Vanishing Acts Part 1

Vanis.h.i.+ng Acts.

by Jodi Picoult.

Prologue

I was six years old the first time I disappeared.My father was working on a magic act for the annual Christmas show at the senior center, and his a.s.sistant, the receptionist who had a real gold tooth and false eyelashes as thick as spiders, got the flu. I was fully prepared to beg my father to be part of the act, but he asked, as if I were the one who would be doing him a favor.Like I said, I was six, and I still believed that my father truly could pull coins out of my ear and find a bouquet of flowers in the folds of Mrs. Kleban's chenille housecoat and make Mr. van Looen's false teeth disappear. He did these little tricks all the time for the elderly folks who came to play bingo or do chair aerobics or watch old black-and-white movies with soundtracks that crackled like flame. I knew some parts of the act were fakehis fiddlehead mustache, for example, and the quarter with two headsbut I was one hundred percent sure that his magic wand had the ability to transport me into some limbo zone, until he saw fit to call me back. On the night of the Christmas show, the residents of three different a.s.sisted-living communities in our town braved the cold and the snow to be bused to the senior center. They sat in a semicircle watching my father while I waited backstage. When he announced methe Amazing Cordelia!I stepped out wearing the sequined leotard I usually kept in my dress-up bin.I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magicians a.s.sistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.II think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.Vladimir NabokovDeliaYou can't exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind. There are concrete paths, like credit card receipts and appointment calendars and promises you've made to others. There are microscopic clues, like fingerprints, that stay invisible unless you know how to look for them. But even in the absence of any of this, there's scent. We live in a cloud that moves with us as we check e-mail and jog and carpool. The whole time, we shed skin cellsforty thousand per minutethat rise on currents up our legs and under our chins.Today, I'm running behind Greta, who picks up the pace just as we hit the twisted growth at the base of the mountain. I'm soaked to the thighs with muck and slush, although it doesn't seem to be bothering my bloodhound any. The awful conditions that make it so hard to navigate are the same conditions that have preserved this trail.The officer from the Carroll, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Police Department who is supposed to be accompanying me has fallen behind. He takes one look at the terrain Greta is bulldozing and shakes his head. "Forget it," he says. "There's no way a four-year-old would have made it through this mess."The truth is, he's probably right. At this time of the afternoon, as the ground cools down under a setting sun, air currents run downslope, which means that although the girl probably walked through flatter area some distance away, Greta is picking up the scent trail where it's drifted. "Greta disagrees," I say. In my line of work, I can't afford not to trust my partner. Fifty percent of a dog's nose is devoted to the sense of smell, compared to only one square inch of mine. So if Greta says that Holly Gardiner wandered out of the playground at Sticks & Stones Day Care and climbed to the top of Mount Deception, I'm going to hike right up there to find her.Greta yanks on the end of the fifteen-foot leash and hustles at a clip for a few hundred feet. A beautiful bloodhound, she has a black widow's peak, a brown velvet coat, and the gawky body of the girl who watches the dancers from the bleachers. She circles a smooth, bald rock twice; then glances up at me, the folds of her long face deepening. Scent will pool, like the ripples when a stones thrown into a pond. This is where the child stopped to rest."Find her," I order. Greta casts around to pick up the scent again, and then starts to run. I sprint after the dog, wincing as a branch snaps back against my face and opens a cut over my left eye. We tear through a snarl of vines and burst onto a narrow footpath that opens up into a clearing.The little girl is sitting on the wet ground, s.h.i.+vering, arms lashed tight over her knees. Just like always, for a moment her face is Sophie's, and I have to keep myself from grabbing her and scaring her half to death. Greta bounds over and jumps up, which is how she knows to identify the person whose scent she took from a fleece hat at the day-care center and followed six miles to this spot. The girl blinks up at us, slowly pecking her way through a sh.e.l.l of fear. "I bet you're Holly," I say, crouching beside her. I shrug off my jacket, ripe with body heat, and settle it over her clothespin shoulders. "My name is Delia." I whistle, and the dog comes trotting close. "This is Greta."I slip off the harness she wears while she's working. Greta wags her tail so hard that it makes her body a metronome. As the little girl reaches up to pat the dog, I do a quick visual a.s.sessment. "Are you hurt?"She shakes her head and glances at the cut over my eye. "You are." Just then the Carroll police officer bursts into the clearing, panting. "I'll be d.a.m.ned," he wheezes. "You actually found her." I always do. But it isn't my track record that keeps me in this business. It's not the adrenaline rush; it's not even the potential happy ending. It's because, when you get down to it, I'm the one who's lost.I watch the reunion between mother and daughter from a distancehow Holly melts into her mother's arms, how relief binds them like a seam. Even if she'd been a different race or dressed like a gypsy, I would have been able to pick this woman out of a crowd: She is the one who seems unraveled, half of a whole. I can't imagine anything more terrifying than losing Sophie. When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.It doesn't matter if the subject Greta and I are searching for is old, young, male, or femaleto someone, that missing person is what Sophie is to me. Part of my tight connection to Sophie, I know, is pure over-compensation. My mother died when I was three. When I was Sophie's age, I'd hear my father say things like "I lost my wife in a car accident," and it made no sense to me: If he knew where she was, why didn't he just go find her? It took me a lifetime to realize things don't get lost if they don't have valueyou don't miss what you don't care aboutbut I was too young to have stored up a cache of memories of my mother. For a long time, all I had of her was a smella mixture of vanilla and apples could bring her back as if she were standing a foot awayand then this disappeared, too. Not even Greta can find someone without that initial clue.From where she is sitting beside me, Greta nuzzles my forehead, reminding me that I'm bleeding. I wonder if I'll need st.i.tches, if this will launch my father into another tirade about why I should have become something relatively safer, like a bounty hunter or the leader of a bomb squad.Someone hands me a gauze pad, which I press against the cut above my eye. When I glance up I see it's Fitz, my best friend, who happens to be a reporter for the paper with the largest circulation in our state. "What does the other guy look like?" he asks."I got attacked by a tree.""No kidding? I always heard their bark is worse than their bite." Fitzwilliam MacMurray grew up in one of the houses beside mine; Eric Talcott lived in the other. My father used to call us Siamese triplets. I have a long history with both of them that includes drying slugs on the pavement with Morton's salt, dropping water balloons off the elementary school roof, and kidnapping the gym teacher's cat. As kids, we were a triumverate; as adults, we are still remarkably close. In fact, Fitz will be pulling double duty at my weddingas Eric's best man, and as my man-of-honor.From this angle, Fitz is enormous. He's six-four, with a shock of red hair that makes him look like he's on fire. "I need a quote from you," he says. I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he'd be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination."Make something up," I suggest.He laughs. "Hey, I work for the New Hamps.h.i.