“Josie, use your brain. If someone in your building had two strangers staying with them, how long would it be before you heard about it?”

She flushed and hung her head.

“People talk. They like to have news to report. Billy’s family has hired the biggest detective agency in the world, certainly in Chicagoland, to find him. Eventually one of the investigators will talk to someone who knows Mary Ann, and they’ll hear about the strange young couple who sometimes take her dog out for her, or pick up pizza and Coke at the Jewel, or hide in the kitchen when the visiting nurse comes. And if they come for Billy, they might hurt you, or Mary Ann.”

“So we need to find another place,” Billy said bleakly.

I poured out coffee for myself and offered the pot to them. Josie went to the refrigerator for a soda, but Billy accepted a cup. I watched, fascinated, as he stirred about a quarter of a cup of sugar into it.

“And what about your mother, Josie? She’s sick with worry over you. She keeps thinking you’re lying dead in the landfill where we found April’s dad. Were you going to let her go on indefinitely imagining she’d lost you?”

Billy said, “They were in the landfill? Who put them in the landfill?” while Josie muttered something about her mother not liking her to be with Billy.

“How rotten of her. You’re fifteen, smart and savvy enough for boys to be spending the night in your own bedroom, or to be sleeping together—where—on Coach McFarlane’s pullout bed? You’re going to have to go home sooner or later. Let’s make it sooner.”

“But, Coach, it’s quiet here. There’s no baby. I don’t have my sister taking my stuff, or the boys sleeping under the dining room table. There’s no roaches in the kitchen—it’s so peaceful here. I don’t want to go back!” Her dark eyes blazed with passion, and a kind of longing. “And Coach McFarlane likes having me here, she said so. She makes me work on my studies, and I help look after her, I do stuff like I did for my grandma when she was sick, I don’t mind it.”

“That’s a separate matter,” I said, calming down—I’d been in that apartment on Escanaba too many times not to respond to her yearning for quiet. “Let’s sit down and figure out what to do about Billy’s problems.”

I pulled the chairs out from under Mary Ann’s old enamel table. Billy’s chin was still sticking out pugnaciously, but the fact that he sat down at my command meant he was ready to answer my questions.