I check the index instead. Mary Gage is listed with two pages next to her name. I flip to the first and see a picture of several students stacking boxes and cans into paper bags. My mother is looking down, standing behind the girl the picture is clearly of. But her hair is swept to the opposite side, and I can make out her profile, so like the image in the photograph I saw with the baby. Fall Food Drive reads the caption. This would have been the start of the year, before the “incident” that took her away for several months.

I flip to the second, and there is a picture of a small class of girls, all perfectly uniformed. Their teacher, a young nun who couldn’t be more than thirty, is standing to their left, a winning smile on her face. She looks radiant with the glow of doing what she clearly believed was important work. I see my mom kneeling in the first row. The other girls are smiling, but her face is soft and blank, like cheese. Her eyes are rimmed in shadows and cast to the side, as if there is someone standing just off camera she is watching, or maybe who is watching her. Sister Margaret Scott and Third-Hour Class reads the caption.

The nun Eric mentioned. Perhaps this photo was taken after the first. It’s hard to say. My mother’s face is puffy. I wonder how far along she is. If she even knows yet.

I decide to flip to the index again. This time, I look under M for Terry Michaels. He has quite a few page numbers listed by his name. I flip to each one in quick succession, taking in the details of him on different days, looking for something that will tell me where he fits into this story. Here is Father Terry reading in the teacher’s lounge. And here he is at a track meet. And here he is laughing with two of the nuns who teach there. And here he is in line in the cafeteria. All very banal. But the last image, the photo of him with his arm around a young student, someone listed as Sabrina White, sophomore, strikes a chord in me, like a bell ringing through my bones.

He is pulling her into his right side with a jolly expression, one that could easily be interpreted as fondness. But the tension in her body is unmistakable. The familiarity with which he handles her does not sit well on her face. Her smile is one-sided, falling nearest to him. And her eyes are wider than they should be, her brow tense, her fingers hanging too straight at her side. The shadows I read in her face remind me of the picture of my mother with her class, looking off, haunted.

I slam the book closed with a loud thump.

“Did you find her?” Eric calls from a back room.