“I’d rather die than work at the King of Prussia mall.” Marie looked over at Sage. “Sorry, Sage, but I couldn’t do Chick-fil-A again. It’s like I would have lost my will to live.”

“Believe me, it’s probably worse than you remember.”

“What about us?” I felt as if I’d been slapped.

“I’m not your mother, Libby. I was never planning to stay here for the summer.” Marie’s eighteenth birthday was in three weeks, and I realized then that no one was going to try to stop her from going.

“How will we see you?” Ellen asked.

“By train, dummy,” Marie said, throwing a pillow at her. Ellen flinched. “Oh shit. Sorry. You okay?” Ellen nodded.

“Does Mom know?” I couldn’t believe Marie was telling us in front of Wilson, like it was nothing, and I resented him even more for seeing me exposed and hurt like this.

“Yeah. She knows.” She was being so casual about leaving. She went across the room and sat next to Ellen on the upper trundle. “You’re going to have to sleep, Ellen. But before you do, Wilson wants to ask you just a few things.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Please.”

“You don’t have to talk about what happened. It’s just to identify the guy.”

“It’s what I said already. He had long almost-white hair, so long he was sitting on it. Blue eyes. Oh, I forgot. He had really long fingernails for a man.” Her picture gave me an involuntary chill.

“Was it both? Did he have long fingernails on both hands?” Wilson asked.

Ellen thought for a moment. “No. It was his right hand. The hand on my leg. Not the one on the steering wheel. And he had to sort of bend over the way he drove, like his body was too big for the car.” She paused. “I can’t think of anything else.”

“What about the car?” Wilson asked.

“I don’t know. It was black. It looked like the car Chicken De Martino drives, except a different color.”

“Chicken drives a Camaro,” Wilson said. “Was it a Camaro?”

“I don’t know,” Ellen said. “It was black on the inside.”

“What were the seats like?”

“They were low, like we were sitting on the ground.”

“Bucket seats?” Wilson asked.

Ellen shrugged. She yawned, and her hand moved to the cut under her eye. “They had furry covers, like the lid of the toilet seat in Meredith Hunter’s house.”

“That’s shag,” I said.

“And disgusting,” said Sage.

“Shag,” said Ellen. “But fluffier and dark, like a purple-black.”

“You told Libby he played a tape.” Wilson picked up the ziplock and stuffed it back in his pocket. “Do you remember what?”