+re Gazette, not the New York Times.""Excuse me . . . ?"We both turn at the sound of a woman's voice. Holly Gardiner's mother is staring at me, her expression so full of words that, for a moment, she can't choose the right one. "Thank you," she says finally. "Thank you so much.""Thank Greta," I reply. "She did all the work." The woman is on the verge of tears, the weight of the moment falling as heavy and sudden as rain. She grabs my hand and squeezes, a pulse of understanding between mothers, before she heads back to the rescue workers who are taking care of Holly.There were times I missed my mother desperately while I was growing upwhen all the other kids at school had two parents at the Holiday Concert, when I got my period and had to sit down on the lip of the bathtub with my father to read the directions on the Tampax box, when I first kissed Eric and felt like I might burst out of my skin.Now.Fitz slings his arm over my shoulders. "It's not like you missed out," he says gently. "Your dad was better than most parents put together.""I know," I reply, but I watch Holly Gardiner and her mother walk all the way back to their car, hand in hand, like two jewels on a delicate strand that might at any moment be broken.That night Greta and I are the lead story on the evening news. In rural New Hamps.h.i.+re, we don't get broadcasts of gang wars and murders and serial rapists; instead, we get barns that burn down and ribbon-cuttings at local hospitals and local heroes like me.My father and I stand in the kitchen, getting dinner ready. "What's wrong with Sophie?" I ask, frowning as I peer into the living room, where she lays puddled on the carpet."She's tired," my father says.She takes an occasional nap after I pick her up from kindergarten, but today, when I was on a search, my father had to bring her back to the senior center with him until closing time. Still, there's more to it. When I came home, she wasn't at the door waiting to tell me all the important things: who swung the highest at recess, which book Mrs. Easley read to them, whether snack was carrots and cheese cubes for the third day in a row."Did you take her temperature?" I ask."Is it missing?" He grins at me when I roll my eyes. "She'll be her old self by dessert," he predicts. "Kids bounce back fast." At nearly sixty, my father is good-lookingageless, almost, with his salt-and-pepper hair and runners build. Although there were any number of women who would have thrown themselves at a man like Andrew Hopkins, he only dated sporadically, and he never remarried. He used to say that life was all about a boy finding the perfect girl; he was lucky enough to have been handed his in a labor and delivery room.He moves to the stove, adding half-and-half to the crushed tomatoesa homemade recipe trick one of the seniors taught him that turned out to be surprisingly good, unlike their tips for helping Sophie avoid croup (tie a black cord around her neck) or curing an earache (put olive oil and pepper on a cotton ball and stuff into the ear). "When's Eric getting here?" he asks. "I can't keep this cooking much longer."He was supposed to arrive a half hour ago, but there's been no phone call to say he's running late, and he isn't answering his cell. I don't know where he is, but there are plenty of places I am imagining him: Murphy's Bar on Main Street, Callahan's on North Park, off the road in a ditch somewhere.Sophie comes into the kitchen. "Hey," I say, my anxiety about Eric disappearing in the wide sunny wake of our daughter. "Want to help?" I hold up the green beans; she likes the crisp sound they make when they snap.She shrugs and sits down with her back against the refrigerator."How was school today?" I prompt.Her small face darkens like the thunderstorms we get in July, sudden and fierce before they pa.s.s. Then, just as quickly, she looks up at me. "Jennica has warts," Sophie announces."That's too bad," I reply, trying to remember which one Jennica isthe cla.s.smate with the platinum braids, or the one whose father owns the gourmet coffee shop in town."I want warts.""No, you don't." Headlights flash past the window, but don't turn into our driveway. I focus on Sophie, trying to remember if warts are contagious or if that's an old wives' tale."But they're green," Sophie whines. "And really soft and on the tag it says the name."Warts, apparently, is the hot new Beanie Baby. "Maybe for your birthday.""I bet you'll forget that, too," Sophie accuses, and she runs out of the kitchen and upstairs.All of a sudden I can see the red circle on my calendarthe parent-child tea in her kindergarten cla.s.s started at one o'clock, when I was halfway up a mountain searching for Holly Gardiner.When I was a kid and there was a mother-daughter event in my elementary school, I wouldn't tell my father about it. Instead, I'd fake sick, staying home for the day so that I didn't have to watch everyone else's mother come through the door and know that my own was never going to arrive.I find Sophie lying on her bed. "Baby," I say. "I'm really sorry." She looks up at me. "When you're with them," she asks, a slice through the heart,"do you ever think about me?"In response I pick her up and settle her on my lap. "I think about you even when I'm sleeping," I say.It is hard to believe now, with this small body dovetailing against mine, but when I found out I was pregnant I considered not keeping the baby. I wasn't married, and Eric was having enough trouble without tossing in any added responsibility. In the end, though, I couldn't go through with it. I wanted to be the kind of mother who couldn't be separated from a child without putting up a fierce fight. I like to believe my own mother had been that way.Parenting Sophiewith and without Eric, depending on the yearhas been much harder than I ever expected. Whatever I do right I chalk up to my fathers example. Whatever I do wrong I blame squarely on fate.The door to the bedroom opens, and Eric walks in. For that half second, before all the memories crowd in, he takes my breath away. Sophie has my dark hair and freckles, but thankfully, that's about all. She's got Eric's lean build and his high cheekbones, his easy smile and his unsettling eyesthe feverish blue of a glacier."Sorry I'm late." He drops a kiss on the crown of my head and I breathe in, trying to smell the telltale alcohol on his breath. He hoists Sophie into his arms. I can't make out the sourness of whiskey, or the grainy yeast of beer, but that means nothing. Even in high school, Eric knew a hundred ways to remove the red flags of alcohol consumption. "Where were you?" I ask."Meeting a friend in the Amazon." He pulls a Beanie Baby frog out of his back pocket.Sophie squeals and grabs it, hugs Eric so tight I think she might cut off his circulation. "She double-teamed us," I say, shaking my head. "She's a con artist.""Just hedging her bets." He puts Sophie down on the floor, and she immediately runs downstairs to show her grandfather.I go into his arms, hooking my thumbs into the back pockets of his jeans. Under my ear, his heart keeps time for me. I'm sorry I doubted you. "Do I get a toad, too?" I ask."You already had one. You kissed him, and got me instead. Remember?" To ill.u.s.trate, he trails his lips from the tiny divot at the base of my necka sledding scar from when I was twoall the way up to my mouth. I taste coffee and hope and, thank G.o.d, nothing else.We stand in our daughter's room for a few minutes like that, even after the kiss is finished, just leaning against each other in between the quiet places. I have always loved him. Warts and all.When we were little, Eric and Fitz and I invented a language. I've forgotten most of it, with the exception of a few words: valyango, which meant pirate; palapala, which meant rain; and ruskifer, which had no translation to English but described the dimpled bottom of a woven basket, all the reeds coming together to form one joint spot, and that we sometimes used to explain our friends.h.i.