Monday

8:00 P.M.

Twelve hours after his daughter had disappeared, Eddie Dunne sat at his kitchen table, trying to decipher a recipe for angel food cake. He'd taken refuge in the kitchen, far away from the overly reassuring young detectives hovering over the phone in the living room. The cake was his granddaughter's idea. Grace had called it "angel foot cake" when she was a baby, and it always made them laugh. She wanted to have a happy surprise for her mother when she got home.

"The recipe says a tube pan," Eddie said.

"I know which pan."

Grace stood inside the closet-sized pantry, on the kitchen chair she'd dragged in. She was searching the shelves for the pan she'd watched her mother use. Eddie ran his fingers through his hair and read the card again. The steps were complicated, with words like volume and decompression.

"Do we have a dozen eggs?" he asked.

"Eggs are in the refrigerator, right under your nose."

At that moment, she sounded so much like her mother, it made his heart pound. Grace hadn't inherited the red hair, but her voice and mannerisms were eerily similar. He remembered when Kate was about Grace's age, sitting on the kitchen floor, sliding little cakes into her Easy-Bake Oven, and somehow getting perfect little pastries out of a forty-watt lightbulb. Eileen had tried to help her, but she wouldn't have any of it. That bossy confidence Eileen always called a Dunne trait would help Kate survive.

"The refrigerator's this big white thing, right?" Eddie said.

The refrigerator held two dozen eggs, neatly stacked in special trays from the Williams-Sonoma catalog. The swanky trays, one of Kate's many kitchen toys, replaced the paper egg cartons in the Dunne fridge. When Kate married Scott D'Arcy, a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, she threw herself fully into cooking. She took classes, inhaled cookbooks, and ordered pastry brushes and souffle pans from overpriced catalogs. All they'd ever talked about were things like presentation and "erbs." After Scott landed a job as a sous-chef at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, they began stockpiling money for a restaurant of their own. Kate worked double shifts at the hospital until the night Grace was born. But less than two years after that event, Scott took their dreams, and a twenty-two-year-old waitress, to Seattle, where he opened his own bistro.

"Mommy only bakes late at night," Grace said. "When she can't sleep."

"Well, that's when the real bakers work. The union bakers work late at night."

"They can't sleep because they're worried, right? So they bake stuff."

"Right. Union workers are always worried. It's good, though, because they make fresh rolls and cakes and doughnuts for the stores to have in the morning."

"Is nighttime when the union says you're supposed to bake?"

"In this house, you can bake anytime you want."

"The union won't get mad?"

"I know people," Eddie said.

After Scott took off, Kate and Grace moved in with Eddie. But none of her other plans changed. For months, she'd been calling Realtors and scanning the classifieds, trying to get an idea of the total cash required to become a minor restaurateur. Eddie closed the refrigerator door and walked over to the open pantry in time to stop a falling cookie sheet from beaning his granddaughter.

"Hey, chef," he said. "Do you know how to separate the whites of the egg from the yolk?"

"Is the yolt the same as the shell?"

"No, the 'yolt' is the yellow."

"Okay, you just put the yolts on a dish, and the other stuff just goes in a bowl."

Eddie returned to the sink for one more close read. Elbows on the sink, he held the smudged recipe card under the fluorescent light. He'd put the fluorescent light in at the same time he'd installed the bay window over the sink. Installing the bay window had been easier than baking this cake. He'd put the window in for his wife, who had seen all the world she cared to through those panes. In the last years of her life, Eileen went to Mass every morning, stopped at the superette, came home, and that was her day. The more Eddie's life revolved around things outside the house, the more Eileen became its prisoner.

The window needed work. They all probably did. With his finger, he scraped the molding around the window frame. Dried-out caulking chipped off in his hand. He brushed the flakes into the trash as he watched a light-colored Chevy Impala move slowly down the street. The driver had the interior light on, reading something from a notepad. Not to worry. A marked NYPD car sat idling across the street. With another two detectives in the living room, there was nothing they couldn't handle.

