THE SCENE AT THE DINER was one I learned of only because Mrs. Wilson inadvertently referred to it during what might have otherwise been a brief exchange upon parting. “It was like he came back just to finish ruining what he had started those years before,” she told me that night in her Pontiac after Mrs. ­Takahashi had left for San Jose. This was five weeks after Mrs. Takahashi’s first appearance at the filling station, and we had met and driven around to various locations a half dozen times in the days between. We had discovered, frankly, very little that might lead us to understand the situation which had resulted in Ray Takahashi’s disappearance, although we did know something of his movements during those weeks, twenty-seven years before, when he had walked the hills of Placer County looking for answers he would never find.

As it would turn out, the night of that conversation was effectively the end of those days, when the two women and I would drive along those snaking roads through the oaks and the last of the orchards. The great teeming industry of Placer County fruit production had been decimated, I was to learn, by a statewide blight that killed off the trees even as the industry itself was faltering, that whole era coming to an abrupt close within a span of a few agonizing months, the orchards dead, the sheds closed, the towns along the old highway never really recovering, so that what remained when I arrived were quaint collections of old-fashioned houses and touristy businesses huddled beside the constant roar of the new interstate. I did not know that that day in late summer was to be the last with Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi, although thinking back on it now I might have surmised that the end was coming, for we had driven up and down the county looking for clues that were simply not there. July had broken into August and then August too was coming to a close.

That last day was not unlike all the days that had come before, a kind of pointless and meandering drive, unguided and unmapped, to find any scrap of information that yet remained. We had visited a corner drugstore in Loomis owned and operated by a Japanese-American family, one of the few that had returned to the area after internment. They greeted Ms. Takahashi in English, the proprietor gathering his wife and grandmother and children from the back room, all of them smiling and nodding. They recalled generally that Ray had been in the area in 1945, if only briefly, remembering him mostly because of his uniform, a uniform he was apparently never seen without.