“They’re good. Mariella just turned twelve and Gracie is going on nine.” Maybe she was younger. In fact, I was sure she was younger. It was a strange moment to think it, but I realized that Gracie’s being classified as lagging behind in her age group might be an incorrect diagnosis. The lag in her development that we’d attributed to her low birth weight and her persistent bad health might actually have been due to her real birth date being three or four months later than we’d believed.

“I can’t imagine them that old.” Pete shook his head at the passage of time, and I pulled myself back into the here and now to say, “By the way, I talked to Ida the other day.”

“Ida? The woman who saw the blue truck? What did Ida have to say?”

When I told him about Ida’s conversation with the Meals on Wheels woman, he cursed a blue streak. Then he apologized. “Idiots,” he said. “Now I gotta call the woman and then I’ll have to go see Ida again. I swear someday I’m not going to get out of that house. She’ll say she don’t want any visitors, and once I get there, she’ll talk and talk until I think I’m going deaf.”

I tried to smile, but I couldn’t squeeze one out. Tolliver just nodded.

“I see what that does to the timeline, Harper. I promise you, any time I get a lead I chase it down. I want to know what happened to your sister about as much as you do. And I’m sorry your asshole of a father ever got out of jail.”

“I am, too,” I said, not sure if I could speak for Tolliver or not. “But we don’t think he took Cameron.”

“I don’t either,” Pete said, which surprised me quite a bit. “I know what you can do, Harper, and I remember seeing you and Tolliver riding around after you graduated from high school. I know you were looking for her. If you didn’t find her, I don’t think she’s here to be found. If Matthew did it, he’d have had to bury her close, real close, and he didn’t have much time. You would’ve found her.”

I nodded. “We tried,” I said. “Unless someone took her from the parking lot at the high school and just dumped her bag along the route back to the trailer, which would widen the search area . . .”

“We did think of that,” Pete said mildly.

I flushed. “I’m not . . .”

“It’s okay. You want to find your sister. I do, too.”

“Thanks, Pete,” Tolliver said and shook his hand again.

“You get better now, you hear,” Pete said and turned to walk back to his cubicle.