Walt exhaled into the phone. “He came back at two this afternoon,” he said. “Cane, gray beard, shaking like a leaf. He begged me to sell the locket back at any price. I told him it was gone.” I sat down hard on the kitchen chair. “What did he say?” “Nothing for a while. Then, ‘Then it found her.’ He left an address on a pawn slip, in case anyone came asking.”

“Where?” I whispered. Walt read it slowly: Riverside Rest Haven, Natchez, twelve minutes from my house. Twelve minutes, after forty-five years. I grabbed my keys, the locket, and the wristband and drove with the windows down. At the front desk, a nurse looked at the locket in my hand and went pale. “Ma’am, he has been waiting,” she said. “Before you go in, you need to know something.”