My eight-year-old skipped lunch for six weeks to buy a red dress for the little girl across the street. The next morning our lawn was covered with fifty lunchboxes — and taped to the biggest one, a beat-up metal thing sitting alone in the middle of the grass, was a note that said OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.

I had lived on that street six years. I knew that an old man lived in the corner house. I knew he had a lawn service and a grocery delivery and a wheelchair ramp that had gone up two winters ago. I knew he had not been at a block party in the entire time I had been there.

I did not know his name.

"Wendell Pike," Officer Kell said. "He's eighty-one. Two officers are with him now. He answered the door and told them straight out what he did before they asked him a single question."

She turned over the top photograph — the one of Milo at the bus stop, the one that had made my son's face go white.

There was writing on the back in the same shaky block capitals.

THIS IS THE ONE WHO DID IT.

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PART 3 — 1962

Wendell Pike had lived in the corner house for thirty-one years.