He hesitates, then walks down the short hall to the storage room. I crouch on the floor and rub Wilson’s belly while I hear Ethan shifting things around in the spare bedroom. He comes back out carrying two large but shallow plastic bins, one on top of the other, and puts them on the floor. “Got a few more,” he says and goes back down the hall. I look down at the clear plastic bins. They are full of envelopes and old bills and receipts and other papers, the kind of things Mom would file and store and then shred after seven years. Wilson rolls to his feet and trots over to sniff the bins, then looks up at me.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “But I’m gonna look.”

GOOD OLD LEO Nevsky also taught me about the importance of documentation, the paper trail we each leave behind us in the modern world, and how a good investigator could follow such a trail like a hunter following footprints and broken branches in a forest. A grocery list could indicate how many people were staying in a location, or how long the shopper planned to stay there, or if there were children or infants or someone with a special diet. A gas station receipt could be like a neon sign saying He went this way. And a phone bill was like manna from heaven.

“So you’re like a trash detective,” I said to Leo when he paused to take a breath during his presentation at our school’s job fair. A few of my classmates snickered and Mrs. Shunnarah, our homeroom teacher, glared at me. But Leo just smiled and said that was pretty accurate.

Sitting in my brother’s living room, I start going through the five plastic bins Ethan brought out from the storage room before going to bed. Each bin holds a year’s worth of receipts and bills and bank statements, five consecutive years ending abruptly when my parents died. Ethan said these were all that was left—the rest had been thrown out or shredded or stored in the attic in cardboard boxes which had bloomed with mold. That’s why Mom started using plastic bins with lids. I don’t think I need to see anything dating from before Dad went to Iraq, anyway.

Five years of documentation is a lot. I start with the most recent year first, separating the papers from that bin into stacks on the dining room table—phone bills, gas bills, power bills, cable bills, credit card bills, bank statements, insurance claims and EOBs, medical records, sales receipts. I run out of room on the table and have to use the chairs. I’d spread it all out on the floor except Wilson would walk all over the papers or try to eat them or something.