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marking recipes in cooking magazines.
    Clyde’s desk was on the other side of the living room. He opened his book, but his mind kept returning to Audrey Reed. The first time he’d really noticed her was one day early in the school year when he’d gotten up in World Cultures to check something in the big dictionary at the other side of the room and found Audrey Reed’s long, bare legs extended out into the aisle, and her all at once realizing she was blocking his way and smiling up at him and pulling her legs in and saying in a friendly, whispery voice that she was sorry.
    He’d begun watching her after that, especially when she was lost in her reading and sliding a finger through her long sandy hair to separate a small cluster of strands that she would make into a little brush that she moved nervously across her lips.
    And then, today, when he’d spotted her and her friends up on their little knoll and she sat facing the sun with her eyes closed so that, in that light and in that attitude, she looked not so much like a girl at Jemison High as some goddess he might invent for his own personal Greek myth.
    1501 Van Buren,
he thought.
    He slipped into the kitchen and looked up
Reed
in the phone book. There were two columns of Reeds, none on Van Buren. Clyde brought a glass of water back to his desk, glanced at his mother—she was lost in her cooking show— and then booted up the computer and logged on to the program his father used for screening potential employees at Bor-Lan. The program searched every place a person’s name might be recorded: newspapers, magazines, legal documents, television interviews. It found addresses, phone numbers, liens, and crimes. Clyde wasn’t supposed to use it, but he found it interesting to slip unnoticed among the file cabinets of the world, peering in at everything that had been recorded about one individual or another.
    He typed in
Reed
and
1501 Van Buren,
and watched as the name
Jackson Luther Reed
came up on the screen. Jackson Reed seemed to owe a lot of money to Citibank, and there seemed to be two large loans on the house on Van Buren— but one thing was certain: he had a daughter named Audrey Anne.
    Audrey Anne. At 1501 Van Buren.
    If he hurried through his homework, then made something simple for dinner—spaghetti, say, for himself, and some kind of creamed soup and smoothie for his mother—then he could tell her he needed to go to the library, which was true, but on the way back he could detour to 1501 Van Buren.
    Just do a little drive-by.
    What could it hurt?

Chapter 7
    House
    Audrey’s car was an old white Lincoln Continental that her father called the
Queen Mary
and Audrey called the
Titanic.
He considered it her armor in any possible collision, and she had considered it the death boat of her social life before she realized that being small-chested, tall, and academically earnest would have sunk her anyway. As she cruised into the driveway at 1501 Van Buren that afternoon, she was surprised to see that her father was home. Usually he worked late.
    Like her car, Audrey’s house was white and overlarge. The huge white columned porch, the gleaming cupola, the Adamesque door, and the Palladian windows were enthusiastically described in
Around Jemison,
the historical society’s guidebook, which praised “the exotic sunken garden of the gracious McNair mansion” and noted that “since 1918, a light has gleamed in the upstairs window, left on in memory of the owner’s only son, who died in World War I.”
    Audrey’s mother had grown up walking by the McNair house, staring up at that light, and sneaking in to play in the exotic sunken garden. After the house was sold and the light went off, she’d made excuses to drive, walk, or cycle by, trying to get up the courage to ask the new owners to turn the light on again in memory of Grady McNair. When she finally did, though, “they looked at her like