map, expanded. She spread her fingers some more, and smaller places popped into view. Then she moved the magnified image around, circling Laconia’s boundary, examining the nearby hinterland.
No Ryantown.
“Try further out,” he said.
“How far would a kid go for a birdwatching club?”
“Maybe he had a bike. Maybe Ryantown was boring. The cops told me there were all kinds of little spots, each with a couple dozen families and not much else. Maybe it was a place like that.”
“It would still have birds, surely. Maybe more than here, if it was quiet.”
“The cops said there were all kinds of mills and little factories. Maybe the atmosphere was smoky.”
“OK, wait,” she said.
She started over with her phone. This time typing and tapping, not swooping around. Maybe a search engine, or a local history site.
“Yes,” she said. “It was a tin mill. Belonged to a man named Ryan. He built worker accommodations and called the place Ryantown. The mill finally closed in the 1950s and the town died, such as it was to begin with. Everyone left and the name fell off the map.”
“Where was it?”
“Supposedly north and west of here,” she said. She dabbed the map back on her phone, and spread and pinched and moved her fingers around.
“About here, possibly,” she said.
There was no name on the map. Just a blank gray shape, and a road.
“Zoom out,” he said.
She did, and the gray shape receded to a pinprick, north and west of Laconia, maybe eight miles out. Between ten and eleven on a clock face. It was one of many similar pinpricks. Like busy planets around a sun, held close in by gravity or magnetism or some other kind of strong attraction. Like Detective Brenda Amos had predicted, for all practical purposes Ryantown had been part of Laconia, no matter what the postal service said. The road that passed it by went onward toward nowhere in particular. It just meandered north and west, ten or more miles, and then another ten through a wood, and then onward. A back road, like the one he had been on with the guy in the Subaru. He could picture it.
He said, “I guess there won’t be a bus.”
“You could rent a car,” she said. “There are places here in town.”
“I don’t have a driver’s license.”
“I don’t think a cab would want to go out there.”
Eight miles, he thought.
“I’ll walk,” he said. “But not now. It would be dark as soon as I got there. Tomorrow, maybe. You want to get dinner tonight?”
“What?”
“Dinner,” he said. “The third meal of the day, generally eaten in the evening. Can be functional, or social, or sometimes both.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m having dinner with Carter Carrington tonight.”
* * *
—
Shorty carried the cardboard carton into the room and placed it on the dresser in front of the TV screen. Then he sat with Patty, side by side in their lawn chairs, through the last of the afternoon sun. She didn’t talk. She was thinking. She often was. He knew the signs. He guessed she was processing the information she had received, examining it, turning it this way and that, until she was satisfied. Which would be soon, he thought. Surely. He really didn’t see much of a problem anymore. The thing with the cotton bud had a simple explanation. And the phone was back on. The mechanic was coming first thing in the morning. Total damage, less than two hundred dollars. A drag for sure, but not a disaster.
Patty said, “Let’s not go to the house for dinner. I think he was kind of hinting they didn’t want us to.”
“He said we were invited.”
“He was being polite.”
“I think he meant it. But he was also looking at it from our point of view.”
“Now he’s your best friend forever?”
“I don’t know,” Shorty said. “Most of the time I think he’s a weird asshole who needs a smack. But I have to admit he did good with the mechanic. He explained the problem and got a solution. That shows he’s taking it seriously. Maybe we were both right, way back at the beginning. They’re weird, but also they’re doing their best for us. I guess they could be both things at once.”
“Whichever, let’s eat just the two of us.”
“Works for me. I’m sick of answering their questions. It’s like the third degree.”
“I told you,” Patty said. “They’re being polite. It’s considered polite to take an interest.”
They got up and stepped inside the room. They left the door wide