Thirty-Seven Families

"Is she on the phone with you?" Vincent asked.

"Matty's got an earbud in. She can hear us when he's next to her." Elena lowered her voice. "He wants to bring her straight here. She won't get into anybody's car."

Vincent put the phone on speaker and set it on the table. Danny reached for the case and undid the catches. The paper inside had gone yellow at the edges.

"Tell her there's a car if she changes her mind," Vincent said.

"I told her. She wants to know what we'd do after we picked her up."

He'd been going to say that Marco would find her somewhere safe. The details would have been somebody else's problem. He thought of Carlo paying for a hotel and never asking if the boy had anything to wear to school.

"Can I talk to her?" he asked.

Elena added Matty to the call. For a while all Vincent heard was the muffled sound of a working kitchen. Then a woman spoke.

"Your father sent a man for me once. He said I had twenty minutes to pack. I left a pot of sauce on the stove because I was afraid he'd drive away without me."

"Did he?" Vincent asked.

"No. He came upstairs and turned the stove off himself. I was grateful to him for that for a long time." She drew in a breath. "I still don't like a man coming to get me when I haven't asked him to."

"I hear you. Is there someone you'd call if you needed to leave the shop?"

"My sister. She knows the owner. She can come in through the kitchen to get me."

"Do you want to call her yourself?"

"Yes. I want to bring my son with me, and I want him to stop looking at the man by the window. He's about to make this worse."

Vincent heard a younger voice protest. Then came the scrape of a chair and a moment of quiet.

"Matty," Elena said, "remember when you came flying into me on the ice?"

"I remember you telling my mother it was your fault."

"It was. I stood there waiting for you to turn because I wanted you to figure it out yourself. Your mom knows what she wants to do right now. Go help her get her things."

Vincent could hear Matty moving. A minute later, Marisol's sister was on her way. Marco called the police with the shop's address and waited where Marisol had agreed to meet him if she needed him. Vincent stayed on the line until she told him she was hanging up to call the owner. There were two other people working and she wanted to make sure they knew what was happening.

Danny had put the directory on the table between them. The rows listed names, contact details and an extra column with a shop, a coach, or sometimes just a first name and a place. Under Flores, Marisol, somebody had written *Mei Tan. Saturday beginners.*

"That's the coach who gave me Matty's number," Elena said when Vincent read it to her. "She'll know how to reach some of the other families. There were kids I only saw for a month or two. I'd assumed their parents got tired of driving."

Danny ran a finger down the page. "The skating coaches might still know a few names. I recognize this one from a rink on Long Island. And that's the man who used to fix our compressors."

Vincent moved the page so they could both see it. "Would he take a call from you?"

"He'd want to know why I'm calling at dinner."

"Tell him someone from the old program may need to get in touch. Let him put that person in touch with Elena if they ask."

Danny found a pad with a cartoon birthday cake printed at the top and began to write the contact names. They left the family addresses in the case. Vincent had Marco send the photograph of Marisol to the investigator who was already looking at the break-in, and passed along what Adrian's source had seen.

Then there were phone calls to make. Most of the people on Danny's page had never heard Vincent speak. A man who still sharpened skates in Yonkers let him get six words out before hanging up. Danny called the man himself, asked about his wife, and got him to listen.

It was close to seven when Marisol called back. She and Matty were with her sister. The police had spoken to the man in the shop, who insisted he'd been waiting for somebody. Marisol had told the owner she'd be taking the weekend off.

"Matty says I should close my social media," she said. "I told him he can take it up with the woman who runs my bowling league."

Vincent heard her son laugh in the background. It was the first time he'd heard him laugh.

"If someone else calls claiming to know Carlo," Vincent said, "you can check with Elena. Would that help?"

"Yes. Give her my number. You can keep it, too, if you want."

He waited until the call ended to write it down. Above it he wrote what she had chosen, so that if anybody opened the case after him, they'd know whom to ask.

Elena arrived at the neighborhood rink around eight. She carried a paper bag with three sandwiches and a smaller one with Sophie's name printed on it in marker.

"She wanted to pack you both a cookie," she said. "I talked her out of packing the wet paper towel she'd been saving to wrap them in."

Danny picked the plainest sandwich and went out to call a man he knew from an equipment shop in Brooklyn. Vincent and Elena ate at a table under the paper stars. She nudged the little bag toward him and left her hand on the table, close to his.

"Marisol asked me if we could meet for coffee next week," she said. "She remembered that I liked the burned edge of a lasagna. I used to have dinner with them and ask her if I could take that piece home."

"Would you go?"

"I already told her yes."

He put his hand over hers. He had time to take it away if he'd misunderstood. Elena turned her palm up instead.

The phone rang on the table. Vincent looked down. Rafael's name filled the screen.

His uncle hadn't called him before nine in years. He always said the important people spent dinnertime with their families.

Vincent let it ring once more before he answered.

"How's the rink?" Rafael asked.

"Closed for the night. How'd you hear?"

"People tell me things. Listen, I can come by in the morning. I still have the keys your father gave me. We can sort out whatever got left behind."

Vincent looked at the case by his feet. Under the table, Elena had tightened her fingers around his.

"I've got the rink covered," he said.

"I meant what got left behind, Vince."

Vincent heard his uncle set a glass down on a hard surface.

"Sometimes those are two different things," Rafael said.