Ms. Albritten’s front garden was similarly groomed, with bushes whose names I didn’t know sporting red leaves against the November gray. The little house was painted mauve, with deep purple trim around the windows. An old hitching post stood at the curb; I tied Peppy’s leash to it.

As I rang the bell, I could hear a television loudly proclaiming the virtues of a drug to help bladder control. I waited for the nanosecond pause between commercial’s end and program’s resumption before ringing again.

After another longish moment, the sound was muted and I could hear Ms. Albritten’s slow step to the door. She was perhaps ninety, stooped only slightly from age, wearing a heavy sweater over a navy-figured dress. She frowned at me but didn’t speak.

“My name is V.I. Warshawski,” I said. “I’m from Chicago, and I’m trying to find Emerald Ferring. A woman named Barbara at Riverside Church said you might know her.”

Ms. Albritten peered at me through thick lenses for a long moment, as if comparing my face to a wanted poster. “I don’t think I can help you, Ms. V.I. whoever from Chicago. I never heard of an Emerald Ferring.”

I started to remind her who Ferring was, that I was sure she’d been here with August Veriden a week or so ago, but I saw her jaw set in a stubborn line: she knew all this, and she wasn’t going to talk to me.

I stared at a broken television in the driveway next door, thinking it through. I wondered if Lisa Carmody, the Riverside associate pastor, had called her, warning her that I would probably come round, urging her not to talk to me. Did Carmody and Albritten herself know where Emerald and August were, or was this a more basic matter—a white stranger poking her nose in where it didn’t belong?

“Ma’am, would you talk to Ms. Ferring’s friends in Chicago, the people who asked me to come down here to find her?”

Before she could say no, I brought up Troy Hempel’s phone number, calling him on FaceTime so that Albritten could see that he was also African-American. Fortunately, he answered immediately.

“V.I. Warshawski! What is it? Have you found Ms. Emerald?”

I put him on speaker and held the phone so that Ms. Albritten could see the screen—and be seen—through the crack in the door. “I’m on the street where Emerald Ferring lived until she was seven. She was here about ten days ago with August Veriden, looking at her childhood home, and now I’m with a neighbor who needs you to vouch for me before she’ll tell me anything. This is Ms. Nell Albritten.”

Albritten took the phone but stepped back into the house to talk. “Who are you, young man, and why should I trust you?”