"You want to know about your package thief," Mr. Eckles said, "you watch Thursdays. About quarter to four."
"Why Thursdays?"
"Because that's when I see her. Little girl. Middle school, maybe. Gray backpack, the big kind, with the reflector on it. She comes in the front, she goes in that closet, she's in there five, six minutes, and she comes out and she goes up the stairs. Every Thursday. Doesn't come home that way any other day. I've been watching three weeks."
"Lot of people go in that closet."
"Sure." Mr. Eckles shrugged. "And I went in after her, last week, because I had a box coming. There's the Fairmont bags in there, for the lady upstairs. And one of them's unzipped. The insulated one. And there's a can of soup on the floor next to it." He looked at Kurt with an expression of great satisfaction. "Now I don't know. Maybe she dropped it. But you asked me, you said, somebody in this building knows something, and I'm telling you what I know."
"Do you know her name?"
"Lowry. Third floor, the father and the girl. He works at the tire place out on Sixth. Big guy, quiet." Mr. Eckles shrugged again. "Seems like a decent fella. That's how it goes, though, isn't it? You never know what's going on in a house."
Kurt had thanked him. He had gone back to his own apartment and stood in the kitchen for a while without turning on the light. He knew who Mr. Eckles meant, roughly. A tall man in a blue work shirt with a name patch, who said good morning in the stairwell; a girl, eleven or twelve, with a lot of hair pulled back in a puff and a backpack that looked heavier than she was. He could not remember her name. He could not remember ever hearing her speak.
He thought about the soup can on the floor. He thought about Mrs. Dunning's legal pad, the chicken she had stopped ordering. He thought about the eleven signatures and the four hundred dollars and the bunk bed in the green room. He thought, without wanting to, about something else, a thing he did not usually let himself think about, which was a Safeway in Everett in 1990, and his mother's coat, and the hand of a man in a blue blazer closing around his own small arm just above the elbow, hard enough that he had a bruise there for a week in the shape of four fingers and a thumb. He was nine. He had not known, until the man reached into the inside pocket of his mother's coat and brought out two packages of ground beef and a jar of peanut butter, what she had done. He had not known she could do that. He had not known they needed her to.
He put that away. He was good at putting it away. He had been doing it for thirty-four years.