He parked in thin shade and found a lunch counter in a drugstore and drank a bottle of soda pop and ate a grilled cheese sandwich and drank another bottle of the pop. Only one other man seated at the counter, reading a newspaper, glanced at Foster once with frank open curiosity and then went back to his paper. The counterman a lank man with a purple birthmark over one side of his face like a burn. Foster paid his bill and left a dime on the counter and stepped into the telephone booth at the far end of the counter and folded shut the door after him and sat with the phone book. It was easier than he thought. Only one Mebane. Alexander: 61 North Main. Telephone 8459. He shut the book and put it back on the shelf.

He drove back out of town the way he had come in and spotted the house and kept on going. He drove as far as the railroad trestle and pulled off underneath where the ground was packed dark and bare. There was a ring of fire-blackened stones and bits of trash: empty soda bottles and pieces of cork painted red for fishing bobbers and tangles of fishing line and several flat-sided pint liquor bottles. He let the dogs out and they went down to the river and drank, wading in up to their bellies. He called Glow back when she started to swim out. He did not like water he couldn’t see into. When the dogs had cooled themselves he put them in the car and without letting himself think about it turned around and drove back into town and parked under shade just down from the house he’d spied out.

“Someone has misled you. You have the wrong house.” The old man stood with his bad arm leaning against the screen door to open it partway. His cane-tip poked out through the opening as a weapon. With his stoop as tall as Foster, in tan trousers and a white shirt, the sleeve of his missing arm folded up square and pinned under the elbow. The pin a little crooked as if done quickly, with long practice. Thin hair ragged over the dome of his skull. He added, “I can’t help you. I don’t know any woman name of Lee. There’s no Lees around here that I know of. No family, that is. Now, there’s plenty of boys called Lee. I wouldn’t know them all. And there might even be a girl called that. It’s a popular name. But I don’t know of any. I can tell you this though. Whatever girl you’re chasing is not here, not at this house. Someone has misled you.”