I did not ask my dad for information about his mysterious weirdo coworker.

I didn't ask any of my classmates about Max's dad, or about Max, for that matter.

I didn't work up the nerve to go actually talk to Max instead of being a gormless creepy idiot.

For the most part I spent fall break that year sulking in the open space behind my house, pretending I was on a hike and avoiding human contact. On the rare occasion I ventured out into society, either I was sleeping or "hanging out" at Starbucks because one of the baristas was cute and took pity on me.

It was on one of these occasions that what an actual detective might call a "lead" pretty much fell into my lap.

I was occupying an armchair at Starbucks, nursing something with a stupid name and way too little actual coffee content, and contemplating whether I could get away with ditching off into the scrub for another few hours. In retrospect I was probably driving away clientele with more money to spend just by angsting all over the furniture, but at the time I didn't care.

One such shining example of humanity (a business type in a suit and the ugliest argyle socks I had ever seen) finally decided he'd had enough coffee and lurking teenagers for one day and departed, leaving his newspaper behind.

Out of sheer soul-destroying boredom, I swiped it. My dad took the New York Times, but I rarely ever read it. At least the local paper promised some comics and maybe some letters to the editor stupid enough to laugh at.

Or, you know, a news story about a local who'd gotten released from prison.

Normally that's not exactly headline news, but in these parts... well, it's still not, and the story ran in the "human interest" section of the paper with the comics and stories about kittens getting rescued from trees. It's just a perpetually slow news day around here, is what I'm saying.

(This was one of many things I should have picked up on before I did. Nothing ever happened. A couple minor drug busts, house fires in the summertime, mountain lions wandering down from the foothills, but never a murder or a domestic abuse case. Nothing.)

I didn't recognize the name, and what he'd been imprisoned for wasn't mentioned in the article. He'd gotten out early for good behavior, blah blah blah.

The thing that interested me was that he was mentioned as having worked for someplace local before he was arrested and convicted of... whatever he'd done. Someplace with a name I recognized; I'd seen it before.

For once slightly motivated, I tucked the newspaper under my arm, grabbed my "coffee", and went home.

The bike ride blurred by: I was on a mission. I shoved my bike against the wall of the garage and bolted inside. I thought I knew what I was looking for, and I had a good idea where it would be.

We'd been living in this house for maybe three months, and we still weren't all the way unpacked. But my dad had insisted that we unpack all of the stuff that went in his "study", and he'd made me do most of the work. I didn't know one person could have so many boxes of books.

I technically wasn't supposed to go in Dad's study when he wasn't there, but I figured as long as I put everything back where it was I'd be fine.

I have a good visual memory, I won't lie, and as I crept in the door, I knew exactly which shelf I had put the book I was looking for on.

Of course, this meant it wasn't there, and I had to search every shelf for it, hyperaware of every sound as I anticipated Dad coming home (which was stupid, given it was half-past one in the afternoon).

Eventually I found it - bound in brown leather, with no title on the spine, but a faint inscription on the front cover in worn gold relief - and cracked it open, already suspicious of what I'd find.

Yep. In the page that showed every employee for that year - the year before I was born - my dad was right next to the ex-con, one arm around the guy's shoulder and a laughing smile on his face. Max's father was in the next row, in the quietly-looming pose to which tall people are so often relegated in group photos.

I turned back to the title page and frowned.

Itexicon Employee Yearbook, 1992.

Why did I know that name?