+p. This was back in the days before playtime had all the contractual scheduling of an arranged marriage, and most mornings, one of us would show up at the house of another and we'd swing by to pick up the third.In the winter, we would build snow forts with complicated burrows and tunnels, complete with three sculpted thrones where we'd sit and suck on icicles until we could no longer feel our fingers and toes. In the spring, we ate sugar-on-snow that Fitz's dad made us when he boiled down his own maple syrup, the three of us dueling with forks to get the sweetest, longest strands. In the fall, we would climb the fence into the back acreage of McNab's Orchards and eat Macouns and Cortlands and Jonathans whose skin was as warm as our own. In the summer, we wrote secret predictions about our futures by the faint light of trapped fireflies, and hid them in the hollow knot of an old maple treea time capsule, for when we grew up.We had our roles: Fitz was the dreamer; I was the practical tactician; Eric was the front man, the one who could charm adults or other kids with equal ease. Eric always knew exactly what to say when you dropped your hot lunch tray by accident and the whole cafeteria was staring at you, or when the teacher called on you and you'd been writing up your Christmas list. Being part of his entourage was like the sun coming through a plate-gla.s.s window: golden, something to lift your face toward.It was when we came home the summer after freshman year in college that things began to change. We were all chafing under our parents' rules and roofs, but Eric rubbed himself raw, lightening up only when we three would go out at night. Eric would always suggest a bar, and he knew the ones that didn't card minors. Afterward, when Fitz was gone, Eric and I would spread an old quilt on the far sh.o.r.e of the town lake and undress each other, swatting away mosquitoes from the pieces of each other we'd laid claim to. But every time I kissed him, there was liquor on his breath, and I've always hated the smell of alcohol. It's a weird quirk, but no stranger than those people who can't stand the scent of gas, I suppose, and have to hold their breath while they fill up their cars. At any rate, I'd kiss Eric and inhale that fermenting, bitter smell and roll away from him. He'd call me a prude, and I started to think maybe I was onethat was easier than admitting what was really driving us apart.Sometimes we find ourselves walking through our lives blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot. It was this way for Fitz and me, the decade after high school. If Eric told us that he had a beer only every now and then, we believed him. If his hands shook when he was sober, we turned away. If I mentioned his drinking, it became my problem, not his. And yet, in spite of all this, I still couldn't end our relations.h.i.+p. All of my memories were laced with him; to extract them would mean losing the flavor of my childhood.The day I found out I was pregnant, Eric drove his car off the road, through a flimsy guard rail, and into a local farmer's cornfield. When he called to tell me what had happenedblaming it on a woodchuck that ran across the roadI hung up the phone and drove to Fitz's apartment. I think we have a problem, I said to him, as if it was the three of us, which, in reality, it was.Fitz had listened to me speak a truth we'd taken great pains never to utter out loud, plus a newer, magnificent, frightening one. I can't do this alone, I told him. He had looked at my belly, still flat. You aren't.There was no denying Eric's magnetism, but that afternoon I realized that, united, Fitz and I were a force to be reckoned with as well. And when I left his apartment armed with the knowledge of what I was going to have to say to Eric, I remembered what I had written down during that backlit summer when I was trying to guess the rest of my life. I'd been embarra.s.sed setting the words to paper, had folded it three times so Fitz and Eric wouldn't see. Mea tomboy who spent hours in the company of boys pretending to be a swashbuckling privateer, or an archaeologist searching for relics, a girl who had been the damsel in distress only once, and even then had rescued herselfI had written only a single wild wish. One day, I'd written, I will be a mother.As one of Wexton's three attorneys, Eric does real estate transfers and wills and the occasional divorce, but he's done a little trial work, toorepresenting defendants charged with DUI and petty thefts. He usually wins, which is no surprise to me. After all, more than once I have been a jury of one, and I've always managed to be persuaded.Case in point: my wedding. I was perfectly happy to sign a marriage certificate at the courthouse. But then Eric suggested that a big party wasn't such a bad idea, and before I knew what had happened, I was buried in a pile of brochures for reception venues, and band tapes, and price lists from florists. I'm sitting on the living room floor after dinner, swatches of fabric covering my legs like a patchwork quilt. "Who cares whether the napkins are blue or teal?" I complain. "Isn't teal really just blue on steroids, anyway?" I hand him a stack of photo alb.u.ms; we are supposed to find ten of Eric and ten of me as an introductory montage to the wedding video. He cracks the first one open, and there's a picture of Eric and Fitz and me rolled fat as sausages in our snowsuits, peeking out from the entrance of a homemade igloo. I'm between the two boys; it's like that in most of the photos."Look at my hair," Eric laughs. "I look like Dorothy Hamill.""No, I look like Dorothy Hamill. You look like a portobello mushroom." In the next two alb.u.ms I pick up, I am older. There are fewer pictures of us as a trio, and more of Eric and me, with Fitz sprinkled in. Our senior prom picture: Eric and I, and then Fitz in his own snapshot with a girl whose name I can't recall. One night when we were fifteen we told our parents we were going on a school-sponsored overnight and instead climbed to the top of Dartmouth's Baker Library bell tower to watch a meteor shower. We drank peach schnapps stolen from Eric's parents' liquor cabinet and watched the stars play tag with the moon. Fitz fell asleep holding the bottle and Eric and I waited for the cursive of comets. Did you see that one? Eric asked. When I couldn't find the falling star, he took my hand and guided my finger. And then he just kept holding on.By the time we climbed down at 4:30 a.m., I had had my first kiss, and it wasn't the three of us anymore.Just then my father comes into the room. "I'm headed upstairs to watch Leno," he says. "Lock up, okay?"I glance up. "Where are my baby pictures?""In the alb.u.ms.""No . . . these only go back to when I'm four or five." I sit up. "It would be nice to have your wedding picture, too, for the video."I have the only photo of my mother that is on display in this house. She is on the cusp of smiling, and you cannot look at it without wondering who made her happy just then, and how.My father looks down at the ground, and shakes his head a little. "Well, I knew it was going to happen sometime. Come on, then."Eric and I follow him to his bedroom and sit down on the double bed, on the side where he doesn't sleep. From the closet, my father takes down a tin with a Pepsi-Cola logo stamped onto the front. He dumps the contents onto the covers between Eric and medozens of photographs of my mother, draped in peasant skirts and gauze blouses, her black hair hanging down her back like a river. A wedding portrait: my mother in a belled white dress; my father trussed in his tuxedo, looking like he might bolt at any second. Photos of me, wrapped tight as a croissant, awkwardly balanced