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he’d found Bill slumped in an easy chair in his room, to give him the sad news. The man had said he’d take care of all funeral arrangements and, in fact, that very night Fred called Susanna at home to say that Bill’s body had been picked up by ambulance and taken away. The nephew—great-nephew—made it clear that the funeral was going to be small and very private.
    Everything else in the obit she’d gotten from Bill when he was alive. She’d taken it all on faith because she’d heard it so many times, and she realized now that even if one were a cynic—which she most definitely was not—repetition was a subtle form of brainwashing when it came to the truth. If you heard something often enough, especially from someone you trusted, it became true. Whether it was or not.
    She told herself that Bill Miller was not a liar. She told herself that there had to be a misunderstanding. She told herself that what she’d put in the obit had been correct.
    Only deep down she didn’t believe it, so she decided to find out for herself.
    If there was a mistake, it was her mistake, not the paper’s, so she didn’t want to do this work on the
Journal
’s time. That’s why, at lunchtime, three hours after Harlan told her that she’d screwed up, Susanna walked over to the East End Harbor Public Library.
    After conferring with the librarian, Adrienne, a surprisingly snip-pish and impatient woman, Susanna took a seat in front of the computer that was in the lobby to the right of the checkout desk. She pulled out the sheet of yellow legal paper that Harlan had handed her, looked down the list of errors that angry Wally Crabbe had called in. She went on-line, wound up going to the Askjeeves.com Web site, and typed in the question:
How do I find out who was nominated for the 1938 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor?
    It didn’t take long. Within seconds she had her answer. She had to admit that she hadn’t heard of any of the nominees. No, wait, Basil Rathbone—he was English, wasn’t he? He played someone famous. Oh yes, Sherlock Holmes, she was pretty sure that was it. And Walter Brennan—he was in some show on Nick at Night; he played a farmer or something like that. And she also had to admit that William Miller wasn’t among them. She tried looking at the nominees for 1939, then 1940, and then going back earlier, year by year, until 1930. She decided to stop searching then. Bill might have gotten the year wrong, at his age, but she doubted he’d miss the entire decade.
    She wondered how much further she should pursue this. Decided—out of duty and curiosity—she had to keep going. After several false starts, she got to the site for IMDB.com—Internet movie data-base—and looked up the career of William Miller. It took her over an hour of staring at the screen and reading and scrutinizing photos and double-checking, then triple-checking, on other movie Web sites before she began to accept what she was seeing.
    By the time she was done, she had a splitting headache and a steady wave of nausea flowing in the pit of her stomach. She practically fled the library, gasping in warm, fresh air once she made it to the sidewalk outside. Leaning up against a lamppost for support, she flicked open her cell phone, called Harlan’s number at the
Journal
, told him she wasn’t feeling well, wouldn’t be coming in for the rest of the afternoon. He told her to go to the doctor, started to ask if there was anything he could do, but she just clicked the phone off and hugged the lamppost until she had the strength to walk.
    When she got home, Susanna paced nervously around her living room, picking at her cuticles and tapping the fingers of her right hand against the knuckles of her left. Finally, she looked at the notes she’d jotted down from the conversation with Fred, the manager of the Home, saw the phone number she was looking for, picked up the phone and dialed it. After the fourth ring, she heard a man’s voice on the