I have a couple of things on my mind.

Detective Wise said ‘Keep it in your hat.’ My father always said ‘Keep it under your hat.’ Same thing I suppose. But I have something in my head that I don’t want there. I was happier before I knew it, and I wasn’t very happy then.

It’s a nice little cap. It’s a Donegal tweed my daughters gave me a while back. Des took it off my head more than once and wore it when we were out in the cold. It was too big for her and gave her the look of an old-time newsboy. She looked damn good in it. I was going to buy her one for Christmas.

The thing for me to do now was to get all this out of my head. I went down to the Historical Society for that. I hadn’t been there since I’d gone to work for Connie because it wasn’t as convenient now that I didn’t work in the Pru anymore, but it was time to get back to it. I had to track down Izaac Andrews.

There are plenty of catalogues and indexes of letters in the various libraries. There is the James Stark book, Loyalists of Massachusetts. I had bought an original copy of that for a bargain 60 bucks over the summer from an on-line dealer in Chicago. There was the Walter Barrell accounting of the removal of the Loyalists from Boston to Halifax in March, 1776. A lot of this stuff is on-line now. You can access the Haldimand papers up in Canada in the comfort of a chair at home. The problem is that beyond the reference to ‘Izaac Andrews and family,’ with the number of persons listed as ‘6,’ having been taken aboard at Boston Harbor during General Howe’s evacuation, and the letters Becky had previously found which were written by Andrews’ wife when they were looking for their lost daughter, there wasn’t much to go on.

Soon after April 19, 1775, Izaac Andrews moved into Boston for safety. He had evidently sold his tavern in Menotomy as well as his house and taken up residence in one of the homes near the rope-walk at the bottom of Beacon Hill. Many of these buildings were abandoned by rebels who had left Boston before the siege began. I had found a reference to an ‘Isaac’ Andrews who sold provisions to the British Troops the following summer, but there was no certainty that it was the same man. The next appearance of the name is as one of over a thousand refugees who boarded British ships after Washington took command of Dorchester heights.

There were no records on-line for the Massachusetts tavern-keeper in Halifax. This was not surprising. As in the James Stark history, which included key Loyalist biographies, only the notables were accounted for. According to Stark and other sources, many of the Loyalists moved out of that small fishing port in Nova Scotia for the cold comfort of unoccupied land near St. Johns in what would become New Brunswick. But there was nothing more about Andrews or his family that I had yet found.

At the Historical Society there were copies of a few letters from those who had left, asking for help from friends and family who stayed behind. ‘Mercy’ was a common request. Most of them had lost everything in the sudden turn of fortunes. They had assumed that the British General Howe would stand his ground against the ‘rabble.’ In Washington and Knox, General Howe had been outwitted by a Virginia planter and a bookseller. The discouragement in the letters was great.

I had found again that tracking people was harder back in the old days. No electronic records. Ledgers seldom recorded whole names. There was nothing at all kept by way of a paper trail for most people beyond the purchase and sale of property, births, deaths, and marriages. Izaac Andrews was somewhere at the middle of the ladder. His wife, Lydie, had no maiden name given. Perhaps they were both born in England. After Izaac sold his house and tavern, he barely existed. His daughter Mary had obviously ranked below that.

But this puts other thoughts in my head. After a few hours at the Historical Society yesterday afternoon, I wander down to the same bar where I gotten the four pigeon feathers in August. It was just a chance. I had to try.

I can tell that the bartender recognizes me right off, but he hardly gives me a look when I sit down. He makes me wait awhile before he moves my way. With his sleeves rolled, he has more hair visible on his arms than on his head. He doesn’t ask what I want. After a bit, he just sort of stands there between me and the television.

I say, “Tell me something. I could use a Sam. I see you’ve got the Winter Lager on tap. I’d like that. But tell me, why did you get so upset over those feathers?”

He doesn’t respond to that right off. He thinks it over. I know the price of a beer isn’t worth the extra trouble. It’s a matter of whether there was something more there to begin with.

He says, “Why don’t you go someplace else.”

