“More like a fantasizing kid.” Who’d memorized every make and model because cars represented freedom and escape. Mentally cataloging all that information was a good time-filler when hiding in the woods, waiting out a drunken father’s rage.

Milo tapped the tucked-leather passenger door. “Now that I think about it, this is kind of a classic buggy.”

My daily ride’s a ’79 Seville, Chesterfield Green with a tan vinyl top that matches her interior leather. She rolled out of Detroit the last year before GM bloated the model beyond recognition, is styled well enough to help you forget she’s Caddy froufrou over a Chevy II chassis. She loves her third engine, is dependable, cushy, and makes no unreasonable demands. I see no reason to get a divorce.

I said, “Bite your tongue. She thinks she’s still a hot number.”

He laughed. “So how many Duesenbergs were made?”

“I’d guess hundreds, not thousands. And chrome pipes means it was supercharged, which would narrow it down further.”

“So getting that subpoena might be worthwhile … but then I’d need to backtrack the history of every one I find and the most I can hope for is some guy who visited the woman who lived in the house maybe at the time the baby was buried.”

I said, “There could be a more direct way to identify her. If Father Eddie noticed the car, other neighbors probably did. Anyone who was an adult back then is likely to be deceased, but in nice neighborhoods like Cheviot, houses get passed down to heirs.”

“A kid who dug cars,” he said. “Okay, can’t postpone the legwork any longer. You have time?”

“Nothing but.”

We began with properties half a mile either way from the burial site, encountered lots of surprise but no wisdom. Returning to the Ruche house, Milo knocked on the door, rang the bell, checked windows. No one home.

I followed him to the backyard. The yellow tape was gone. The holes where air-sniffing tubes had been inserted were still open. The chair where Holly Ruche had sat yesterday had been moved closer to the felled tree sections and a woman’s sweater, black, size M, Loehmann’s label, was draped over one of the massive cylinders. A few errant blond hairs stood out on the shoulders. Beneath the chair, a paperback book sat on the dirt. What to expect during pregnancy.

I said, “She came back when everyone left, wanting to check out her dream.”

He said, “Location, location, location … okay, let’s ask around some more about the car. Haystacks and needles and all that.”

Expanding the canvass another quarter mile produced similar results, initially. But at a house well north, also Tudor but grander and more ornately trimmed than Holly and Matt’s acquisition, a small, mustachioed man in his sixties holding a crystal tumbler of scotch said, “A Duesie? Sure, ’38 SJ, blue over blue—navy over baby.”