“I know you will. Such good girls, and single. Tony—”

“Ma.”

“I’m just saying.”

By six o’clock Angie had finished setting up the new monitor and done all the prep work for the screening sessions they meant to start first thing Thursday morning.

She should be exhausted, but instead Angie found it impossible to dial down the rapid flow of her thoughts. She considered going back to Ivy House and starting dinner, or to the Piggly Wiggly to look at new entries in the memory book. Miss Annie had called to say the local histories she had requested were finally available, there was two weeks’ worth of mail to catch up on and bills that were surely overdue.

All this was true, but there was another truth, a more important one: John was downstairs in his office, and she hadn’t seen or heard from him all day long.

There had been no lack of other visitors. It seemed as if a dozen people had dropped by, including Rob, who had come up on his lunch hour to look through old photos, something she had asked many different people to do.

The photo box was meant to look like an odd assortment thrown together hastily, but in fact Angie and Rivera had spent some time deciding what would go into it. Most of the pictures were of Miss Zula and her family over the years, some which Angie knew a great deal about, some which were more mysterious. Most of the photos were candid and many were badly composed.

Angie left Rob with the box and a notepad for more than half an hour, because she had come to the conclusion that it was best to leave people to sort through things on their own, and to take what information they provided without questions or prompting.

From the box she had left him Rob pulled out a half dozen photos to study, and he had written a few sentences about each of them. One of the pictures he had put aside to talk to her about, and Angie felt the small, sharp thrill that came with the feeling that a crucial piece of a larger puzzle was about to be turned over.

This particular photo, badly framed, overexposed, was of Miss Zula as a young woman, standing on a porch. She was dressed in what must have been her very nicest clothes: a tailored suit with a flower pinned to her lapel, more flowers on the rim of a small hat, white gloves, and a dark wool coat with a fur collar hung over her shoulders. She was laughing into the camera and she looked unreservedly happy. To her right was her mother, dressed in dark colors. There was a resemblance between Zula and the older woman in the shape of the mouth and eyes, but while Miss Zula was smiling, her companion’s expression was grim, almost disapproving.