Free Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

bedroom, she was stepping into a pair of rhinestone-trimmed flip-flops. “Do you know how to log off when you’re done?” she asked him. “Do you know how to work this, even?”
    “Certainly I know how!”
    Her computer sat on the nightstand, attached to the phone line there. He assumed this meant that no one could call in, which didn’t trouble him as much as it might have. He settled on the edge of the bed and rubbed his hands together. Then he looked up at Kitty. “Did you want something?” he asked.
    “No, no,” she said, and she gave an airy wave. “I’m off,” she told him.
    “Okay.”
    She didn’t mention when she’d be back. Was she supposed to have a curfew?
    As of noon, they’d passed the forty-eight-hour mark since his release from the hospital, but she had said nothing about going home. Well, none of his affair.
    He waited until she had left the room, and then he typed Ishmael Cope in the Search window. It was true that he knew how to work a computer—he’d taken a mandatory teachers’
    training course—but the smaller keyboard gave him some difficulty and he had to hit Delete several times.
    There were 4,300-some references to Ishmael Cope. Liam knew from experience that many of these would be false leads—whole paragraphs in which Ishmael and cope coincidentally appeared at widely separated points, or even (amazingly enough) other Ishmael Copes in other cities—but still, he was impressed.
    Ishmael Cope was buying up farmland in Howard County. Ishmael Cope and his wife had attended a gala for juvenile diabetes. Ishmael Cope’s plan to build a strip mall on the Eastern Shore was meeting with stiff opposition. Pass on, pass on. Aha: a newspaper profile, dating from just this past April. Mr. Cope had been born on Eutaw Street in 1930, which would make him … seventy-six. Younger than Liam’s father, although Liam had taken him for much older.
    He had only a high school diploma; he’d started his working life assisting in his parents’
    bakery. His first million had come from the invention of an “edible staple” to fasten filled pastries and crepes. (Liam allowed himself a brief grin.) The rest of his career was fairly run-of-the-mill, though: the million parlayed into two million, four million, then a billion as he swept across his own personal Monopoly board. Married, divorced, married again; two sons in the business with him …
    Nothing about any memory problems.
    The next entry dealt with a question of sewage disposal for a golf community that Mr.
    Cope was proposing near the Pennsylvania border. In the next, he was merely a name on a list of donors to Gilman School. Liam signed off and closed the computer. He might have known he would come up empty. The whole point of hiring a rememberer, after all, was to conceal the fact that one was needed.
    And anyhow, what had he hoped to accomplish even if he had found what he was looking for?
    On Thursday morning he had another visit from the police. There were two of them, this time—a man and a woman. The woman did all of the questioning. She wanted to know if Liam recalled any recent conversations in which he had publicly mentioned some valuable possession. Liam said, “Absolutely not, since I have no valuable possessions.”
    She said, “Well, maybe not by your standards, but … a high-definition TV, say? For lots of folks, that’s a hot property.”
    “I don’t even have a low-definition TV,” Liam told her.
    She looked annoyed. She was an attractive young woman, petite and towheaded, but a little W of wrinkles between her eyebrows marred the overall impression. She said, “We’re just trying to figure out why your place would have been targeted, and on the very first night you lived here.”
    “Well, it wasn’t Damian, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “Damian?”
    He regretted bringing the name to her attention. He said, “It wasn’t the guys who moved me in.”
    “No. Those were friends, as I