MY STEPFATHER BROKE DOWN MY DOOR AT 2 A.M. — UNTIL ONE TAP UNDER MY KITCHEN TABLE TURNED HIS RAGE INTO TERROR

Chapter 13

There was one page left.

I had assumed it was the signature page — the polite closing, the with all my love, the date. But the fourth page was not a letter. It was a list.

Three sets of numbers, written in the same small hand, spaced down the page with dashes:

36.8508 — 76.2859

36.7674 — 76.2874

36.8529 — 75.9780

I stared at them.

Diane leaned over. “What are those?”

“Coordinates.”

“For what?”

I got up and took the road map off the kitchen counter and laid it flat beside the letter, and I put my finger on the first circle. Norfolk, tight and small.

“Dad didn’t circle cities,” I said. “He circled three points, and the points are the same three numbers.”

The second set put me in a residential grid in Chesapeake, four blocks from a school, near the street that ran behind the circled neighborhood on the map.

The third put me at the north end of the Virginia Beach oceanfront, where the beach narrows and the piers run out and the tourist hotels give way to a long strip of older cottages.

Vance came back in from the porch with Otto and stopped behind my chair and looked at the page over my shoulder, which was a thing she did with charts and which I had learned, over two years, not to find invasive.

“Three coordinates,” she said. “Three circles on the map. What’s the fourth thing?”

“There isn’t a fourth thing.”

“There’s always a fourth thing.”

I found it. Not on the front of the page — in the bottom margin, written so lightly in pencil that it had survived two decades in an envelope without ever being legible at a glance. Two words.

Blue room.

Diane made a sound.

I turned.

“I haven’t heard that phrase in twenty years,” she said.

“I know. You told me. Blue wallpaper, little white flowers, upstairs.”

“Yes.”

“So why is it written under a set of coordinates for Virginia Beach?”

My mother stared at the margin, and I watched a woman who had spent two decades of her life being careful make an error, because she said the next thing before thinking about it.

“Because he always used to say it was the only room in the world where he got any thinking done.”

Then she heard herself, and her face changed.

“Mom.”

“It’s a bedroom.”

“I know what a bedroom is.”

“In his grandmother’s house.”

“Then why is it in the margin under three coordinates in three different cities?”

Neither of us had an answer.

Vance picked up the letter and read the fourth page twice, the way she read everything, and set it down and said: “Maybe the coordinates aren’t three places. Maybe they’re one route.”

I looked at the numbers again.

Norfolk. Chesapeake. Virginia Beach. In a line, southeast, like somebody driving the back way to the ocean.

“It’s a route,” I said.

“Or it’s three errands,” Vance said. “Or it’s three hiding places and one of them is the right one, and he never expected anyone to look.”

I looked at the wooden airplane on the windowsill.

“He was dying,” I said. “He had a year and he knew it, or he suspected it. Nobody writes three letters and a set of coordinates and a line about a blue room by accident.”

“Then we shouldn’t look for the letter,” Vance said.

I turned to her.

“If he hid it,” she said, “he hid it in a place his sister would recognize. Not a place you would recognize and not a place your mother would recognize. Otherwise it’s not a letter to Margaret, it’s just a letter she happened to find.”

Diane said, quietly, “She’s right.”

I looked at both of them, then at the map, and then at the clock on the wall, which said twenty past seven in the evening on the third day since a man kicked my door down.

“Then I need to find Margaret Marsh,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

“Tonight,” said Diane.

“What?”

“Tonight.” My mother stood up and took her keys off the table, and her hands were steady, and I understood that this was the first time in years I had seen her move first. “Because her bookkeeping office has a listed number and I can look it up, and if I wait until morning I will spend all night finding reasons not to.”

I looked at her.

“Do you want me to call?” she asked.

“No.”

“All right.”

I picked up my phone.

“Mom.”

She stopped at the door with her car keys in her hand.

“I want you to come with me when I go,” I said. “But I want to make the call.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Then I’ll be in the car,” she said.