I park and walk. Across the street college students sit on marble stairs adjacent to the yellow Shunned House. There are so many shunned houses, and I don’t know why this one has sole claim to the name. The kids have sketch pads balanced on their packs, so I’m guessing they go to RISD. Maybe I’m self-conscious (duh), but I’m dressed like they are, or they’re dressed like me (bootcut jeans, hoodie, black skully, chonky glasses; one has a thicker beard than I have but not patched with gray), and they watch me iceberg past. I’m the future natural disaster to be avoided (good luck with that, kids). One of them laughs as though all of this, everything, is funny. Maybe it is. The most cosmic of jokes and horrors. I have the urge to shout “Boo!” and scatter them like birds.

Two more blocks and here I am at the corner of Benefit and Bowen. The redbrick three-story house is scaffolded by fire escapes designed by an Escher wannabe. According to Zillow, the studio-apartment units are five hundred square feet and rent for one thousand bucks a month. I follow the slate gray of the foundation and curtained basement windows down Bowen and to the entrance. It’s cold enough to see my breath. The outer door is locked. I buzz her apartment. No one answers. I wish I could tell you I feel or don’t feel her presence. There’s only a thrilling, hopeless uncertainty. The prevailing voice in my head asks variations on a theme of Do you know what you’re doing? Not as insistent is a child’s voice asking more directly What if you don’t find her? and What if you do?

I buzz the apartment again, and nothing, so I tape a card to the door’s window. I also tape a card to the apartment’s locked mailbox.

Next, I go on a mini tour of Providence’s music clubs and leave cards taped to windows and doors. I have plenty of cards left, so I pick out some bars and restaurants on Westminster and Thayer Streets and tuck the cards into unseen corners of their bay windows, and I drip a few on the sidewalk. Those cards are like lottery tickets, the one-in-a-gazillion chance that she’d find one. I Johnny Appleseed Providence until I have two cards left. Then I drive south to Exeter.

The Chestnut Hill Cemetery isn’t hidden, isn’t a lost place. Prior to arrival, I imagined parking on the shoulder of some winding, desolate road and then hiking along a secret overgrown path through a wooded glen, with the trees parting to reveal an ivy-and-mossed land of the dead, where few dare to tread.

What’s up with the rhymes in the last few pages?