in my mother's arms. And one of my mother and father on an ugly green couch with me between them, a bridge made of dimpled flesh, of blended blood.It is like visiting another planet when you only have one roll of film to record it, like coming to a banquet after a hunger strikethere is so much here that I have to consciously keep myself from racing through, before it all disappears. My face gets hot, as if I've been slapped. "Why were you hiding these?" He takes one photograph out of my hand and stares at it long enough for me to believe he has completely forgotten that Eric and I are in the room. "I tried keeping a few of the pictures out," my father explains, "but you kept asking when she was coming home. And I'd pa.s.s them, and stop, and lose ten minutes or a half hour or a half day. I didn't hide them because I didn't want to look at them, Delia. I hid them because that was all I wanted to do." He puts the wedding picture back in the tin and scatters the rest on top. "You can have them," my father tells me. "You can have them all."He leaves us sitting in the near dark in his bedroom. Eric touches the photograph on the top as if it is as delicate as milkweed. "That," he says quietly. "That's what I want with you."It's the ones I don't find that stay with me. The teenage boy who jumped off the Fairlee-Orford train bridge into the Connecticut River one frigid March; the mother from North Conway who vanished with a pot still boiling on the stove and a toddler in the playpen; the baby s.n.a.t.c.hed out of a car in the Strafford post office parking lot while her sitter was inside dropping off a large package. Sometimes they stand behind me while I'm brus.h.i.+ng my teeth; sometimes they're the last thing I see before I go to sleep; sometimes, like now, they leave me restless in the middle of the night.There is a thick fog tonight, but Greta and I have trained enough in this patch of land to know our way by heart. I sit down on a mossy log while Greta sniffs around the periphery. Above me, something dangles from a branch, full and round and yellow.I am little, and he has just finished planting a lemon tree in our backyard. I am dancing around it. I want to make lemonade, but there isn't any fruit because the tree is just a baby. How long will it take to grow one? I ask. A while, he tells me. I sit myself down in front of it to watch. I'll wait. He comes over and takes my hand. Come on, grilla, he says. If we're going to sit here that long, we'd better get something to eat.There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you. But this feels too real. This feels like it has actually happened.I've lived in New Hamps.h.i.+re my whole life. No citrus tree could bear a climate like ours, where we have not only White Christmases but also White Halloweens. I pull down the yellow ball: a crumbling sphere made of birdseed and suet. What does grilla mean?I am still thinking about this the next morning after taking Sophie to school, and spend an extra ten minutes walking around, from the painting easel to the blocks to the bubble station, to make up for my shoddy behavior yesterday. I've planned on doing a training run with Greta that morning, but I'm sidetracked by the sight of my father's wallet on the floor of my Expedition. He'd taken it out a few nights ago to fill the tank with gas; the least I can do is swing by the senior center to give it back. I pull into the parking lot and open the back hatch. "Stay," I tell Greta, who whumps her tail twice. She has to share her seat with emergency rescue equipment, a large cooler of water, and several different harnesses and leashes. Suddenly I feel a p.r.i.c.kle on my wrist; something has crawled onto my arm. My heart kicks itself into overdrive and my throat pinches tight, as it always does at the thought of a spider or a tick or any other creepy-crawly thing. I manage to strip away my jacket, sweat cooling on my body as I wonder how close the spider has landed near my boots.It's a groundless phobia. I have climbed out on mountain ledges in pursuit of missing people; I have faced down criminals with guns; but put me in the room with the tiniest arachnid and I just may pa.s.s out.The whole way into the senior center, I take deep breaths. I find my father standing on the sidelines, watching Yoga Tuesday happen in the function room."Hey," he whispers, so as not to disturb the seniors doing sun salutations. "What are you doing here?"I fish his wallet out of my pocket. "Thought you might be missing this.""So that's where it went," he says. "There are so many perks to having a daughter who does search and rescue.""I found it the old-fas.h.i.+oned way," I tell him. "By accident." He starts moving down the hall. "Well, I knew it would turn up eventually," he says. "Everything always does. You have time for a cup of coffee?""Not really," I say, but I follow him to the little kitchenette anyway and let him pour me a mug, then trail him into his office. When I was a little girl, he'd bring me here and keep me entertained while he was on the phone by doing sleight-of-hand with binder clips and handkerchiefs. I pick up a paperweight on his desk. It is a rock painted to look like a ladybug, a gift I made for him when I was about Sophie's age."You could probably get rid of this, you know.""But it's my favorite." He takes it out of my hand, puts it back in the center of his desk."Dad?" I ask. "Did we ever plant a lemon tree?""A what?" Before I can repeat my question he squints at me, then frowns and summons me closer. "Hang on. You've got something sticking out of ... no, lower ... let me." I lean forward, and he cups his hand around the back of my neck. "The Amazing Cordelia," he says, just like when we did our magic act. Then, from behind my ear, he pulls a strand of pearls."They were hers," my father says, and he guides me to the mirror that hangs on the back of his office door. I have a vague recollection of the wedding photo from last night. He fastens the clasp behind me, so that we are both looking in the mirror, seeing someone who isn't there.The offices of the New Hamps.h.i.+re Gazette are in Manchester, but Fitz does most of his work from the office he's fixed up in the second bedroom of his apartment in Wexton. He lives over a pizza place, and the smell of marinara sauce comes through the forced-hot-air ducts. Greta's toenails click up the linoleum stairs, and she sits down outside his apartment, in front of a life-size cardboard cutout of Chewbacca. Hanging on a hook on the back is his key; I use it to let myself inside. I navigate through the ocean of clothes he's left discarded on the floor and the stacks of books that seem to reproduce like rabbits. Fitz is sitting in front of his computer. "He}'," I say. "You promised to lay a trail for us." The dog bounds into the office and nearly climbs up onto Fitz's lap. He rubs her hard behind the ears, and she snuggles closer to him, knocking several photos off his desk.I bend down to pick them up. One is of a man with a hole in the middle of his head, in which he has stuck a lit candle. The second picture is of a grinning boy with double pupils dancing in each of his eyes. I hand the snapshots back to Fitz."Relatives?""The Gazette's paying me to do an article on the Strange But True." He holds up the picture of the man with the votive in his skull. "This amazingly resourceful fellow apparently used to give tours around town at night. And I got to read a whole 1911medical treatise from a doctor who had an eleven-year-old patient with a molar growing out of the bottom of his foot.""Oh, come on," I say. "Everyone's got something that's strange about them. Like the way Eric can fold his tongue into a clover, and that disgusting thing you do with your eyes.""You mean this?" he says, but I turn away before I have to watch. "Or how you go ballistic if there's a spider web within a mile of you?" I turn to him, thinking. "Have I always been afraid of spiders?""For as long as I've known you," Fitz says. "Maybe you were Miss m.u.f.fet