"I want to know why Rosalind ran away from home," I said, as we headed back down the Foleys' drive. The middle kid had her nose squashed up against the living-room window and was making faces at us.
"And where she went," said Cassie. "Can you talk to her? I think you'll get more out of her than I would."
"Actually," I said, a little awkwardly, "that was her on the phone, earlier. She's coming in to see me tomorrow afternoon. She says there's something she wants to talk about."
Cassie turned from stuffing her notebook into her satchel and gave me a long look I couldn't read. For a moment I wondered if she was miffed that Rosalind had asked for me instead of her. We were both used to Cassie being the families' favorite, and I felt a juvenile, shameful spark of triumph:
She swung her satchel onto her back and we headed off down the road. She was looking out over the fields with her hands in her pockets, and I couldn't tell whether she was annoyed with me for not telling her about Rosalind Devlin's phone call earlier-which, in all fairness, I should have done. I gave her a little nudge with my elbow, testing. A few steps later she flipped up a foot behind her and kicked me in the arse.
We spent the rest of the afternoon going door-to-door through the estate. Door-to-door is boring, thankless work, and the floaters already had it covered, but we wanted to get a feel for what the neighbors thought of the Devlins. The general consensus was that they were a decent family but kept themselves firmly to themselves, which hadn't gone down very well: in a place the size and social class of Knocknaree, any kind of reserve is considered a general insult, half a step from the unforgivable sin of snobbery. But Katy herself was different: the Royal Ballet School place had made her Knocknaree's pride, their own personal cause. Even the obviously poor households had sent someone to the fund-raiser, everyone needed to describe her dancing to us; a few people cried. A lot of people were part of Jonathan's Move the Motorway campaign and gave us edgy, resentful looks when we asked about him. A few went into outraged speeches about how he was trying to stop progress and undermine the economy, and got special little stars beside their names in my notebook. Most people were of the opinion that Jessica wasn't the full shilling.
When we asked if they had seen anything suspicious, they offered us the usual set of local weirdos-an old guy who yelled at bins, two fourteen-year-olds with a reputation for drowning cats in the river-and irrelevant ongoing feuds and nonspecific things that went bump in the night. A number of people, none of them with any useful information, mentioned the old case; until the dig and the motorway and Katy came along, it had been Knocknaree's one claim to fame. I thought I half-recognized a few names, a couple of faces. I gave them my best professional blank look.
After an hour or so of this we got to 27 Knocknaree Drive and found Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald-still, incredibly, very much alive and kicking. Mrs. Fitzgerald was great. She was eighty-eight, skinny and half blind and bent almost double; she offered us tea, ignored our refusals and shouted to us from the kitchen while she prepared a loaded, trembling tray, and then demanded to know whether we had found her purse that some young one had robbed off her in town three months ago, and why not. It was a bizarre sensation, after reading her faded handwriting in the old file, to watch her complain about her swollen ankles ("I'm a martyr to them, so I am") and indignantly refuse to let me take the tray. It was as if Tutankhamen or Miss Havisham had wandered into the pub one night and started bitching about the head on the pints.
