The teacher promised to call if he heard anything, which was as likely as seeing the Cubs in the World Series. That left me with a man named Curtis Rivers, who still lived in West Englewood, a few blocks from where he and Lamont Gadsden had grown up. Like the other people on Miss Ella’s list, Rivers had done very little that showed up on the Web: he didn’t vote, he hadn’t been in prison or run for public office, I couldn’t tell if he’d ever been married. But he did own Fit for Your Hoof, a shoe-repair shop on Seventieth Place just west of Ashland.

It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I had time to go to Rivers’s shop. I spent the bulk of the day cleaning up my job for Darraugh Graham. I was tracing the engineering credentials of a woman Darraugh wanted to head his aerospace division, and my inquiry took me to Northwest ern University’s engineering school.

When I finished my queries—learning, sadly, that Darraugh’s candidate looked too good to be true because she was too good to be true—my feeling of unreality intensified. I seem to be finding more and more job candidates these days who don’t care what lies they tell. Maybe politicians and television have so blurred the lines between entertainment and truth that people think no one knows or cares about the difference between a clever story and real experience.

On a summer day, with the lake in the background and the trees around the fake-Gothic buildings a greeny gold, the campus itself didn’t look quite real. I walked down to the water, tempted to join the students who were lounging on the beach behind the engineering building and lose myself in the dreamworld.

My cellphone rang: Darraugh’s personal assistant. I sighed and returned to reality, and told Caroline that Darraugh would have to start a new search, that I’d give him full details from a landline. The call broke my mood. I knew it was time to devote myself to Miss Ella and her son. Prickly, unpleasant woman, with her grim forty-year-old past, I didn’t want to touch her problems. But I’d agreed to work for her, and that meant she deserved my best efforts, no matter what I thought.

I could hear my mother standing behind me while I practiced the piano: “Yes, I know you resent this, Victoria, but you make it harder for yourself by refusing to put your best work into it. Engage with the music. It needs you, even if you don’t think you need it.”