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the following.
    Fleur was nineteen. She was graduated in 1946 from Tudor Hall, which was a private girls’ school in Indianapolis. She had done some volunteer hospital work as a high school student late in the war and she had continued the volunteer work afterward. She had attended the Butler University College of Nursing for a year, but was interrupting her studies to marry.
    Crystal, at twenty-nine, had just graduated cum laude from Butler University’s Business College. He had served in Europe and had been awarded a Silver Cross and a Purple Heart. Presumably he came to Indianapolis to study on the GI Bill. Nothing was stated about his career plans. Perhaps with Estes Graham and a business degree, that was understood.
    The couple would spend the night in Estes’ house and then leave for a month-long honeymoon in Florida.
    By the time I finished making my notes, it was nearly eleven o’clock and time for decision. Break for an early lunch, or go on and try to find another chunk of information?
    A rare burst of ambition took hold of me. I decided to stay.
    From the wedding I cranked on. The first mention of familiar names was on October 18. It was in the caption of a picture of Leander and Fleur getting off a plane. The bride and bridegroom at Weir Cook Airport returning from the Florida honeymoon. Both smiling this time, no doubt from memories of the Miami sun and the Miami moon. I liked this picture. It made me feel better about the bond between Leander and his apparently errant wife. Newly wed can be a happy time.
    As I cranked my way to the end of the year it occurred to me that there was a slightly more efficient way to go about things. There were three more events of significance to the family that I knew existed: Eloise’s conception, Eloise’s birth, and the death of Estes Graham.
    If Eloise was sixteen now, then her birth took place in 1954 or the end of ’53. The conception nine months earlier. And Graham had died, according to Maude, in ’53 or ’54.
    The whole thing came to me in a flash! At the annual birthday party of 1953, some crude reporter had gotten Fleur drunk on illicit hooch, and then had knocked her up. Leander had been occupied elsewhere at the time, and Fleur was too ashamed to tell him or her father that she had been drinking. Later when she found she was pregnant, nobody knew that the father wasn’t Leander, until Eloise had stumbled on it. End of case. Reporters can be such bounders!
    I took a look at the social pages of February 13, 1954, in search of a birthday party.
    There was nothing. Presumably no party. Estes either dead or sick. Or for reasons I did not know, uninclined to celebrate his eighty-third.
    I cranked backward in time, day by day. This time checking both sociable pages and obits.
    I got as far back as October 2, 1953, before I found anything. And that was a picture of Fleur, Leander and Estes, back at Weir Cook Airport. The Crystals leaving for France. No indication of how long they would be away. Just that they were going to visit some of the ground Leander had covered in the war. And to visit the place where Fleur’s older brother Joshua had died in the same war.
    The picture also showed that Estes had been alive in October, ’53, and presumably for his birthday too.
    I knew why Estes hadn’t held his annual soirée: he couldn’t get a decent bouncer to replace Leander.
    So the old man had to have died after his eighty-third birthday. I cranked back to February ’54 and started the social-obit circuit going the other way.
    The job was getting morbid. I found the obituary of a kid I’d gone to grade school with. I hoped that Fleur and Leander got back before Estes went.
    And at 11:50 I was rewarded for my charity. April 18, 1954. Fleur and Leander returned to Weir Cook after their long sentimental journey. I counted fingers. They had been gone for six and a half months.
    I decided I’d had enough for a while. I