THE HOUSE IS FINISHED NOW, or as finished as it will ever be, since I have more or less run out of the necessary funds for continuing its renovation. Perhaps this is a blessing, since I have come to understand that there is no end to such tasks, the process of replacing and rebuilding such that one wonders if the object that remains is still itself; if you replace every board of a house is it still the same house or something else? The work I had done here is not quite so drastic as that but it has been enough to make me feel, in some way, as if the house is now mine, even though the furniture remains more or less where it was when I first entered the parlor. Now my daughter charges through its rooms and up and down its stairs and lets its screen door clack shut with a terrific bang. The three of us have occupied the house in the way a family occupies a house, making a series of rooms and stairs and hallways into a home by the act of simply being in them, of stirring whatever ghosts remain, most of them fleeing out through the new shingles and into the blue summer night.

I informed a sheriff’s deputy of what I knew of Raymond Takahashi’s murder, although I well know it will likely come to nothing—a thirty-eight-year-old case without a body and without a living perpetrator is of little interest to the law—and yet I felt duty-bound to do that much. I also wrote Doris Harris, née Takahashi, whose address I still have, to tell her the story. Into that envelope I slipped the pendant. It was never mine, although in some ways I know it is not Doris’s either. The actions of sealing that envelope and dropping it at the post office have been two of the most difficult of my life, although I lack the words to explain why, even to myself.

Sometimes I can still feel the Wilsons in the rooms and halls and the stairwell of this old house, not only Evelyn and Homer but the children too, Jimmy and Helen in the upstairs bedrooms, bright phantoms whose yellow days extend into our own. How they shimmer like tinsel in the air. And Ray of course, in the days in which he was yet a child and could not even imagine all the madness that would descend in the years to come. Their laughter like bells. Their breath sweet with fruit.