“Riley can help me with this tomorrow,” Helen said after they’d been working for nearly two hours. “I don’t want you to have to be here all day.”

“Oh, I don’t mind at all,” Mary Ann said. “I’m actually enjoying the detective work. I had no idea that Hattie Breckenridge had left such a legacy. It’s fascinating that there are living relatives out there somewhere, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely,” Helen said.

“You know,” Mary Ann confessed, “I always thought it was unfair—the way people treated Hattie, the way the whole town talks about her still. I don’t think it’s right, to vilify a person like that.”

Helen smiled at her. “That’s part of what’s pulling me to do this research. I want to know her side of the story.”

Helen took a break and ran across to the general store to get them sandwiches, cups of coffee, and a box of raspberry Danish.

“I brought us provisions,” she announced when she got back.

“I’ve got some information on Samuel Gray here,” Mary Ann said, eyes on the computer screen. “He was one of eight siblings, and his mother, Eliza Gray, lived until 2002. She was in Duxbury, so the kids could have gone to her.”

Helen reached into her bag for her notebook to start writing down the list of names they came up with, but her notebook wasn’t there.

“Damn,” she muttered.

“Everything all right?”

“Sorry, I thought I had my notes with me, but I guess not.”

She must have left the notebook back at home. By the computer there, maybe. Careless. If Nate found it…but he wouldn’t find it, would he?

Mary Ann found her a blank legal pad. Helen started to write down the names and dates of birth of every family member they’d found whom Jason and Gloria might have gone to live with.

“I don’t want to make things more difficult,” Mary Ann said, “but I think it’s important to remember that they might have been taken in by a distant cousin, the sister-in-law of an aunt or uncle—anyone.”

In the end, after she and Mary Ann had been at it for over four hours (and had polished off their sandwiches along with all the raspberry Danish), she had a long list of aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, cousins, in-laws. She had four pieces of paper taped together on which she’d sketched a rough outline of Hattie’s family tree—the branches twisted and tangled, heavy with names.

. . .

Helen flicked on her turn signal when the smiling cartoon pig on the Uncle Fred’s Smokehouse sign came into view. Under the pig sign hung another that said: BACON, SAUSAGES, HAM. There was a low single-story building with a green metal roof and an awning that said simply: MEATS. Behind it, a small shed with a metal chimney that sweet hickory smoke poured out of.