What you forget are the more interior details—what may seem like minutiae at the time. Nora and Em knew everything—meaning they knew as much as I knew—but I hadn’t told the snowshoer I was sure I’d seen the little getaway driver before. What would Elliot Barlow be inclined to believe about those black-and-white photographs—those ghosts, if they were ghosts, who were haunting me? Wouldn’t the little English teacher tell me that my runaway imagination had run amuck? I was becoming more sensitive about hurting Elliot’s feelings. He’d been better than a standby father to me; he’d loved me and advised me, as a good father (a real one) should. How did it make the snowshoer feel that I kept thinking about my mystery father, the one who’d done nothing for me?

It was another lie of omission. I hadn’t told Mr. Barlow that Paul Goode looked like the smiling snow shoveler—that boy too young to shave, posing by the snowbank in front of the Hotel Jerome. But you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.

It would soon be 1961. I would soon be on my way to Pittsburgh, and then, soon after, be on my way back. For a time, my focus was the snowshoer’s safety—though loneliness (my own, included) would be my more abiding subject, as a writer.

Coach Dearborn promised me he would keep an eye on the “Police Report.” Not only when I was away in Pittsburgh, but whenever I was out of town, the coach kept me informed. There was a lot of drunken driving and a shitload of domestic disputes and animal emergencies. The dangling cats continued for a while. The crafty hangman turned out to be a faculty brat—not quite old enough to be an academy student, but not exactly a townie. The cat killer was a young boy who loved birds, as Mr. Barlow had believed from the beginning.

But there were no further sightings of a small, pretty woman disabling the lustful men and boys of the town of Exeter. Either the artful snowshoer was not venturing out as a woman or the previously sighted little woman was venturing elsewhere.

I thought it sufficed that I’d given Molly a possible name for my unknown father, but I hadn’t told Molly about Paul Goode—I hadn’t even told her about the snow shoveler who looked like Paul Goode. I knew Molly didn’t believe in ghosts—she simply didn’t see them. I thought it sufficed that Molly might whisper the Paulino name, or just plain Paul, in my mom’s ear—to see if Little Ray remembered the name of the kid she’d slept with in Aspen.