in a former life.""What if I were?" I say."I was kidding, Dee. Just because someone's got a fear of heights doesn't mean she died in a fall a hundred years ago."Before I know it, I am telling Fitz about the lemon tree. I explain how it felt as if the heat was laying a crown on my head, how the tree had been planted in soil as red as blood. How I could read the letters ABC on the bottoms of my shoes. Fitz listens carefully, his arms folded across his chest, with the same studious consideration he exhibited when I was ten and confessed that I'd seen the ghost of an Indian sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed. "Well," he says finally. "It's not like you said you were wearing a hoop skirt, or shooting a musket. Maybe you're just remembering something from this life, something you've forgotten. There's all kind of research out there on recovered memory. I can do a little digging for you and see what I come up with.""I thought recovered memories were traumatic. What's traumatic about citrus fruit?""Lachanophobia," he says. "That's the fear of vegetables. It stands to reason that there's one for the rest of the food pyramid, too.""How much did your parents sh.e.l.l out for that Ivy League education?" Fitz grins, reaching for Greta's leash. "All right, where do you want me to lay your trail?"He knows the routine. He will take off his sweats.h.i.+rt and leave it at the bottom of the stairs, so that Greta has a scent article. Then he'll strike off for three miles or five or ten, winding through streets and back roads and woods. I'll give him a fifteen-minute head start, and then Greta and I will get to work. "You pick," I reply, confident that wherever he goes, we will find him.Once, when Greta and I were searching for a runaway, we found his corpse instead. A dead body stops smelling like a live one immediately, and as we got closer, Greta knew something wasn't right. The boy was hanging from the limb of a ma.s.sive oak. I dropped to my knees, unable to breathe, wondering how much earlier I might have had to arrive to make a difference. I was so shaken that it took me a while to notice Greta's reaction: She turned in a circle, whining; then lay down with her paws over her nose. It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it. Fitz leads us on a circuitous trail, from the pizza place through the heart of Wexton's Main Street, behind the gas station, across a narrow stream, and down a steep incline to the edge of a natural water slide. By the time we reach him, we've walked six miles, and I'm soaked up to the knees. Greta finds him crouching behind a copse of trees whose damp leaves glitter like coins. He grabs the stuffed moose Greta likes to play catch witha reward for making her findand throws it for her to retrieve. "Who's smart?" he croons. "Who's a smart girl?" I drive him back home, and then head to Sophie's school to pick her up. While I wait for the dismissal bell to ring, I take off the strand of pearls. There are fifty-two beads, one for each of the years my mother would have been on earth if she were still alive. I start to feed them through my fingers like the hem of a rosary, starting with prayersthat Eric and I will be happy, that Sophie will grow up safe, that Fitz will find someone to spend his life with, that my father will stay healthy. When I run out, I begin to attach memories instead, one for each pearl. There is that day she brought me to the petting zoo, a recollection I've built entirely around the photo in the alb.u.m I saw several nights ago. The faintest picture of her dancing barefoot in the kitchen. The feel of her hands on my scalp as she ma.s.saged in baby shampoo. There's a flash, too, of her crying on a bed.I don't want that to be the last thing I see, so I rearrange the memories as if they are a deck of cards, and leave off with her dancing. I imagine each memory as the grain of sand that the pearl grew around: a hard, protective sh.e.l.l to keep it from drifting away.It is Sophie who decides to teach the dog how to play board games. She's found reruns of Mr. Ed on television, and thinks Greta is smarter than any horse. To ray surprise, though, Greta takes to the challenge. When we're playing and it's Sophie's turn, the bloodhound steps on the domed plastic of the Trouble game to jiggle the dice.I laugh out loud, amazed. "Dad," I yell upstairs, where my father is folding the wash. "Come see this."The telephone rings and the answering machine picks up, filling the room with Fitz's voice. "Hey, Delia, are you there? I have to talk to you." I jump up and reach for the phone, but Sophie gets there more quickly and punches the disconnect b.u.t.ton. "You promised," she says, but already her attention has moved past me to something over my shoulder.I follow her gaze toward the red and blue lights outside. Three police cars have cordoned off the driveway; two officers are heading for the front door. Several neighbors stand on their porches, watching.Everything inside me goes to stone. If I open that door I will hear something that I am not willing to hearthat Eric has been arrested for drunk driving, that he's been in an accident. Or something worse.When the doorbell rings, I sit very still with my arms crossed over my chest. I do this to keep from flying apart. The bell rings again, and I hear Sophie turning the k.n.o.b. "Is your mom home, honey?" one of the policemen asks. The officer is someone I've worked with; Greta and I helped him find a robbery suspect who ran from the scene of a crime. "Delia," he greets. My voice is as hollow as the belly of a cave. "Rob. Did something happen?" He hesitates. "Actually, we need to see your dad." Immediately, relief swims through me. If they want my father, this isn't about Eric."I'll get him," I offer, but when I turn around he's already standing there. He is holding a pair of my socks, which he folds over very neatly and hands to me. "Gentlemen," he says. "What can I do for you?""Andrew Hopkins?" the second officer says. "We have a warrant for your arrest as a fugitive from justice, in conjunction with the kidnapping of Bethany Matthews." Rob has his handcuffs out. "You have the wrong person," I say, incredulous. "My father didn't kidnap anyone.""You have the right to remain silent," Rob recites. "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning""Call Eric," my father says. "He'll know what to do." The policemen begin to push him through the doorway. I have a hundred questions: Why are you doing this to him? How could you be so mistaken? But the one that comes out, even as my throat is closing tight as a sealed drum, surprises me. "Who is Bethany Matthews?"My father does not take his gaze off me. "You were," he says. EricI'm almost late to my meeting, thanks to the dump truck in front of me. Like a dozen other state vehicles in Wexton in March, it's piled high with snowheaps removed from the sidewalks and the parking lot of the post office and the banks pushed up at the edges of the gas station. When there is just no room for another storm's bounty, the DOT guys shovel it up and cart it away. I used to picture them driving south toward Florida, until their load had completely melted, but the truth is, they simply take the trucks to a ravine at the edge of the Wexton Golf Course and empty them there. They make a pile of snow so formidable that even in June, when the temperature hits seventy-five degrees, you'll find kids in shorts there, sledding. Here's the amazing thing: It doesn't flood. You'd think that a volume of precipitation that immense would, upon melting, have the capacity to sweep away a few cars or turn a state highway into a raging river, but by the time the snow is gone, the ground is mostly dry. Delia was in my science cla.s.s the year we learned why: snow disappears. It's one of those solids that can turn directly into a vapor without ever going through that intermediate liquid stagepart of the process of sublimation.Interestingly, it wasn't until I started coming to these meetings that I learned the second meaning of that word: to take a base impulse and redirect its energy to an ethically higher aim.The truck makes a right onto an access road and I swerve around it, speeding up. I pa.s.s the deli that has changed hands three times in the last six months, the old country store that still sells penny candy I sometimes bring to Sophie, the poultry farm with its enormous shrink-wrapped hay bales stacked like giant marshmallows against the barn. Finally I swerve into the parking lot and hurry out of my car and inside.They haven't started yet. People are still milling around the coffee and the cookies, talking in small pockets of forced kins.h.i.