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“Can you remember anything else unusual about that night?”

“Not really. We had kind of a party after the play. Families from the cottages down on the lake came because their kids were in the show. We were all in our yard eating hot dogs and burgers. Aggie, Peter and Lizzy’s mom, got a little tipsy and accidentally set the picnic table on fire. I guess that’s the most unusual thing that happened.”

“And things broke up shortly after dark. People went home. What did you do, Miss Farr?”

“I…um, went into the woods with some of the kids from the play.”

Crowley flipped through his book.

“Hospital records show you and Peter Shale being seen in the emergency room for stitches around ten o’clock that same evening. Everyone I’ve talked to says that at some point during or shortly after the party in the yard, you, Peter Shale, Lizzy Shale,
and Greta Clark went into the woods and tore down the stage. Was there something particular that prompted this?”

Rhonda’s head spun. She went over what few memories she had of tearing down the stage, but they were just a blur in her mind. It didn’t feel like a true memory anymore. It was just a story she had told and retold so many times that it had long ago left any feel of reality behind. When she told the story, it was like recalling a dream. The dream where she and Peter ended up with matching scars.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “We all somehow knew it was our last play. Everything changed that summer. Peter and Tock got together. Lizzy was drifting away from us. I guess tearing apart the stage was kind of a symbolic thing.”

“Were Daniel and your father fighting that night? About money? Because Daniel had asked your father for another loan?”

Rhonda remembered a time before, on Peter’s birthday, when Daniel asked Clem for a loan. He said it was to buy tools, but Clem hadn’t believed him—had made some mention of gambling. She and Peter had heard the whole thing from inside their closed coffins.

“That’s pretty much the story Clem, Aggie, and Justine tell,” Crowley continued after listening to her recollections from earlier that summer.

“You’ve talked to Aggie?” Rhonda asked.

Crowley nodded. “A detective in Maryland met with her last night.” Crowley ran a hand through his short hair, glanced down at his notebook, then continued. “Daniel was in trouble with some gambling debts and your father felt he’d bailed him out enough. It sounds like your father did an awful lot for Daniel. Is that the way you remember it?”

“I’m not sure. I guess so. I mean, Daniel had bad luck. He was always coming up with these schemes, but none of them ever
panned out. And it seemed like he always owed money to someone. That’s the impression I got anyway, but I was just a kid.”

She thought again of the wings Daniel made, of Peter standing on the shed roof, determined to prove they would work.

“Who took you to the emergency room?” Crowley asked.

“My father and Aggie.”

“Your mother didn’t go?”

“I don’t remember her going. I think she stayed home with Lizzy.”

“And Daniel, where was he when you had your stitches?”

“I have no idea. He wasn’t at the hospital, I don’t think. He must have stayed back with my mother and Lizzy.”

Rhonda reached up and touched her scar. She thought of Peter’s matching scar. Of the way the blood poured down her face, how frightened she was. There was so much blood on both of them. On Lizzy too, because she was there, trying to help them. She took off her pirate jacket and wrapped it around Rhonda’s head. They were all crying so hard. Rhonda didn’t even remember how they got back to her house, or the ride to the hospital. She just remembered being in the same room with Peter and how the doctor pulled the curtain to do the stitches.

“Thank you, Miss Farr, you’ve been helpful.” Crowley was closing his notebook, getting up to go. “One more thing, if you don’t mind,” he added, fumbling in the pocket of his jacket for a small bag that he withdrew and held out for her inspection.

“What can you tell me about this?”

The pink plastic was cracked and grimy, but she recognized it immediately. It had once clung to the roof of her mouth.

“My retainer!” she said at last.

Crowley nodded. “We found it down in the hole with the body.”

Rhonda was quiet a moment while she considered this, remembering the day she and Peter had sat in the hole together and
he asked her to take it out. She shivered as she imagined it there beside little Ernie Florucci.

“I used to change costumes down there,” Rhonda explained. “I probably left it in the hole the night of the play. I wouldn’t have worn it on stage. I probably left it down there for safekeeping. God, I thought it was gone forever.”