"This sounds like a lot of eggs," Eddie said. "Are you sure it's not a restaurant recipe?"

"Restaurants don't have recipes, Granpop," Grace said, setting the pan on the counter. "If the cake is too big, I'll just take some next door. Mom says that whenever you make a cake, you're supposed to give a piece to someone. So I'll take a big piece over to Uncle Kev and Aunt Martha."

"That reminds me. You didn't answer my question before. How come you don't want to stay with Uncle Kevin and Aunt Martha?"

"She watches Oprah."

"That's a good reason," he said. "Why don't you just go in and watch Uncle Kev's TV?"

"'Cause Uncle Kev only has a little tiny black-and-white TV. Like the kind the baby Jesus had."

Grace had not asked him a single question about Kate. Eddie figured that Aunt Martha, the wife of his brother Kevin, had already told her more than she wanted to know. Aunt Martha didn't believe in coddling. But when Eddie tried to reassure Grace by saying, "Your mom is going to be fine," she simply looked at him and said, "I know."

The white Impala circled the block again. They should grab him, Eddie thought. But the guy was too obvious to be bad. He was just searching in the dark for a street address on a block where the houses were too old to bother with numbers. He floated past.

Eddie's house, one of the newer ones, had been built in 1927. The nine-room brick Tudor with its odd gables and arched doorways was a handyman's special when they bought it with his biggest fight purse. Those first few years, he did most of the work himself, but he lost interest in the house long before Eileen died. The three most dire needs were a new slate roof, new plumbing, and a new heating system.

Eddie's bank account didn't show nearly enough money to handle all three. His checking account held just enough money to cover a few regular bills: insurance, phone, and electric. Eddie Dunne hated banks, credit cards, and other paper trails. He paid cash every chance he got. At present, his only income came from working nights in his brother's bar, but Eddie lived frugally. He fixed things himself, bought old cars, and dressed as if he were applying for welfare. Since he'd stopped drinking, his only vice was gambling: sports betting with a local bookie, lottery tickets, and a once-a-week trip to Yonkers Raceway.

Grace dragged the chair from the pantry toward the kitchen sink. She wore Kate's old apron, a green one with shamrocks. It said, kiss the cook, she's irish. It came down to her ankles. She'd found a clear glass cake plate and a yellow-and-green tin cover painted with Pennsylvania Dutch symbols. Eileen had bought it on a trip to the Amish country thirty years ago and then used it for every cake after that.

"Aunt Martha wants to buy a gun for the bar," Grace said.

"A gun in a bar? Oh, that'll turn out good."

"It's because of all that stuff, you know. But Uncle Kev doesn't want to. He says she'll just shoot him in the ass."

The white Impala backed down the street and stopped next to the marked Yonkers police car. It was a short conversation; then the Impala pulled in behind Eddie's Olds.

"We have company," he said

"Aunt Martha and Uncle Kev-o," Grace sang out.

"Wrong-o," he sang back. "Somebody in a car-o."

A tall man in a dark suit got out of the Impala. Under the glare of a single streetlight, he flicked a cigarette on the pavement, then ground it out with his shoe. He was slender, with a full head of hair. From the way his upper body cleared the roof of the car, Eddie figured he was about six four, maybe taller. He leaned back down and picked something off the seat, a cell phone or a pager. As soon as he started coming up the long driveway, Eddie recognized the walk. Walks never change. People get old, get fat, but the way they walk remains a signature. Their guest was Detective Matty Boland, the NYPD's gift to women. During the waning days of Eddie's police career, Boland was a hotshot rookie in the Detective Bureau.

Grace put her finger in the vanilla extract and tasted it. She made a pained face as the front doorbell rang. Eddie had assumed Boland would walk around back. Only people who didn't know them rang the front doorbell. Grace wiped her tongue with her apron.

"Why don't you go watch TV for a while, babe. I have to talk to this guy."

"Is he going to help find Mommy?" she asked softly.

"Absolutely. I just have to fill him in. Then we'll get this cake rolling after that."

"We don't want it rolling, silly," she said.