+p. There are men in business suits and women in sweatpants, elderly men and boys yet to grow a full beard. Some of them, I know, come from an hour away to be here. I approach a group of men who are talking about how the Bruins are doing their d.a.m.nedest to lose a spot in the playoffs.The lights flicker and, at the front of the room, the leader asks us to take our seats. He calls the meeting to order and gives a few opening remarks. I find myself sitting next to a woman who is trying to unwrap a roll of LifeSavers without making any noise. When she sees me watching, she blushes and offers me one. Sour apple.I work on sucking the candy instead of biting it, but I've never been a patient man, and even as I imagine it getting thin as an O-ring I find myself crunching it between my teeth. Just then there is a pause in the flow of the meeting. I raise my hand, and the leader smiles at me."I'm Eric," I say, standing. "And I'm an alcoholic." When I graduated from law school, I had a choice of several employment options. I could have joined a prestigious Boston firm with clients who would have paid $250an hour for my expertise; I could have taken a position with the public defender's office in a variety of counties and done the humanitarian thing; I could have clerked with a State Supreme Court justice. Instead, I chose to come back to Wexton and hang a s.h.i.+ngle of my own. It boiled down to this: I can't stand being away from Delia.Ask any guy, and he can tell you the moment he realized that the woman standing next to him was the one he'd be spending his life with. For me, it was a little different: Delia had been standing next to me for so long, that it was her absence I couldn't handle. We went to college five hundred miles apart, and when I'd call her dorm room and get her answering machine, I'd imagine all the other guys who were at that very second trying to steal her away. I'll admit it: For as long as I could remember, I was the object of Delia's affection, and the thought of having compet.i.tion for the first time in my life put me over the edge. Going out for a beer became a way to keep myself from obsessing about her, but eventually, that one beer became six or ten.Drinking was in my blood, so to speak. We've all read the statistics about children of alcoholics. I would have sworn up and down, when I was a kid, that I'd never turn into the person my mother had been-and maybe I wouldn't have, if I hadn't missed Delia quite so much. Without her, there was a hole inside me, and I suppose that to fill it, I did what came naturally in the Talcott family.It's funny. I started drinking heavily because I wanted to see that expression in Delia's eyes when she looked only at me, and it's the same reason I quit drinking. She isn't just the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with, she's the reason I have one.This afternoon I am meeting a potential client who happens to be a crow. Blackie was wounded when he fell out of a nest, or so says Martin Schnurr, who rescued him. He nursed the bird back to health, and when it kept hanging around, fed it cold coffee and bits of doughnuts on his porch in Hanover. But when the crow chased a neighbor's kids, the authorities got called. Turns out, crows are a federally regulated migratory species, and Mr. Schnurr doesn't have the state and federal license to keep him."He escaped from the place where the Department of Environmental Services was holding him," Schnurr says proudly. "Found his way back, ten whole miles.""As the crow flies, of course," I say. "So what can I do for you, Mr. Schnurr?""The DES is going to come after him again. I want a restraining order," Schnurr says. "I'm willing to go to the Supreme Court, if I have to." The likelihood of this case going to Was.h.i.+ngton is somewhere between nil and nevermore, but before I can explain this the door to the office bursts open and there is Delia, frantic and crying. My insides seize. I am imagining the very worst; I am thinking of Sophie. Without even a glance at the client, I pull Delia into the hall and try to shake the facts out of her."My father's been arrested," she says. 'You have to go, Eric. You have to." I have no idea what Andrew might have done, and I do not ask. She believes I can fix this, and like always, that's enough to make me think I can. "I'll take care of it," I say, when what I really mean is: I'll take care of you.We didn't play inside my house. I made sure to get up early enough so that I was always the one knocking on Delia's door, or Fitz's. On the occasions that we settled at my place, I did my best to keep everyone outside, under the backyard deck or beneath the sloping saltbox roof of our garage, and that's how I managed to keep my secret until I was nine.That was the winter Fitz started to play league hockey, which left Delia and me alone in the afternoons. She was a latchkey kidher father was always working at the senior centersomething that never bothered her until we happened to see a TVmovie about a twin who died and had his ring finger sent to his brother in a velvet box. After that, Delia didn't like being by herself. She started to come up with reasons to hang out at her house after schoolsomething I was more than happy to do, if only to get out of my own. I always stopped off at home first, though. I had a hundred ready excuses: I wanted to drop off my backpack; I had to grab a warmer sweats.h.i.+rt; I needed my mother to sign a report card. Afterward, I would head next door.One day, as usual, Dee and I split up at the fork in the sidewalk that divided my driveway from hers. "See you in a few," she said.My house was quiet, which wasn't a good sign. I wandered through it, calling for my mother, until I found her pa.s.sed out on the kitchen floor. She was sprawled on her side this time, and there was a puddle of vomit under her cheek. When she blinked, the insides of her eyes were the color of cut rubies. I picked up the bottle and poured the bourbon down the sink drain. I rolled my mother out of the way so I could clean up her mess with paper towels. Then I got behind her and braced myself hard, trying to lever her weight so I could drag her to the living room couch."What can I do?"It wasn't until I heard Delia's quiet voice that I realized she had been standing in the kitchen for a while. When she spoke, she couldn't meet my eyes, and that was a good thing. She helped me get my mother to the couch, onto her side, where if she got sick again she wouldn't choke. I turned on the TV, a soap I knew she liked."Eric, baby, would you get me . . ." my mother slurred, but she didn't finish her sentence before she pa.s.sed out again. When I looked around, Delia was gone. Well, it didn't surprise me. It was, in fact, the reason I'd kept this secret from my two best friends; once they saw the truth, I was sure they'd turn tail and run. I walked back to the kitchen, each foot a lead weight. Delia stood there, holding a sponge and staring down at the linoleum. "Will carpet cleaner work even if it's not used on carpet?" she asked."You should go," I told her. I looked down at the floor and pretended to be fascinated with the little blue dot pattern.Delia came closer to me, seeing the freak I truly was. With one finger, she traced an X over her chest. "I won't tell."One traitor tear slicked its way down my cheek; I scrubbed it