“Thank you for your time.” He snapped the book closed.

“You’ve been quite helpful.”

“But I don’t understand,” Rhonda said. “What does any of this have to do with Ernie Florucci?”

“Ernie?”

“Yeah, with the body you found in the woods?” Crowley looked perplexed, and Rhonda went on, a bit irritated. “It was Ernie, right? You found her.”

“We didn’t find Ernestine’s body in the woods. Not yet anyway, we’re still looking. There’s a lot of woods around the lake to cover and, unfortunately, Warren hasn’t given us many details to go on.”

“So, what’s this about?”

Rhonda thought again of that old bogeyman, stuffed full of rags and pillows. Of their fears scribbled on slips of paper, folded again and again and dropped into the hole like ruined paper cranes. What had she written on her paper? What did Lizzy and Peter write?

“The body we found has been identified as Daniel Shale. Initial findings are consistent with his being killed around the time he disappeared. Possibly the night of the play. The remnants of his clothes match those shown in the photographs from that day.”

Rhonda felt a peculiar rushing sensation around her head, as though all the air had been suddenly sucked off the porch.

“Killed? How?”

“Yes,” Crowley said. “The preliminary reports say blunt trauma to the head.”

SEPTEMBER 4, 1993

PETER HAD TOCK’Sgun out and was practicing his aim, shooting cans off the stone wall at the edge of the yard. Clem gave him pointers, set up the targets, and even let Peter fire his Civil War replica musket a few times.

Rhonda didn’t know how to talk to Peter about what had happened to his parents. It didn’t seem right to bring it up, nor did it seem right not to. She carried her homework out to the picnic table and glanced up often to see Peter shooting cans, Clem patting him on the back, saying,Good shot, son .

Rhonda thought of things to say, how to comfort him, to tell him that everything would be all right—Aggie would get well, Daniel would come home. But every time she opened her mouth to speak, to say the words she practiced in her head, the weight of their inadequacy, their sheer stupidity, kept them in the back of her throat. Her words got stuck there like some vile frog, thick
and useless, and when she finally gathered the courage to walk up to him and say something, the only thing that came out was, “Want a Coke?”—to which he just shook his head.

That night, Lizzy didn’t wet the bed, but she didn’t stay silent either. She moaned, howled, spoke in gibberish. She called out for something or someone—the word a blur that sounded, to Rhonda, an awful lot likePeter .

Rhonda shook Lizzy awake.

“He’s outside,” Rhonda told her, trying to comfort Lizzy, whose eyes were wide with panic. Lizzy grabbed hold of Rhonda, dug her nails into Rhonda’s arm. “Peter’s just outside in the tent,” Rhonda told her. Lizzy put her head back down on the pillow and drifted off to sleep.

Rhonda got up and looked out her window to see Peter standing with Tock’s gun. She watched him walk the perimeter of the yard, then return to his tent. From her bedroom window, she studied him, positioned in front of his tent like he was standing guard—holding the gun tight in his hands, gazing off into the distance, looking not brave but somehow resigned, as he stood waiting for some imagined enemy.

JUNE 25, 2006

WHEN RHONDA PULLEDinto Peter and Tock’s driveway, the first thing she noticed was the two girls playing in the yard. There was Suzy, her heavy silverEPILEPTIC bracelet glinting in the sun, her hair nearly white blond. She had a red toy shovel and bucket in her hand. The other girl was smaller, all knees and elbows, with dark hair held back in pigtails. As Rhonda watched, the dark-haired girl dropped something into a hole. Suzy shoveled sand over it, covering it up. The other little girl leaned down and whispered something in Suzy’s ear.

Ernie?

“Hey, Suz,” Rhonda said, jumping out of her car. “What’re ya up to?” Rhonda studied the dark-haired girl: freckles, brown eyes. She looked an awful lot like the girl in theMISSING poster; the girl Warren said had fallen out of Laura Lee’s car.

“Nothing,” Suzy said.

Rhonda nodded. “Your dad inside?”

“Yep,” she said.

Rhonda went up the steps and knocked. Tock answered. Rhonda instinctively took a step back, remembering the other woman’s rage when they’d last met.

