She chewed on her lower lip a minute, trying to remember. “It was more than a week ago, and I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

A younger woman standing near her spoke up. “I remember, because he looked just like my uncle Roy.” She looked at me apologetically, as if not wanting to imply I had an uncle as bad as Roy. “I don’t know who it was yelling, because the light was behind him, I could only see his shape, but he was just yelling at him to get the hell away from Diamond Head.”

The far door opened and the foreman came out. “Time to get back to work, girls. Who you talking to here?”

“Just a girl.”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“She thought maybe you were hiring, but we told her we were all lucky to still have the jobs we got.” It was Roy’s niece, protecting me the way she probably had to protect him, and her own mother, and perhaps herself as well.

“You shouldn’t be on the work floor, girlie,” he said to me. “You looking for a job, you should go to the office. It’s marked real clear and this door ain’t. So scoot.”

I didn’t say any of the things I was thinking of. He was the kind of guy who’d take it out on the other women as soon as I’d shut the door.

I moved down the hall at a good clip, not wanting to run into Dexter or any of the others on their way from the can or the lunchroom or whatever they did this time of day. Following the directions the woman in the assembly room had given me, I made it to the far side of the building and another set of high double metal doors. Beyond these clearly lay a machining room: it was filled with gigantic machines.

Their size was so monstrous that I somehow couldn’t imagine a function associated with them. Large curls of steel lay on the floor near me, like the curls of wood that used to fall when my uncle Bernard was planing boards for shelves. Perhaps the monster above it was some kind of metal plane.

Lost in the scale of the machines were a dozen or so men in overalls or work clothes. The ones actively engaged with the tools wore goggles. As I saw sparks fly near me I stepped back nervously. I needed to find someone who wouldn’t torch me or lose an arm himself if startled by a stranger. Finally I spied a man sitting at a drafting table in a corner and went over to him.

“I’m looking for the foreman.”