away with a fist."You should go," I repeated, the last thing in the world that I wanted."Okay," Delia agreed. But she didn't leave.The Wexton police station is like a hundred other small-town law enforcement agencies: a squat cement building with a flagpole planted out front like a giant tulip stalk; a dispatcher so infrequently bothered that she keeps a portable TV at her desk; a nursery school cla.s.s mural spread along the wall, thanking the chief for keeping everyone safe. I walk inside and ask to speak to Andrew Hopkins. I tell the dispatcher I am his attorney.A door buzzes, and a sergeant comes into the hallway. "He's back here," the officer says, leading me through the pretzeled hallways into the booking room. I ask to see the warrant for Andrew's arrest, pretending, like any defense attorney, to know far more than I actually do at this minute. When I scan the paper, I have to do my best to keep a straight face. Kidnapping?Indicting Andrew Hopkins for kidnapping is like charging Mother Teresa with heresy. As far as I know he's never even gotten a traffic ticket, much less been implicated in criminal behavior. He's been a model father-attentive, devoted-the parent I would have killed to have when I was growing up. No wonder Delia's so rattled. To have your father accused of living a secret life, when, in fact, he's been about as public a figure as humanly possible-well, it's insane. There are two lockups in Wexton, used mostly for DUIs who need to sleep off a bender; I have been in the one on the left myself. Andrew sits on the steel bench in the other. When he sees me, he gets to his feet.Until this moment, I haven't really considered him to be an old man. But Andrew is almost sixty, and looks every year of it in the shallow gray light of the holding cell. His hands curl around the bars. "Where's Delia?""She's fine. She's the one who came to get me." I take a step forward and angle my shoulder, blocking our conversation until the sergeant leaves the room. "Listen, Andrew, you have nothing to worry about. Obviously this is a case of mistaken ident.i.ty. We'll contest it, set everything straight, and then maybe even get you some money for emotional damages. Now, I"

"It's not a mistake," he says softly.I stare at him, speechless. He starts to repeat his confession, but I stop him before I have to hear it again. "Don't tell me," I interrupt. "Don't say anything else, all right?"Part of me has s.h.i.+fted into automatic defense attorney mode. If your client confessesand they almost always want toyou put in earplugs and go about doing your job. Whatever the vicefelony or misdemeanor, murder or, Jesus Christ, kidnappingyou can still find a way to make a jury see the shades of gray involved. But part of me is not an attorney, just Delia's fiance. A man who needs to hear the truth, so that he can tell it to her. What kind of person steals a child? What would I do to the son of a b.i.t.c.h who took Sophie?I look down at the arrest warrant again. "Bethany Matthews," I read out loud."That... used to be her name."He doesn't have to explain the rest; I know in that instant we're talking about Delia. That she is the little girl who was stolen a lifetime ago. I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.The lawyer in me urges caution, remembers that there are mitigating circ.u.mstances I don't yet know. The rest of me wonders if Delia cried when he took her. If she was scared. If her mother spent years searching for her. If she still is."Eric, listen ...""You'll be arraigned tomorrow in New Hamps.h.i.+re on the fugitive charges," I interrupt. "But you've been indicted by an Arizona grand jury. We'll have to go there to enter a plea.""Eric""Andrew"I turn my back on him"I can't I just can't, right now." I am about to exit the lockup, but at the last moment, I walk back toward the cell. "Is she yours?""Of course she's mine!""Of course?" I snap. "For G.o.d's sake, Andrew, I just found out that you're a kidnapper. I have to tell Delia you're a kidnapper. I don't exactly think it's an unreasonable question." I take a deep breath. "How old was she?""Four.""And in twenty-eight years you never told her?""She loves me." Andrew looks down at the floor. "Would you risk losing that?" Without answering, I turn and walk away.When I was eleven, I realized that Delia Hopkins was female. She wasn't like ordinary girls: she didn't have the dreamy, loopy handwriting that reminded us of soap bubbles lined up in a row; she didn't giggle behind her hand in a way that made us wonder what we'd done wrong; she didn't come to school with neat braids twisted like French crullers. Instead, she spoke to frogs. She could make a slap shot from the blue line. She was the first one to cut her palm with Fitz's Swiss army knife when we three made a blood vow, and she didn't even flinch. The summer after fifth grade, everything changed. Without even trying, I smelled Delia's hair when she sat near me. I noticed how her brown summer skin stretched tight over the muscles of her shoulders. I watched her tilt her face to the sun and felt an answer in my own body.I kept these thoughts a secret through the first half of sixth grade, until Valentine's Day. It was the first time in school that we weren't forced to bring in a card for everyone in the cla.s.s, including the kid who picked his nose and the Missing Link, who had so much hair on her arms and back you could practically braid it. Girls flitted around the cafeteria like b.u.t.terflies, alighting long enough to plant kisses on the bright cheeks of boys they liked. When it happened, you'd pretend to be disgusted, but there would be a coal burning inside you.Fitz got a card from Abigail Lewis, who had just gotten glow-in-the-dark braces and, it was rumored, invited select boys into the custodian's closet to watch them light up. In my own back pocket was a folded pink heart that I'd glued to a square of red construction paper. When I'm with you, bells go off in my head, I had written, and then added: Like a moving truck that's backing up.I was going to give it to Delia, but a thousand times that day, the moment hadn't been rightFitz was with us, or she was too busy rummaging in her locker, or the teacher came by before I could pa.s.s it across the aisle. I slipped it out of my pocket just in time to have Fitz grab it out of my hand. "You got a card, too, didn't you?" He read it aloud, and he and Delia started to laugh.Angry, I s.n.a.t.c.hed it back. "I didn't get it from someone, you jerk. I'm giving it." And because Delia was still sort of laughing, I marched right past her and up to the first girl I saw, Itzy Fisher, carrying a hot lunch tray. "Here," I said, and I shoved the card between her napkin and her slab of pizza.There was absolutely nothing special about Itzy Fisher. She had long frizzy hair that nearly touched her behind, and she wore gold-rimmed gla.s.ses that sometimes caught the light in cla.s.s and made little reflections dance on the blackboard. I had barely said three words to her all year."Itzy Fisher?" Delia accused when I sat back down. "You like her?" And then she got up and ran out of the cafeteria.Groaning, I flopped my head down on my arms. "I didn't make that card for Itzy. It was for Delia.""Delia?" Fitz said."You wouldn't understand."Fitz stared right at me. "What makes you think that?" In the thousands of times I have replayed this moment over the years, I realize that what happened next could have gone a different way. That had Fitz been less of a best friend, or more compet.i.tive, or even more honest with himself, my life might have turned out very different. But instead, he asked me for a dollar."Why?""Because she's p.i.s.sed at you," he said, as I fished into my lunch money. "And I can fix that."He took a Sharpie from his binder and wrote something across George Was.h.i.