Now I’m really interested.

“Because I need to know. You don’t know me. There’s no reason for you to be on my case except for the fact that I wouldn’t give you back those feathers. It was you who gave them to me in the first place. Right? So something is going on. It’s more than curiosity.”

He thinks about this. Then he goes over and pulls my beer and sets it down in front of me, but he doesn’t say a word.

The next time it gets quiet, he comes back.

He says, “That was my mistake. That’s a fact…She used to come in here every week. I got used to it. I liked talking to her. Something I looked forward to…I mean, it’s been what? Three months. Friday nights I still look for her to come through the door.”

“You haven’t seen her since?”

“No. Once. On the street. Around lunch time one day when I was on my way to work. I asked her if she ever got her feathers back. She said yes. She seemed pretty pleased about it. But she never came back in…You met her. You gave back the feathers, right? So, you know what I talking about. She was good to see.”

Now I could work this around the long way, or go head on. I don’t have the patience for the long way. Never did.

I ask, “What did you talk about when she used to come in?”

He shrugs, “This and that.”

I say, “What? Places? Sports? What?”

He says, “That’s right. Mostly places. She’d been all over. She told me about Texas once. She liked Texas. But I don’t think she was from there. And California. She didn’t like California. And she’d spent a lot of time in England. She wanted to go back.”

I said, “Where about in England?”

I see the crease suddenly cut right across his forehead.

“Why do you want to know?”

I was moving too fast. So now it was my turn.

“Because she’s missing.”

The crease on his forehead gets deeper. “What do you mean, she’s missing. Like disappeared? Are you a cop?”

I look him in the eye to make sure he can see what I’m saying. “No. Just a guy. I got to know her. And now she’s gone. Disappeared. I’m trying to find out what happened.”

He gives one short laugh at that, without a smile. “Now you know how I feel.”

I say, “Maybe worse. I got real serious over it.” I can see he understands that pretty quick. I say. “Now I’m worried something has happened to her. I don’t know what. She didn’t show up to work one morning. She didn’t go home. She hasn’t contacted anyone. She hasn’t even called her mother…So I’m just wondering, if you can tell me if you remember her talking about where she wanted to go back to?”

He thinks about this for a minute. He pulls a beer for someone else. He sets up some glasses. Then he comes back.

“She talked about a place called Rye. Same as the drink. She wanted to go back to a little house there she’d lived in for a while. She talked about it more than once.”

I appreciate the fact that he was not going to be a hardass. But I had to take it one step further.

“Look. There’s a police detective who’s working on this. His name is Bill Wise. If I send him over, will you tell him about it?”

He nods at me. “I guess I will. Sure.”

I tap the bar with the palm of my hand. “Something else…” Now this is the actual reason I had decided to come in. Detective Wise told me he had no way to track her, and this was the only link I could think of. I say, “Did she always pay cash when she came in or did she ever use a credit card?”

“Cash.” He pauses to glance at his register. “Except once. On the Fourth of July, she came in before the fireworks. She was on her way over there by herself. I told her I’d close the place up and go with her if she wanted me to. She laughed like I was joking, but I wasn’t. Anyway, she didn’t have any cash. She’d forgotten to go to the bank, I think. She used her card that day. I remember because I saw the name on the card and it wasn’t the same one she’d told me.”

“Margaret?”

“No. Judy.”

So the night I was flirting with Rebecca Sawyer on the other side of the Charles River, Desiree had been watching those same fire works as well.

“Do you remember the last name?

He shakes his head at me. “Not right off. But I could find the receipt easily enough.”

“Did you ask her about the first name?”

“Yeah. She said it was her mother’s name. She didn’t like to use it. I got the impression she didn’t like her mother at all.”

That sounded right. Only her mother’s name wasn’t Judy. Or at least it wasn’t the name her mother was using now.

There is a ferry that goes over to Long Island from New London. I take the first one available this morning and I’m in Greenport before noon.

Nice place. Not like the Eastern Shore. These are small houses. Most of them still have a little of the modesty that was common a hundred years ago. Hometown USA. The water is only a few blocks away on all sides. I can see myself living in a place like this pretty easily. I could get myself a little boat. Learn to fish.

