Bones

well. Better than you expected?”

“Much better.”

“Have you tried calling Officer Houghton?”

“Jim Houghton is the one survivor I can’t seem to track down. He quit police work altogether, and moved out of state. But a friend of mine who’s an investigator is going to try to find him.”

“You’ve made a good effort. I hope it works out. In the meantime, though, perhaps you should try to talk to the Sayres again.”

I won a struggle with an impulse to object. “Will you let me go back to work if I do?”

“Hmm. You want to make a deal, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, doesn’t work that way.”

I studied my hands.

“However,” she said, “aside from any deal you have in mind, I was going to suggest a gradual return to work.”

“Gradual? What does that mean?”

“Part-time.”

“I’m not sure the Express will go for that.”

“Leave that to me. Between now and next time, I want you to think about Parzival.”

“Parzival?”

“Yes. Why do you suppose you chose the story of Parzival?”

“Ben asked for that one. I’d been telling it in installments.”

“No, I meant, why did you choose it the first time?”

“In the mountains?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Because I had I read it recently, I suppose.”

She waited, but this time she waited in vain.

“Give it some thought,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, standing up.

“Not so fast — about the Sayres . . .”

I tried calling Gillian first, since she had been trying to contact me, but she hadn’t left a number when she talked to Frank, and the one I had for her was disconnected. I didn’t have any luck with the boutique she had worked in, either.

“The media, man,” the owner said.

“The media?”

“Yeah, she didn’t come into work after all those dudes got whacked in the mountains — you know, the guys that were looking for her old lady? So finally she calls me and says she ain’t comin’ in and she’s gonna look for new digs, ’cause the media is, you know, making her crazy. They were always tryin’ to interview her and shit, you know?”

Yeah, I knew.

I called Mark Baker at the Express and asked him if he had been in contact with the Sayre family since Julia’s body had been brought back.

“I saw Gillian once, a couple of weeks later,” Mark said. “I had asked the owner of that shop she worked in to tip me off if she called to say she was coming in for her final paycheck. I wasn’t the only one waiting — the guy must have called half the press in the area, hoping to get free publicity, I guess. She met all the reporters outside, said that she wished we’d look for Nick Parrish as hard as we had looked for her. And that was it.”

Despite my pointing out my recent poor track record with vehicles, Ben loaned me his Jeep Cherokee, saying he would use David’s pickup truck in the meantime. Jack did the driving. We nearly drove past the Sayres’ large home — it used to be gray and white; it had been painted peach since the last time I had seen it.

I thought back; that had been just after Gillian had told me that Nick Parrish had lived on this street. I had spent a fruitless day interviewing neighbors — either they said he was pleasant but kept to himself, or they said they had always thought he was an odd duck. No one in this latter group could say why — leading me to believe that they had been influenced by what they had already read about him. No one in the neighborhood had any real insight into Nick Parrish, or could say where he had lived next, or what had become of his sister.

During the first year after Julia disappeared, the Sayres and I had seen one another fairly often. I had met Jason, and Giles’s mother, a woman who was clearly not prepared to cope with a rebellious teenager like Gillian. I was shocked to realize that although I had spoken to Gillian in person on any number of occasions since then, and had seen her father a few times as well, I had never again talked to her brother or grandmother.

Months earlier, when Parrish had first made his offer to lead police to Julia Sayre’s grave, I visited Giles at the company he owned. The moment I had arrived, he said, “He’s told them where to find Julia, hasn’t he?”

In the privacy of his office, I told him what I knew. He took it calmly, but asked, “Is there a chance he might be lying? A chance that it isn’t her?”

Yes, of course there was, I said, having seen this sort of denial before. He asked me to keep him informed.