Oddly enough, the station was the first place I’d felt at home since leaving Chicago. The jurisdiction might be different, but the desk sergeant, the wanted posters, the anxious mom seeking news about her boy—they were what I’d known since the first time I went to work with my dad, who’d been a Chicago patrol officer for thirty years. I could remember him lifting me onto the high counter when I was four and old Sergeant Reardon pinning a star on my jacket. I’ve never felt so important since.

I showed my credentials to the Lawrence desk sergeant. I repeated my story, which sounded increasingly threadbare with each repetition. The sergeant looked at Emerald’s and August’s pictures and smiled pityingly.

“This is a college town, miss. Look out the window, or at least go over to Ninth and Massachusetts, and you’ll see dozens of kids just like him. We don’t pay attention to them unless they’re drunk and disorderly or beating each other up, and even then, unless we need an ambulance, we just tell them to go home and sleep it off.”

I wondered how true that was, especially with a black youth, but all I’d get if I pressed him would be a boatload of bad will. Not the way to start off in a new place.

“Ms. Ferring, the older woman he’s traveling with, supposedly hired him to make a documentary about her life and work. She went to school here back in the sixties, so I’d like to find where she lived, check if they’ve been to her dorm or apartment or whatever to film. They don’t have old phone books at the library—where else can I look?”

The sergeant shrugged, but an older officer who’d stopped to listen said, “The city has a historical society just a couple of blocks away. You might try there.”

There was something to be said for a small city: the library, the police station, the historical society, and bars and restaurants were all within about a six-block area along Massachusetts, the main north-south street. The historical society was in a massive Victorian building at Tenth and Massachusetts. It had been built as a bank, apparently, with all the opulent fittings that nineteenth-century financiers liked in their temples of mammon. Funny that today’s moguls, whose real net worth is about seventy-five times the Morgans’ and Carnegies’, operate inside minimalist glass-and-steel walls.

The woman at the entrance told me that while I was free to look around the three floors of the museum, I needed an appointment to use the archives. She gave me a form to fill out, but I persuaded her to let me talk to the archivist. I followed her to a back room, where we ducked around an antique wedding dress hung just inside the door.