The Book of Air and Shadows

a low chain-link fence. A row of brownish junipers bordering the house seemed the limits of H. Olerud’s horticulture. This name was displayed on a battered black maibox nailed to a crooked post. In the driveway sat a rust-flecked green Chevy sedan with the hood up and a scatter of tools on a tarp next to it. In the open shedlike garage that adjoined the house, he could see a red tractor and a tangle of shapes that could have been agricultural implements. The place had a tired look, as if it and the people who lived there had been knocked down and were waiting for breath to return. It was a Saturday. Crosetti had left the city at dawn and driven across the state of Pennsylvania, nearly three hundred miles on I-80 and 79, and reached Braddock a little past three. Braddock was built around a single intersection with two gas stations, a McDonald’s, a pizza joint, a VFW hall, two bars, a 7-Eleven, a coin laundry, and a collection of older brick-built commercial buildings, most of the shops in them Wal-Marted into oblivion and now occupied by junk dealers or storefront services for the distressed. Behind this strip were dozens of large homes that must have been built for the commercial and industrial aristos when the steel mills and mines had been working. Crosetti couldn’t imagine who lived in them now.
    Tower Road and the sad house on it had not been hard to find with his Google map, and after arriving there he had knocked on the front door with no result. Crosetti had pushed the unlocked door open and called out, “Hello! Anyone home?” and felt the hollow sense of an empty house. Inhabited, though: messy but not filthy, toys on the floor, little cars and a plastic gun, a TV tray with an empty plate set up in front of the large-screen TV. They had satellite too-behind the house a white dish scanned the heavens. In front of the TV a La-Z-Boy lounger in brown vinyl attended a sagging chenille-covered couch. A narrow mantelpiece held photographs in frames, but Crosetti could not see them from the door and did not wish to venture within. No dogs barked, which he thought was strange. Didn’t all rural households have dogs? Another clue to he knew not what. He walked around the house. In the backyard there was a plastic playground set much faded by the sun and sized for very young children. In the center of the yard stood a clothes-drying contraption of the kind that resembles an inverted parasol. It was empty, and several of the lines had broken away and dangled, waving feebly in the light breeze. On the back porch stood an elderly cylindrical washing machine. He checked it; dry and spidery.
    After his brief exploration he sat in the car and thought about all this and also how really dumb it had been to drive all this way because of a postcard he’d found in the street. He had no idea whether Carol Rolly had any connection whatever to this house. She could have picked the card up off the sidewalk or found it marking an old book. No, he thought, don’t think about that. Let’s go with the gut. This has something to do with her and that photograph of the two women and the kid. Well, there
was
a kid here, a boy. He took the photo and looked at it once again. He judged that it had been snapped around five or so years ago, given the apparent age of Carolyn’s face in it, and so the boy would be around eight or nine by now. Crosetti studied a bicycle tossed casually down on the driveway. That would fit a kid of that age, and the various toys scattered around the house and yard suggested the same. There were no girl toys in sight, nor was there another bike, and Crosetti wondered what had become of the baby girl in the photograph…no wait, there in a sandbox attached to the playground set, a single, weathered, naked Barbie. So that checked out too, unless Barbie had been dropped by a visitor. Or stolen.
    He considered the backyard. A sunny day, a Saturday, no clothes on the dryer and it in disrepair, nor had he spotted an electric dryer exhaust, nor did the washer look much used. Which meant that probably there wasn’t a woman in residence. The guy lived here with his kid (or kids), and on Saturday he went to town and did his laundry in the Laundromat, because it was ignoble for a man to do laundry at home, and by going to town on a Saturday he got to meet women and advertise his availability, and maybe he’d go across to the VFW and have a couple of beers while the dryer spun. The kid(s) could play video games at