Chapter 6 Summary

The boy remembers talking to his mother in 1958 about a story that McIlhenny had told to Katie before he disappeared. McIlhenny had been working as a bus conductor on a rural route and one of his regular passengers was a man called Sean who always carried a small brown case, inside of which was just one baby sock. The man had once shown the sock to McIlhenny and told him that when he found its match, he would stop traveling on the bus. The sock had belonged to Sean's baby daughter, who had died many years before. When Sean collected her belongings from the fever hospital, one sock was missing. After that, Sean went to the hospital every day, waiting for the sock to be found. According to McIlhenny, this was Sean's way of blaming himself for the baby's death, as he believed...