Mrs. Betty Arnold lives in a plain, square, two story house, beige with green trim, with a porch side to side at the front. Several chairs are tucked to one side of the porch with the cushions removed for the winter. All of this is surrounded by a low white picket fence. Withered beach rose bushes are thick behind the white slats of the fence. I could easily imagine the mess of blossoms that would fill the narrow yard in summer. There is a ten year-old green Buick in the driveway.

She answers the door as if she were expecting me. She says, “You’re John Finn? Well. I didn’t guess correctly at all from your voice. Every man I’ve ever met with a deep voice is shorter than I am.”

I could have said something of the same thing for her. I expected someone closer to Des in height. Maybe five foot six inches. Betty Arnold was at least six feet tall. She hasn’t colored the gray in her hair. No stoop. Thin. Much too thin by any standard of mine. Not much in the way of a build, but then I figure her to be about 65 or 70 years old. Some curves evaporate with age. That was the way it was with my own mother.

I’m still standing at the door. All I’d said was “Hello.” We stood that way for maybe a full minute, with me wondering how she’d guessed who I was, but I added, “Is it possible that I could talk with you about your daughter?”

She says, “I suppose, if you’ve come all this way from Boston.” She shrugs a little without moving. “But I can’t tell you as much about Maggie as I should. She left home when she was seventeen, you know. She never lived with me after that, and I’ve only seen her a few times in recent years.”

She opens the door wider then, and smiles uncomfortably. Perhaps it was a matter of letting a stranger into her house.

To the left is a neat living room of inexpensive furniture. To the right is a dining room that smells of lemon-scented polish. The windows were curtained in different colors for each room. There is nothing distasteful or garish. She stood blocking the way to the dining room so I ended up in the other direction.

The funny thing, at that first moment, I had the feeling she was flirting with me. More than a feeling. The smile seemed a bit nervous. Embarrassed. Like a girl on a first date.

She’s a handsome woman, but my guess is, never as pretty as her daughter. She’s smart. That comes out fairly soon. Her diction is precise. She’s neatly dressed in a skirt and blouse and shoes. Half the women you run into these days at home are still in their pajamas and slippers at noon and the TV is rattling in the background. I could hear music coming from a radio. It sounded like Doris Day.

Early in our conversation she asks if I’d like tea, but I wave it off with an apology for the amount of coffee I drank to get up in time to catch the ferry.

I ask, “Does your husband work here in Greenport?”

She nods, “He did. He had a small marina. He used to own the Sea Blue Motel down on the water, but we sold that years ago. Before he died.”

That was a fact I should have known. I might have asked Wise about it when I called early that morning to let him know I was going down to Greenport, but he didn’t answer and I had to leave a message.

What I knew was that Mrs. Arnold had married twice after Des’ father died, but I had not written down any other names. I just assumed the last one was named Arnold.

I say, “I’m sorry. You’ve had your share of tragedy then. Your first husband, Charles Perry, died unexpectedly as well.”

She closes her eyes on her words as if weary of the thought and shakes her head.

“That was the drinking. Not really unexpected either. He was an alcoholic. He would have killed himself one way or the other eventually. Maggie’s father was just a cowboy out of his element. I should never have married him. But poor Patrick was just unlucky. He died of cancer. It took awhile so he had time to take care of his business affairs. I think I even said it to you on the phone: I’ve been unlucky in love.”

I had to ask then, “I hope your second husband is still okay.” I think I was trying to be funny, but not a bright question.

She actually smiles briefly again. I suppose there is some dark humor to it. “Probably. I have no idea. Stan and I were divorced over fifteen years ago. He was a stupid fellow. The kind of man who’s full of promises but can’t get out of bed in the morning…That was my second mistake. But you’re here to find out about Maggie, aren’t you?”

