All in all, it had been a memorable day, from its inauspicious and rather ordinary beginning at Beulah’s Beauty Bower to its extraordinary conclusion with Miss Hamer’s Rebel yell and the arrest of a Chicagoland gangster right across the street—not to mention Miss Hamer’s claim that her father had paid Harold to jilt her and leave Darling. Who would have thought that all those amazing things could happen on just one day? She rather hoped that things would go back to being ordinary again tomorrow. She’d had just about all the excitement she could handle.

In her room, Bessie turned on the light beside her bed. She was tired, but her mind was still racing and she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Her glance went to the box of her father’s papers that she had carried down from the attic, sitting on her dresser. She hadn’t had an urgent reason for going through them—until now. Of course, it wasn’t likely that she’d find anything to confirm or refute Miss Hamer’s assertion. But still, she ought to make the effort. When she didn’t find anything, she would at least know that there wasn’t anything to find.

Mr. Noonan had brought the box over from the funeral home one day not long after her father had sold the business. He was already too sick to be able to go through the papers, so Bessie had carried the box to the attic without bothering to take a look. Mr. Noonan told her that he’d kept the business items he had found in the files—burial records, grave marker and grave location information, invoices, employee records, and the like—and was returning items that looked to be of a more personal nature: newspaper clippings, notes from grateful clients, complaints, and so on. There was a note inside the box from Mrs. Noonan, saying that she had put everything into folders, a folder for each year. Now, Bessie was grateful. Her father had been in the funeral and gravestone business for decades and had accumulated a great many papers. At least she didn’t have to sort through dozens of scraps.

The file folders were neatly labeled and arranged in chronological order. Not all the years were represented, and the files were variously thick and thin. Bessie flipped through the folders, found the year she was looking for—the year Harold disappeared—and opened the file. There were only five or six items in it. A clipping about a death in neighboring Monroeville; a plaintive letter from a mother in North Carolina, asking for information about the burial of her son, with a carbon copy of the typed letter her father had written back; and several dated notes in her father’s cribbed and almost illegible handwriting, scribbled on the backs of funeral cards. She was about to close the file when she noticed another piece of paper, the familiar plat of all the graves in the Darling Cemetery, neatly numbered.

Bessie had seen similar copies many times before, at the funeral home and on her father’s desk at home. The plat was necessary, he had once told her, because sometimes people came in from out of town and needed to know where their father’s cousin or their mother’s great-aunt Clara were buried. But this one caught her eye because it was dated in the top corner: the day of Harold’s disappearance, a date she would never forget.