s knee as he petted it absently.

“Can I?” Mae asked Grace.

“Ask the man first.”

Mae walked off the path onto the grass with a slight hesitancy as if approaching a strange, uncharted frontier.

The man and woman smiled at her, then looked at us and we waved.

“Is your dog friendly?”

The man nodded. “Too friendly.”