I have my hat in my hand because I’d taken it off when she came to the door, and I find myself fidgeting with it as I speak. I don’t usually put it down. I’ve lost too many hats that way. But now I see that she’s watching my hands so I put it on the seat of the couch beside me. I say, “Sure. Maybe I’m just looking for some motivation that might make her suddenly run away.”

Mrs. Arnold shakes her head at me, “She needed no motivation. She had the will power to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. I’ve often thought, if I was born a few years later and had half of Maggie’s determination, I would have owned the world.”

I should not be guessing at so much of this. What is the history? It’s not in a book or the odd letter or a piece of microfilm. All I have to do is ask. For this I need to know the right question.

“Why did Des run away the first time?”

I see the quick uncomfortable smile again. She says, “We argued. We argued constantly. She loved Charlie. She blamed me that he was out on the boat by himself that day. I didn’t like to go with him. It was his boat. He had bought it even though we couldn’t afford it.”

Now it was me who was uncomfortable. This did not seem to be what I wanted.

“On the phone you said you worried that it was something worse—that she had not simply run away this time.”

And there it is. Right across her cheeks and in the clinch of her jaw. Her eyes did not carry the fierceness I had seen with Des, but the anger was visible none-the-less.

“Over the years–” Mrs. Arnold halts to rephrase her words. “We had too little contact through the years, but all of it offered a picture I didn’t like. I don’t want to hurt you, but you’ve come looking for information. This is what I know. Maggie never wanted to get married–” She pauses with the uneasy smile I had seen earlier. “Detective Wise called this morning and said you were on your way. He told me you were in love with Des and you felt compelled to find out what had happened to her. I can empathize with that, but—” She takes a breath. It’s clear she doesn’t want to be talking about any of this. “I was still living in California when she was working in San Francisco. She had a different boyfriend every week then. She kept her things in my garage because she was moving around so much. Now and again she’d find a ride and show up at odd hours to get something. Often I would meet the boy she was with. Never the same one twice.”

She looks at me for my reaction to the hard facts. I tried not to look like a sap. I realize that this woman has not been flirting with me at all. She has been embarrassed for me. I was the stupid man again.

I say, “That was then. Just after law school. Des was pretty young.”

Betty Arnold shakes her head at me again. “Des. Desiree. Such an odd name. I wonder where she picked it up…When I was that age I was already nursing her. I was feeding and grooming six horses every morning and giving riding lessons every afternoon. I was mending the messes that Charlie made and keeping the light bill paid. Charlie only bought that damned boat to get away from me you understand. Maggie knows that.”

So it came down to one question.

“Why do you think this time is different?”

She sits back and looks toward a patch of sun that fell on the floor near our feet.

“I don’t know. I can’t really know. But she has changed over the years. I think I spoke to her once last year. All year. May 15th. She always called to ask how I was on May 15th. Very polite. But that was the day her father died.”

I wasn’t up to probing any further into that dark corner. I had no thought worth expressing. I searched for another direction.

“Why do you think she changed her name?”

“Because ‘Maggie’ was what her father called her. Margaret was his mother’s name. My mother was named Anne.”

That was understandable. I wonder aloud, “Who is Judy?”

She is shocked upright by that. She had not expected the question, but even more, she is clearly disturbed by the fact that I know that name. “Why do you ask that?”

“It’s another name Des used.”

“When?”

“Recently.”

She straightens uncomfortably in her chair. Her ankles have been crossed and they come undone. Her hands, folded in her lap, clinch.

“It was her sister’s name.”

“I thought she was an only child.”

“She was, except, for a year or so…Fifteen months. When Maggie was about six we had another daughter. Judy. She died in her crib. Shortly after that, Charlie fell in the ocean. It was the worst year of my life.”

But there is no tear in her eye at that. Only anger.

Later, I’m standing alone in the cold on the top deck of the ferry back to New London and thinking about the fact that only a month ago I’d been with Desiree out on Boston Harbor. She was wearing my cap with the brim turned over one ear to keep the wind from blowing her hair into her eyes. A good day. An Indian summer day. A great day.

The sun is low over the dark brim of Connecticut. The cold of the wind cuts through to my scalp. I have forgotten my hat on the couch.