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him?”
    I told him how his father had welcomed us to our new house and planted a garden for
us. He smiled when I said that.
    “My father was—is—always planting things. Flowers, fruit trees, vegetables. He loves
to see things grow.”
    “What about you? Did you inherit his green thumb?”
    “I have no talent for growing. I’m nothing like my father.”
    “He told me he was worried about you.”
    He nodded. “I work for an aid agency in Afghanistan. My father doesn’t approve.”
    “My dad is working near a rebel-held area in Liberia,” I told him. “ I don’t approve.”
    He regarded me with new interest. Maybe he thought I would understand why he chose
to work in a danger zone. But I didn’t any more than I understood why my father chose
to do the same thing, and why he kept volunteering to stay on.
    “I wish I could have been here sooner, but it took a while to make the arrangements,”
he said. “The hospital here tracked me down. My father had me listed as his emergency
contact, but the information was out of date. I spoke to his doctor. He says I may
have to make some hard decisions.”
    “Did he tell you what happened?”
    “When I stopped by the hospital, a policeman was there. He told me that my father
had been in a barn fire.” He peered through the darkness to where the barn had once
stood, replaced now by a burnt-out skeleton and a heap of rubble. “He said the fire
was set deliberately.”
    I admit I was curious, but I just couldn’t make myself ask if the same police officer
had mentioned that Mr. Goran was the prime suspect.
    Aunt Ginny emerged from the house with her equipment.
    “I’ll file a report. I wish I could do more, Mr. Goran.”
    “Thank you,” he said. “And please—it’s Aram.”

    “It took him long enough to get here,” Aunt Ginny muttered as we drove back down
Mr. Goran’s long driveway. “The fire was over a week ago.”
    “Mr. Goran’s son works in Afghanistan,” I pointed out. “Besides, he and his father
were estranged.”
    “Is that what he told you?”
    “His father told me.”
    “Did he also tell you what it was about?”
    “He said Aram blames him for his mother’s death.”
    “Oh?” That caught Aunt Ginny’s interest. “Why? What happened?”
    “She died of a heart attack. Mr. Goran told me his son thinks he worked his wife
too hard. But he says she wanted to work. She wanted to save the money to buy a farm,
and she never told him she had a heart condition. If he had known, things would have
been different.”
    Aunt Ginny glanced at me.
    “You’re a good kid,” she said—a first. “But you have to be careful with that.”
    “With what?”
    “Believing whatever people tell you. You barely know the man, Riley. So just because
he tells you something doesn’t make it true, not until you know he’s someone you
can trust. And even then…”
    And even then, you couldn’t ever be sure that you really knew someone. That’s what
she meant.

    Before I went to bed, I sent a text message to IT, who used to be one of Jimmy’s
roadies. The guys used to call him “It” because he was the Mount Everest of men and
was reputed to have once carried an upright piano up two flights of stairs single-handedly,
although I never met anyone who had actually seen him perform this astounding feat.
IT preferred to think of himself as Mr. Information Technology, because he knew everything
there was to know about computers and had taken care of all the web-based technology
for Jimmy and the band. After Jimmy died, he’d started doing freelance tech support
for several other bands. If Aram Goran’s hard drive had anything retrievable on it,
IT would be able to recover it.
    He texted me back immediately and said he’d take a look at it. I promised to ship
it to him the next day.

FOUR
    After Aunt Ginny left for work the next morning, I painted another wall in my room.
I wanted to keep going, because I was impatient to unpack and organize my things.
But I