As I put the boxes back on their shelves, I kept wondering about Miss Ella. She must have known Steve Sawyer had been convicted of murder when she told Karen to give me his name yesterday. Why hadn’t she included that information? What was going on with her and her hostility to this search that she herself had initiated? But I had looked for Steve Sawyer along with Lamont in Department of Corrections databases around the country and hadn’t found either name. Did that mean that Lamont, too, was actually doing time somewhere?

I hurried past students whose faces were puffy from lack of sleep, pinched with anxiety over exams or jobs or love. In the sunken garden behind the library, I could see a gray-haired woman throwing a ball for her dog. They seemed to be the only happy creatures on the campus.

When I was a student, the war in Vietnam was just winding down. Students with pinched faces were often worrying about the draft, but it didn’t seem like today’s kids cared much about their own war eight thousand miles away. The thought gave me another idea about Lamont Gadsden. Maybe he’d forgotten to tell his mother he’d been drafted. His bones might be rotting in a jungle in Southeast Asia.

I detoured to Lionsgate Manor before going to my office. Miss Ella opened the door the length of the chain bolt but didn’t invite me in. I asked her about Steve Sawyer.

“You knew he’d been sent to prison when you gave his name to Pastor Karen, didn’t you?”

“Don’t take that tone with me, young woman. You wanted the names of Lamont’s friends, and I told you I didn’t approve of them. Now you see why.”

It was an effort not to scream at the client. “What about Lamont? Is he in prison, too?”

“If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t have asked you to look for him.”

We went back and forth for a few more fruitless minutes. She didn’t know where Steve Sawyer was now or she wouldn’t admit to knowing, I couldn’t tell. I finally left, cursing her and Pastor Karen—and myself, for agreeing to get involved in their quagmire.

Still, just to cross every t, I called the Pentagon when I got to my office to see if they had any record of Lamont. I wasn’t expecting any information, so I was surprised when the woman on the other end said Lamont had been called up and told to report to his local draft board in April 1967. He was still officially absent without leave.

“You didn’t try to find him, did you?” I asked.