“You’re going to have to cut it,” Marie said. She turned on the hot faucet and handed me a bar of soap. “Wash your face and your hands really well, and when you get home, you can have a bath.” She took a toothbrush out of her backpack. “Use this like you would a nailbrush, and we’ll throw it away. But get it all off you.”

It took several hours for our statements to be taken. We sat in a room together, Marie with us. Grady and Sage were still in the waiting room. The police gave us cans of Coke and bags of potato chips from the vending machine. Later, around four in the morning, Ellen and I went to the bathroom together. She finished first and went back out. When I stepped into the hallway, Sage was hugging her, but she didn’t look at me. I knew the message was to stay away. I didn’t blame her.

We told our stories. Ellen had to begin with that night in the car when Julius Korhonen picked her up. Officer Day asked why she was on the road, to tell him again how she ended up getting out of our car and standing on the road in the dark.

“It was almost dark. But not quite. That time that’s more like twilight,” Ellen said. “And I was being horrible, losing my temper, and my mom couldn’t control me . . .”

I glanced at Marie. We knew Officer Day was thinking about what kind of mother would leave a girl this size on the side of the road.

Marie said she really didn’t know anything about who went up to Pottstown with Wilson, or exactly what they did.

I found myself defending Wilson again. “He was trying to help us,” I said.

Ellen told her story from the fireworks, how she had turned out of the swim club parking lot to come find me. Meredith Hunter just wanted to follow a group of boys from her middle school around, and she was getting on Ellen’s nerves. It wasn’t Barbie Man’s car she’d seen—she saw him, standing in the middle of the road, looking around, taller than everyone else. She thought he was looking for her, so she ran straight across to the trail, past the tower, and kept going. She waited in the Kingdom, and when she thought for definite that she’d waited long enough, that Thomas and I would be home, she walked back, only to see the police car in the driveway. She didn’t know what to do, so she’d waited under the dogwood for one of us to come home.