Look Closely by Laura Caldwell Page B

with his stocky scribble. I hoped so because it was something he had in common with my mom.

    I could remember Dan, so often in the parlor room that no one else used, sitting at the octagonal table. He would hunch over his notebooks, his hand pushing across the page. I used to try to spy on him. I’d sneak in from the kitchen, crawling stealthily, I always thought, until I reached the far couch or the big leather chair, something I could hide behind. I would peek my head out and watch him, trying to figure him out, this brother who was part man, part boy. But almost immediately, and without looking up from his notebook, Dan would say something like, “Hey, kid. I know you’re there.” Usual y, I wouldn’t respond. I would hold my breath, hoping he was just guessing, that he had an inkling but maybe didn’t real y know I was in the room.
    But he always knew. He would tiptoe over to me, and although I couldn’t see him, I could sense the shift in the room, and the anticipation made me shake. Then he would scream to scare me, and I would scream back, and he would tickle my stomach until I begged him to stop.
    I knew I should go downstairs to meet Ty, but I kept looking at the envelopes from Dan, turning them over and over. I took out the letters, then returned them to their places, hoping I would see something different, something that might make it simpler to find him.
    I had cal ed the Santa Fe directory today, just as I had Portland, and I’d gone through the same process, but there was no Dan Sutter or D. Sutter listed anywhere in that city. He might have left by now. Who knew what had happened to him over the last six years? It struck me that he could have died. People got cancer. People got hit by cars. Why not my brother? But I couldn’t believe that. Somehow I would have known, I told myself. I would have been able to tel if my brother had died. There was no logical basis for that conclusion, just something I felt in my gut.
    As I studied the envelopes from Santa Fe, I noticed something different from the first two envelopes Dan had sent to Del a. The addresses were different, but that wasn’t it. It was the way he’d written his name that was off somehow.
    Iputtheletterssidebysideonthedeskandlooked at the top left corners where Dan had written his returnaddresses—EastLansing,Detroit,SantaFe,and Santa Fe again. I studied the first two. Dan had scratchy, short handwriting, and he didn’t make an effort to be legible, but I could tel that he’d written, “D. Sutter” in the corners. On the last two, the ones from Santa Fe, again there was the initial D , but the last name looked odd. I could tel it started with an S , ended with
    an R , and had roughly six letters, so
    maybeDan’shandwritinghadsimplychangedalittle.Thatwasn’tit,though.Itwasdefinitelydifferent.
    I picked up the last letter and held it close to my face. There was a dot right above the second letter of the name, as if he’d written an I , but there was no slash as there had been through the T’ s in the other letters. Instead, the fourth letter dipped down below the word. Was it a J or a Y? I stared some more until the word began to shape. “Singer,” it said. I picked up the other letter from Santa Fe and saw that I was right.
    My brother had apparently changed his name to Singer.
    10
    I locked the room and ran down the stairs, excited about the “Singer” discovery, yet trying to prime my mind for my meeting with Sheriff Manning. This wasn’t just a nice Sunday dinner.
    When I got to the front desk, Ty was behind it with a young woman, a friend who helped out occasional y. Ty had instituted a late Sunday checkout of four o’clock, but he said he stil didn’t push people to get out on time, so sometimes they had a rush on Sunday afternoons. It looked like one of those days. Both Ty and the woman, who had a cute upturned nose and bobbed brown hair, were leaning over the counter, handing out credit-card slips, taking keys from