“You’re losing it, Bruce.”

“Come on,” he said. “There’s never been a better time to take a spin. There’s no cops on the roads. There’s nothing for them to do except hang out at Dunkin’ Donuts all day.”

Katie gave the proposal some thought. “If we did get stopped, I’d just say I was trying to find my brother. That I was worried he might be in trouble.”

“There you go,” Bruce said. “Come on.”

He reached into a decorative bowl on the kitchen counter, grabbed a set of car keys, and then tossed them to Katie. She wasn’t expecting them, and fumbled the catch. The keys hit the floor.

“You play for the Red Sox?” Bruce asked as she bent over to retrieve them.

He was already leaving the kitchen and heading down a short hallway to the door that led into the garage. Katie caught up to him as he opened it and reached around for the switch. The garage was bathed in light as they stepped inside.

And there was Finny.

“Every time I step in here,” he said, “she takes my breath away.”

It was easy to understand why. The gleaming black car, which had been backed into the garage, overwhelmed the space. The garage had probably been designed to hold one average-sized vehicle, not a land yacht like this.

“What year is it again?” Katie asked.

“This,” Bruce said, taking a breath, “is the 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It’s two hundred and twenty-five inches long, a wheelbase of one hundred and thirty inches, with a three-hundred-and-ninety-cubic-inch V-8 under that hood up there.”

“You’ve told me all this stuff before. I was just asking about the year.”

“You want to know how many of these babies they made?”

“Not really.”

“They cranked out 21,924. No idea how many of them are still around. But I’d bet you there aren’t many as nice as this one. One of the most beautiful cars ever made and the absolute peak of the tailfin craze.”

“Yeah, about these,” Katie said, taking a step toward the car and touching her index finger to the chrome-trimmed tip of one of the two massive tailfins on each of the rear fenders. “Why does the car have these? I mean, do they actually do anything?”

Bruce smiled. “They don’t have to do anything, Katie. They just are.”

She tapped her finger again on the sharp tip of the left tailfin. “I’d hate to run into this at sixty miles an hour.”

“Interesting fact,” Bruce said. “There were actual incidents of people—motorcyclists, I believe—being impaled on those beauties. It was in Ralph Nader’s book on safety deficiencies in the American auto industry, most notably where the Chevrolet Corvair was concerned, which—”

Katie rested a hand gently on Bruce’s arm. “Please,” she said. “Stop.”

He nodded slowly. “I get carried away sometimes. So, why don’t you get behind the wheel?”