I will not belabor you with the various witnesses we spoke to over those weeks, witnesses who described days wholly unremarkable and which we cobbled together from the vague reminiscences of people who often could hardly remember Ray Takahashi at all. “Oh yeah, right, right, I think I do remember him,” one might say. “I think I saw him once at the picture show over in Auburn” or “Yeah, yeah, saw him once at the drugstore there in Loomis, eating a sundae at the counter I think. No I don’t think anyone was with him,” or something similar. Most such reminiscences were mundane and pointless, but one or two carried with them a fresh stab. An old Japanese farmer in Loomis recalled Mr. Takahashi contacting him in search of news, and then further remembered seeing Raymond in the flesh a few weeks later, head down, walking up Ridge Road from the irrigation canal. The farmer had pulled over and asked Ray if he needed a ride and Ray had told him that he did not and then the farmer had told the young soldier that his father had been in touch looking for him and that he should call or write home right away. Ray nodded and said he would use the public phone in town and that anyway he had just been home and that his parents knew of his whereabouts and all was well. “That was all,” the old farmer said with a shrug. “I think I only saw him that one time, walking up the road like that.”

“My God, Kim,” Mrs. Wilson said after we had driven away, back downhill, back toward the old highway. “It’s almost too much to bear. It’s almost too much,” her own incredulity seemingly as profound and troubled as that of Mrs. Takahashi herself. (Toward the end of that period, when summer had broken to a cold wet autumn, Mrs. Wilson’s reaction was revealed to be merely relief at another dead end in which she was not implicated. But there was to be a final piece of the story yet to come in the figure of Jim Tuttle, young son of the Oklahoma family who were the only other tenants of the little whitewashed box that was still thought of as the Takahashi home. After nearly everyone in the story was dead, my grandmother first, then Mrs. Takahashi, and finally Mrs. Wilson herself, leaving only me and the teller, he would appear out of nowhere on a hot still summer afternoon in 1983 and at last offer the nearest thing to closure this story can ever have.)

Towards the end of that period, Mrs. Takahashi asked me to drive us to nearby Penryn to visit the Buddhist church, Mrs. Wilson having, during their earliest conversations, suggested that Ray might have slept there.