“Have you been in touch with her at all since the police started looking for her?”

The woman still didn’t say anything, so Heloise tried again. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“I … I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”

Heloise briefly considered how she should approach this and decided to tell the truth. “I’m here because Anna has sent me some letters.”

The woman looked up and shook her head, confused. “Letters?”

“Yes.”

“Why? What did she write?”

“She says that she and I are connected.”

The woman looked Heloise over, as if she were searching for something tangible—a concrete, physical connection. “In what way?”

“That’s what I was hoping you could help me figure out.”

“Well, you don’t really … look alike,” the woman said. “You’re not her type.”

“No? What’s her type then? What kind of friends did she have?” Heloise asked.

“She didn’t really have any, I don’t think.”

“She didn’t hang out with anyone?”

“No. No one besides Kenneth.” The woman shook her head.

“Who’s Kenneth.”

“Just some boy she went to school with. He was a couple of years older than her, this handicapped kid.”

“Handicapped?”

“Yeah, he was in a wheelchair, something about a car accident. Anna was always pushing him around town; they were together almost every day. They always sat and read books together, wrote secret notes to each other, that kind of thing.”

“Were they, like, dating?” Heloise asked.

“I don’t know,” the woman said with a shrug.

“But they were friends as kids?”

“Yes.”

“What was Anna like back then?”

The woman got a faraway look in her eyes, and for a long time she said nothing. “Her teachers said she was a strange child,” she began. “She was withdrawn, always so angry, so I had a lot of problems with her.”

“What was she angry about?”

The woman turned and walked over to the cash register and reached for a pack of cigarettes that was sitting on top of it. She lit a cigarette and took a few deep drags before responding.

“Her father wasn’t a good father. He left us when she was little.” She stuck out her lower lip and exhaled the smoke upward in a vertical column toward the ceiling. The she shrugged indifferently. “Maybe she was angry about that.”

“And what about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you a good mother?”

The woman gave Heloise a vague look, and her eyes filled with tears. “Do you have any children?” she asked.

Heloise shook her head.