“I haven’t found any trace of them. I was going to go back to Chicago today, but early this morning someone called to say that she’d seen them in the same place where another person disappeared thirty-some years ago.”

“Sonia Kiel.” A woman in a severely tailored navy blazer spoke. “She was picked up from in front of the Lion’s Pride—that bar at Eighth and Rhode Island—we’ve been trying to get them shut down, or at least to close at eleven so that people unfortunate enough to live nearby can get a night’s rest.”

“Yes,” I said. “She called me from the bar, but by the time I got there, she was in a coma. Someone had slipped her roofies.”

“Poor Shirley,” the tailored blazer said. “She’s always worried about Sonia. If only she could have made a success out of Boston instead of coming back to Lawrence.”

“This morning Shirley seemed more bitter than worried,” I said.

“You’re a stranger, and Shirley is awkward around strangers,” the blazer said. “I worked with her for twenty years at Emigrant Bank and Savings. She was tireless, committed to the well-being of our clients and to her co-workers.”

Joy Helmsley nodded emphatic agreement. “It’s not easy having a child with the kind of problems Sonia does. Maybe it seems cruel to you, putting her in a group home, but she’s forty-something. Shirley and Nate are eighty or so. How can they take care of an adult child!”

I held up my hands: stop sign. “I’m sure you’re right. Mrs. Kiel only presented one face to me, anger, but you all know her and I don’t. I had about thirty seconds on the phone with Sonia at two this morning before the bartender took the phone from her. Sonia said she’d seen Ferring and August Veriden at the place, maybe a cemetery, where Matt Chastain was buried.”

“Oh, she was making that up!” Helmsley burst out. “We all know she lives in a daydream about—”

“Sonia knew a detail I hadn’t included in my flyer,” I said. “That’s why I believe her, despite any emotional problems she may have.”

“What is it you want to know?” Lisa Carmody pulled the conversation back onto the main track.

“Does everyone know who Matt Chastain is?”

Most of the women shook their heads, so I gave the thumbnail of what I knew, or at least what I’d been told, leaving out my guess that Chastain was Cady Perec’s father.

“Oh, yes. That was about the time that they had the big demonstration out by the missile silo,” a woman who hadn’t spoken before said. “Jenny Perec was marching with the anti-nuke people. I know Gertrude agreed with her in principle, but she hated it when Jenny started camping out with them on the missile site.”