She smiled up at me, but the smile wobbled. “Maybe I’m just being vain, but if he saved a bunch of letters from kids he never met I thought he’d keep what I wrote him.” She looked away.

I gripped her shoulder for a minute. “Don’t worry, Paige. I’m sure they’ll turn up.”

She sniffed a tiny, elegant sniff. “I think I’m just fixating on them because they keep me from thinking, ‘Yes, he’s really… gone.’ ”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m cursing him for being such a damned pack rat. And I can’t even get back at him by making him my executor.”

She laughed a little at that. “I brought a suitcase with me. I might as well pack up the clothes and makeup I left over here and get going.”

She went to the master bedroom to pull out her things. I puttered around aimlessly, trying to take stock of my task. Paige was right: Boom Boom had saved everything. Every inch of wall space was covered with hockey photographs, starting with the peewee team my cousin belonged to in second grade. There were group photos of him with the Black Hawks, locker-room pictures filled with champagne after Stanley Cup triumphs, solo shots of Boom Boom making difficult plays, signed pictures from Esposito, Howe, Hull-even one from Boom-Boom Geoffrion inscribed, “To the little cannon.”

In the middle of the collection, incongruous, was a picture of me in my maroon robes getting my law degree from the University of Chicago. The sun was shining behind me and I was grinning at the camera. My cousin had never gone to college and he set inordinate store by my education. I frowned at this younger, happy V. I. Warshawski and went into the master bedroom to see if Paige needed any help.

The case sat open on the bed, clothes folded neatly. As I came in she was rummaging through a dresser drawer, pulling out a bright red pullover.