“Rhonda,” she said, stone-faced. “We were starting to think you weren’t coming.” Rhonda couldn’t tell from Tock’s expression if she was grateful or disappointed.

“I got held up,” Rhonda said. She heard voices in the living room. Peter and a woman.

“The girl playing in the yard with Suzy,” Rhonda said, “who is she?”

“Come in,” Tock invited, placing a hand gently on Rhonda’s back. Rhonda flinched. No, not a knife. Just a hand. Tock was guiding her toward the living room, pushing her almost. Rhonda half-expected the room to be full of people who would jump out and yellSurprise! People who would tell her that the past weeks had all just been a trick, a game. Warren would be there in the rabbit suit and say something like,See, Rhonda, things are never what they seem. Even Crowley would be there, peeking out from behind the drapes to give her a we-sure-fooled-you-didn’t-we? wink.

Rhonda looked in and felt all the air drain from her, like an abruptly punctured balloon. There was no party. Just Peter talking with a woman she recognized at once.

“Ronnie,” the woman said. “My God, Ronnie.”

“Lizzy?” Rhonda managed to whisper. The name came out like a question, but there was no doubt. Rhonda stood and walked over to her.

Lizzy wore her hair long still, but had it back in a braid. She had dark eyeliner on and was dressed in faded jeans, black cowboy boots, a white T-shirt.

Rhonda took Lizzy in her arms and clung to her. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

“I have so much to tell you, Ronnie,” Lizzy said.

“You’re talking,” Rhonda pulled back and studied the face of her long lost friend.

“Not just talking,” Peter said. “She’s a singer. Tell her, Lizzy.”

Lizzy nodded. “I have a band in Seattle. Amazing Grace and the Disciples. We’ve put out a couple albums.”

“Seattle?”

“That’s where I finally landed.”

There was so much to say, so much to ask. Little by little, they sketched out their lives for one another in broad strokes. Tock brought out fruit, bread, and cheese. Peter opened some wine.

“When did you start singing?” Rhonda asked.

“Nowthere’s a story,” Lizzy said. “See after I left home, I hitchhiked. Ended up in Boston for a while. Lived on the streets and in a couple of shelters.”

“Wait,” Rhonda interrupted. “Shelters? But I thought you were with Daniel.”

Lizzy shook her head, looked away.

“But that’s what you said in your postcards,” Rhonda explained.

“That’s what I wanted everyone to believe. Maybe, on some level, I wanted to believe it too,” Lizzy said. “The truth is, I was on my own. No one knew who I was or where I’d come from. I still wasn’t talking. I didn’t talk until I was sixteen. Five years of silence. I was in San Francisco then, pregnant with Kimberly, living in this home for pregnant girls. This gal Trish, she asked me if I wanted to be in her band. They needed a guitarist. So one day, I just sat down with them, picked up the guitar, and the next thing I knew, I was singing. I don’t know if it was music or Kimberly that gave me my voice back, but the way I look at it, it must have been the combination, ’cause that’s been what’s kept my life afloat ever since. Kimmy and the music. The centers of my little universe.”

“That’s Kimberly in the yard with Suzy?”

Lizzy smiled and nodded.

AFTER A WHILE,Peter patted the cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Ronnie, come have a smoke with me,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you smoke,” Lizzy said.

“Once in a while,” Rhonda admitted.

“Once in a while won’t hurt,” Peter said. “Me, I wish I could give the damn things up.”

“You’ve always got a choice,” said Rhonda, thinking back to how she used to obsess over the choices others had made. The choice to leave, which she thought Daniel and Lizzy had made. Now it turned out Daniel hadn’t left after all. He’d been buried in the woods the whole time—right next to the bogeyman.

“Peter, I’m so sorry,” Rhonda said once they were alone on the front steps, where a tangled hedge of rugosa roses was encroaching on the left side, scratching Rhonda’s leg on the way down. Once settled on the step, Rhonda looked up—at the peak of the A-frame was a huge paper wasp nest, a startlingly large layer of gray combs buzzing with activity.