“I mean it, flicka. No risk. No danger. If anything happens to you, so help me, I will box your ears until they bleed.”

And with that I pushed myself from the table. “I think I’ve had enough coffee.”

“Would you like to play checkers?”

“Not tonight. I’m going over the box scores. Up to the middle of June 1917. The Giants are in a dead heat with—”

Hellida put up her hands, begging me to stop.

“Please. Any torture but baseball.”

I opened the door that led upstairs. She followed me up the narrow stairs. We stepped into my kitchen and were hit by the stench of mildew, rotting garbage, and filth too ancient to contemplate.

“I don’t know how it could smell this bad,” said Hellida, “when you never cook anything but toast.”

“You underestimate me. Just this morning, I fixed a particularly delicious mayonnaise and mustard sandwich.”

Past the kitchen was the dining room, still stacked with my father’s clothes and books, and the parlor, where I stored the sports sections of five daily papers, stretching back ten years. I passed my evenings going over old seasons, one game at a time, squinting at the tiny print of the box scores until I felt the hard wood of the Polo Grounds’ seat on my back and smelled the roasting peanuts in the air. It was a lonely way to pass long, dark nights, but every single girl needs a hobby. If I went slow enough, a single game might last me an hour. I would have to learn to be more stingy—I stopped collecting the papers near the end of 1919, and I had not been to the ballpark since. Why bother, when I had history to keep me warm?

Past the parlor were the stairs, the broad wooden steps where I spent most of my childhood, watching the doorway for my father to come home. Even as I let the rest of the house decay, I kept the stairs dusted and the bannister gleaming. They were stairs to build a life around. Hellida followed me up, hovering like a hummingbird.

We stopped on the second-floor landing, where the hardwood was caked with dust. Across the hall was a door as impenetrable as any bank vault’s.

“Have you consulted your father’s files about the glove?” she said.

“No.”

“We could just cross the hall, open the door, and take a look. Your father had files on everything.”

“His mysteries were bigger than mine.”

“Even so . . .”

“No.”

For a moment, she looked tired—like a woman who has been doing the same job for far too long. She turned downstairs and, finally, left me alone. From my bag, I took Mrs. Copeland’s glove. It fit passably. I now saw that I had been looking at the gloves upside down. The brand was not a rubber stamp splashing in ink. It was a clenched fist, dripping blood.