I drove back to the parks that bordered the center of town and let Peppy root around in the lamplight. She was annoyed at having been left in the car for too much of the afternoon and showed it by breaking away to greet other dogs and refusing to come when I called her.

I’d been sitting too long, too. I grabbed her leash and ran the length of the park five or six times, until Peppy was panting loudly. The rain was still falling, not hard, but we were both damp by the time I bundled Peppy back into the Mustang.

Although I saw some interesting restaurants, I didn’t feel like changing into dry clothes, nor like leaving the dog in the car again. I went to a co-op grocer on the town’s west side that had organic carry-out meals and took a salmon dinner back to the B and B with me. The owner provided a common room, an alcove, really, with a microwave and a small refrigerator.

“Who do you think the doctor is that Gertrude Perec was protecting from my scar picking?” I asked Peppy when we were in our room and dry again. “And what painful episode was she talking about? Do you think it has anything to do with Emerald Ferring?”

Peppy didn’t look up from the peanut-butter bone I’d bought her, not for a question that could be answered only by consulting a medium. I tried texting Cady to ask if she’d tell me the doctor’s name, but she said her grandmother would know I’d gotten it from her and she didn’t want to cause any more domestic friction.

Was Cady afraid of her grandmother? Probably a little, but maybe she was protecting her, too. I didn’t really need to know—I was grasping at straws, after all, looking for clues about Emerald Ferring at a protest camp that had disappeared almost thirty-five years ago. Anyway, it’s impossible to persuade people via text to tell you something they want to keep to themselves.

Gertrude Perec didn’t rate a Wikipedia entry. My subscription databases said she was seventy-eight, retired, owned her own home, had a modest pension, collected Social Security, and owned two apartment buildings on Louisiana Street. Cady had said her grandmother had lost her husband in a car crash; that had happened long before the digital age, so there was no mention of his death. Gertrude’s brother, Clarence, who’d taken over the grandfather’s farm, had died ten years earlier; he’d never married and the farm had been sold when he died.

I couldn’t find any record of Gertrude’s only child, Cady’s mother, either. Nothing about Gertrude and a doctor. Had he been Gertrude’s boss? Her lover?