“Yes,” she said.

“Thought so.”

She took a long gulp of thick air and told herself to get it together. David was smiling a knowing smile, like he knew precisely what was going on in her head.

They drove past Liberty High, with its giant blue billboard.

“They should get a bigger sign,” David said. “That one is too subtle.”

“I can barely see it,” Stevie said.

“Small towns really love their high schools. They seem to scream about them. Why do you think that is?”

“People love to scream.”

“That’s probably it,” he said, turning to her with a wolfish grin. “I know I do.”

Focus, she told herself. They were almost there.

Susan Marks lived in the center of town, on one of the side streets off the main road. They parked by the library and the green. Barlow Corners was quiet but not completely still. There were a few people going in and out of the shops. There were people in the Sunshine Bakery with coffee. Stevie followed the map on her phone, which guided them through the painfully quaint lanes that trailed back behind the main drag. The roads here were one lane only, with tidy little Victorian houses groaning under the weight of flower baskets, decorative flags, and wicker porch furniture. Susan’s was the last one on this particular lane. She had fewer flags, but many more flowers and shrubs.

A woman with sharply cut gray hair was on her knees in a flower bed in front of the house. As Stevie and David turned down her path, she rose and dusted off her knees. Susan Marks was in her midseventies, and despite a little stiffness as she stood, she had the look of someone who did an hour of yoga a day to warm up for the second hour of yoga she did each day.

“Stevie,” she said. She had the firm, commanding tone of someone who was used to doing roll call. “And you are?”

“Her assistant,” David said. “The one that asks the stupid questions.”

“Watson, huh?”

“That’s me,” David replied, smiling.

“It’s going to be a hot one today, so I wanted to finish up some of this weeding early. Come on in.”

She marched inside, and Stevie and David followed. The inside of the house was almost as plant heavy as the outside, with ferns and greenery of all sorts in dozens of pots. Two orange cats sat on a perch in a sunny window, lazily entwined around each other. There was a framed collage of photos of Susan and another woman. Stevie paused a moment to look at them.

“My wife,” Susan said, noting where Stevie was looking. “Magda. She passed away eight years ago.”

“Oh, I’m . . .”

“It’s all right,” Susan said. “I didn’t say it to make you feel bad. She was the nurse at the camp. That’s where we met. There are good memories of the camp too. She was also an artist. All of these are hers.”