“It must be hard to have them so far away,” I said, trying to infuse some sincerity into my voice.

“That’s my business,” she said roughly. “Don’t you have to be someplace else?”

I suppose I did. I stepped outside but stopped to say, “If it wasn’t Matt Chastain you thought Dr. Cordley should know about, who was it?”

Shirley smiled in a wolflike way that showed all her teeth, which were stained from coffee or cigarettes or maybe the fuzzy orange stuff on her kitchen counter. Even a fantasy lover would have brought more comfort to her daughter than that smile. She shut the door on me without speaking.

“I hope your dog mother never looked at you like that,” I said to Peppy when I got back into the car.

Peppy licked my ear sympathetically. An hour with the Kiels made me feel as though I needed a bath in some kind of fumigation sink, the kind where they pummel your body with steam jets. As a substitute I spent an hour in the open air with my dog.

We left the car a block from Gertrude Perec’s house and ran to a nearby park. This one had winding paths that led down to the south side of the river. Peppy flushed a rabbit and jumped in and out of the water. I ran along the river’s edge, letting cool air and motion empty my mind. By the time we returned to the car, I was feeling easier, almost as though I’d had five hours of sleep instead of four, almost as though I’d spoken to my own mother instead of Sonia Kiel’s.

“You stink,” I told Peppy, who grinned at me happily, “but at least it’s a good honest stench.”

I climbed into the passenger seat to look up Matt Chastain, Kiel’s errant graduate student, leaving the door open so I didn’t have to breathe quite so much rotting dog. If Sonia had been fourteen when Chastain vanished, then he’d disappeared in the early eighties, before everyone’s history had been digitized.

I searched news stories and law-enforcement databases but didn’t find any reports of a public-health disaster involving Kiel or Chastain. Whatever had happened, I guess it had bruised Kiel’s sensitive ego more than anything else.

I also couldn’t find any trace of a Matt or Mathias or Matthew Chastain as a cell biologist, although there were dozens of men with that name scattered around the country. It would be a waste of my time and the client’s money for me to start calling them just in the hopes of finding a person who could tell me where Sonia had seen Emerald Ferring a week ago: Were you a graduate student in Kansas in the 1980s? Do you remember where Sonia Kiel saw you the last night you were in town?