The kettle started boiling, and I poured water into the mugs. “April, have you talked to Josie since she came to the hospital?”

She turned away from me and became very busy at the counter, moving the tea bag from one cup to the next until all three had turned a pale yellow.

“Josie disappeared the same night your father died, and I’m very worried about her. Did she run away with Billy?”

She scrunched her face unhappily. “I promised not to say anything.”

“I found Billy’s sports car wrecked under the Skyway around one in the morning. I think the English reporter had been in it, but where were Billy and Josie?”

“Billy gave Daddy his car,” she whispered softly. “He said he couldn’t use it anymore, and he knew Daddy didn’t have a car, if we wanted to go out he had to borrow a car from a buddy, or sometimes he drove us in the semi if he thought Mr. Grobian wouldn’t find out, you know, it was By-Smart property.”

“When did he give your dad the car?” I tried to keep my voice low and level, not to make her more nervous than she already was.

“Monday. He came to the house Monday morning, after they brought me home from the hospital. Ma had to be at work; they only gave her one hour off to bring me home, but Daddy was working a late shift so he didn’t leave until three. And then, then Josie came. I called her and told her to come here before she went to school. She and Billy used to meet here, see, it was a place she could come and be doing her homework so her ma didn’t mind, and my ma, she just thought Billy was a boy from school, we didn’t tell her he was one of the Bysens, she would, like, totally lose it if she knew that.”

Those school projects that Josie was so intent on, her science and health studies homework she had to do with April. Maybe I should have guessed that they were a cover story, but it didn’t matter now.

“Why was Billy so angry with his family?” I asked.

“He wasn’t angry with them,” April said earnestly. “Worried, he was worried by what he saw at the plant.”

“And what was that?”

She hunched a shoulder. “You know, everybody works hard for not enough money. Like Ma. Even Daddy, he made more driving a truck, but Billy said it wasn’t right, people’s lives being so hard.”

“Nothing more specific than that?” I was disappointed.

She shook her head. “I never listened that hard, mostly he would be talking to Josie, you know, off in one corner, but Nicaragua came in somehow, and Fly the Flag, I think—”