“Just hold on a second,” I urged him. “Which brick, Jennie? Which one ties Father Fahey back to Violet’s grandmother?”

“Across,” Jennie told me.

“Across where?” I asked. Straight across from the chapel door were tall hedges. “I’m going to need you to be more specific, because it’s cold out here, and it’s getting late.”

“The other building.”

Other building? The only other building besides the church and rectory in the St. Monica’s complex was the elementary school, which was past the hedges and across an enormous parking lot. I walked down the path to where the hedges ended so that I could take a better look at the school building, and my head rose as if invisible hands were repositioning it. The two-story school building in the distance had been built with limestone, and its windows were dark behind the paper Easter decorations that had been hung in them.

Trey and Violet joined me and both gazed out across the parking lot at the school in wonderment. Without saying a word, the three of us walked past Violet’s parked car and over the dark expanse of the lot until we reached the grassy lawn surrounding the school. In the lead, feeling as if my feet were being guided by Jennie, I walked toward the front corner of the building. My eyes came to rest on a bronze plaque hung on the brick wall, level with my eyes.

Violet read the words embossed on the plaque aloud. “ ‘St. Monica’s Elementary School, August 2003. Many thanks to the generosity of Harold and Ann Simmons… ?”

“That doesn’t make sense. My mom went to St. Monica’s when she was a kid,” Trey said. “That was way before 2003.”

I looked down the length of the building, past the double doors of the entrance and toward the back, where I knew the gymnasium was located. “They built onto it. Here, in the front, and the gym. See how the limestone’s a different color here than near the front doors? And look at the roof over the gym.”

Unlike the roof over the rest of the building, the roof of the gym was peaked, with brown tiles covering it. I couldn’t recall ever having been inside, but it made sense—especially if it had been constructed decades after the original building—that the architects had sloped the roof because of the excessive snow our area of Wisconsin received every winter.

“You didn’t know that your grandparents donated a ton of money to build onto the elementary school?” I asked Violet, doubting that she could possibly have been so ignorant. “I mean, they added onto the library, too.”

“And the community center,” Trey chimed in. “Haven’t you ever noticed the sign by the pool? They closed it one spring when we were kids to renovate and build the toddler pool. I only remember because the pool didn’t open that year on Memorial Day weekend because the construction wasn’t done yet, and everyone was angry.”

Violet shrank a step back from us as if we were attacking her. “I had no idea! God! Obviously my grandparents invested a lot around this town. But I didn’t grow up here, so how would I have known?”