+ngton's face. Then he creased the bill the long way. He brought up the bottom edge and then the halves, turned it over, and tucked in both sides. A few more maneuvers and then he handed me a dollar folded into the shape of a heart. When I found Delia, she was sitting underneath the water fountain near the gym. I handed her Fitz's heart. I watched her open it, read the message along with her: If all I could ever have is you, I'd be a billionaire."Itzy might get jealous," Delia said."Itzy and I broke up."She burst out laughing. 'That's the shortest relations.h.i.+p in history." I glanced over at her. "You're not still mad at me, are you?""That depends. Did you write this?""Yes," I lied."Can I keep the dollar?"I blinked. "I guess.""Then no," she said. "I'm not mad."I waited for years to see Delia spend that dollar on something-every time she pulled out money to buy candy or ice cream or a c.o.ke, I'd scan it for Fitz's words. But as far as I know she never spent it. As far as I know, she has it, still. When I go into Andrew's house, it's quiet. I call for Delia, but there's no answer. Wandering around, I check the bathroom and the living room and the kitchen, and then I hear noise coming from upstairs. The door to Sophie's room is closed; when I open it she is on the floor, playing with the Crime Scene Dollhouse. Delia and I got to calling it that when Sophie would leave the rooms with the contents overturned, a Barbie or two spread-eagled on the floor of the kitchen or bathroom. "Daddy," she says, "did you bring Grandpa home?""I'm working on it," I tell her, ruffling her hair. "Where's Mommy?""Out back with Greta." Sophie holds a Ken doll up to the front door. "Open up. It's the police," she says.When I look at Sophie, I see Delia. Not just in the physical features-Delia's dark hair and rosy cheeks are duplicated in our daughterbut their expressions are identical. Like how a smile unfurls across both their faces, a sail caught in a rip of wind. And the habit they have of separating the food on their plates into similar colors. Or the way, when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see. I watch Sophie for another moment, thinking about what I would do if someone took her away from me, how I'd upend the earth to find her. And then I hesitate, and wonder what might make me be the one to run away with her in tow. Downstairs, I find Delia deep in thought on the outside deck. Her legs are propped up on Greta, a lightly snoring ottoman. When she sees me she startles."Did you""I can't get him out until the arraignment tomorrow.""He has to spend the night at the police station?" I weigh the cost of admitting that, actually, her father will spend the night in the Grafton County Jail, and decide against it. "First thing in the morning, we can go to the courthouse."She glances up at me. "But they'll let him go, won't they? They're looking for someone named Bethany Matthews. That's not me. That was never me. And I wasn't kidnapped. Don't you think I'd remember something like that?" Taking a deep breath, I ask, "Do you remember your mother dying?""Eric, I was practically a baby-""Do you remember it?"She shakes her head."Your father told you your mother was dead, Delia," I say bluntly. "And then he brought you to New Hamps.h.i.+re."Her chin comes up. "You're lying.""No, Dee. He was."Just then Fitz bursts onto the deck. "Why aren't you answering the phone? I've been trying to get in touch with you for an hour!""I've been a little busy trying to get my father out of police custody.""You found out," Fitz says, his jaw dropping. "About the kidnapping.""How the h.e.l.l do you know about it?" I ask.Fitz sits down across from Delia. "That's why I've been trying to call you. You remember how we were talking about past lives the other day? Well, I started to think about how people reinvent themselves all the time. And that maybe there was a more logical explanation to the whole lemon tree memory than the fact that you used to be a citrus farmer in eighteenth-century Tuscany. So I jumped online and Googled your name. Come on inside; I'll show you."We follow Fitz to Delia's computer, buried under topographical maps of New Hamps.h.i.+re and Vermont and catalogs from K-9 supply companies. Fitz starts to type, and a minute later, a screen is filled with stripes of search results. The first few links are Gazette stories about Delia and Greta, making a missing-person rescue. But Fitz clicks on a different link, and a page from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch fills the screen. "CORDELIA LYNN HOPKINS," it reads. "Daughter of Margaret Ketcham Hopkins and the late Andrew Hopkins, was born in Maryland Heights on March 16, 1973...""That's my birthday," Delia says."... in Clarkton and died March 8, 1977, at the age of four as a result of complications from an automobile accident that also claimed the life of her father. Survivors include her mother; her grandparents, Joe and Aleda Ketcham; and a brother, Lloyd. Funeral services will be conducted at 11 AM on Sat.u.r.day, at the Maiden Baptist Church with Reverend Thomas Monroe officiating. Interment will follow at Memorial Park Cemetery in Maiden.""She had the same name, the same birthday. Her father died in the same car crash. And the accident happened the same year that you showed up with your father in Wexton.""Type in Bethany Matthews," I tell Fitz.The screen glows green with a new list of articles, all from the Arizona Republic."CHILD ABDUCTED DURING CUSTODY VISIT. MOTHER VOWS TO FINDMISSING DAUGHTER. NO NEW LEADS IN SCOTTSDALE KIDNAPPING CASE." Fitz clicks on one link.June 20, 1977Investigators continue to search for clues in the disappearance of Bethany Matthews, 4, of Scottsdale, who was last seen in the company of her father, Charles Matthews, 33, during a routine custody visit. Police in Albuquerque, acting on a tip, raided a hotel room that had been paid for with Mr. Matthews's credit card, but turned up no positive results. Meanwhile, the girl's mother, Elise Matthews, has not given up hope that her daughter will be found and returned safely. "There is nothing in this world," Mrs. Matthews vowed yesterday at a televised press conference, "that can keep me away from her." Mr. and Mrs. Matthews divorced in March, and shared custody. Matthews was last seen picking up his daughter from the home of his ex-wife at 9 AM on Sat.u.r.day, where he indicated that he would return before 6 PM on Sunday. When he didn't bring Bethany back, and Mrs. Matthews was unable to reach him via telephone, she involved the police. An initial search of Mr Matthews's apartment suggested that the subject had permanently vacated the premises. Volunteers who would like to contribute time or materials to the search effort should report to the Saguaro High School gymnasium. Any tips regarding the whereabouts of Bethany Matthews or Charles Matthews should be directed to the Scottsdale police, at 555-3333.Delia puts her hand over Fitz's, where it rests on the mouse. She clicks a single word at the end of the article: photo. Twin head shots fill the computer screen-one of a little girl who looks frighteningly like Sophie; the other of a younger, grinning Andrew Hopkins.A minute later she runs out the door and into the woods, Greta bounding off at her heels. We both know enough to let her go."This is all my fault," Fitz says."I think Andrew might be a little more to blame."He shakes his head. "I didn't know her name ... her real name. After I saw the obituary on Cordelia Hopkins, I started thinking of who might steal an ident.i.ty, and why. Delia mentioned some weird memory about a lemon tree ... so I narrowed down my search by figuring out where they'd grow." Fitz starts counting off on his fingers. "Florida. Southern California. Arizona. Only one of them had a well-publicized kidnapping case in 1977. I called the number in the article for the Scottsdale Police, and asked about Bethany Matthews. It took a while to find someone who knew what I was talking aboutall of the officers who'd worked on the case had retired. They asked me where I was calling from.""And you told them?"Fitz grimaces. "I had to say I was a journalist, didn't I? The thing is, Eric, I never told them Del