We both stayed quiet. I lifted my arm and tipped the edge of an asteroid so that it swung above me in slow circles. Thomas’s little spinning projects made me sad. Since the funeral he seemed to spend all his time in his room, except when he was at school or swimming. He never saw Jack anymore. I wasn’t sure about his school friends. He went to an all-boys Catholic school.

I sat up suddenly, my heart pounding the inside of my rib cage. “Oh my God, Marie, I’ve just thought of something. Ellen told that guy she lived on the mountain. She said she was going to Valley Forge Mountain and would take a ride to the covered bridge. She was wearing her school uniform.” I could hear the hysteria building in my voice. “We’re the only ones on the mountain that wear those uniforms. If he’s alive, he’ll find us and get revenge for whatever Wilson and those boys did.”

11

Sage and I sat on the floor of her bedroom with copies of the Pottstown Mercury spread out in front of us. She’d bought them at the newsstand in King of Prussia over the last few days, and we scoured the pages for any report of a man being beaten or killed the week before. We were trying to figure out what had happened that night. Sage had taken Charlotte’s map of Pennsylvania from her car, and we found Pottstown. We traced the route Barbie Man must have driven the night Ellen got into his car, and the one Wilson and the others probably drove to get him. Investigating helped me forget what Sage had said about Jack, and we were almost like ourselves again. Sage had also been asking around. Tony told her that he’d heard now that the man had got a bad beating, was maybe hospitalized, but not dead.

“Oh God, look at this.” Sage pushed an open page toward me. An inmate at Graterford Prison had told a Mercury reporter that he had raped and murdered two women in French Creek State Park. He said he’d picked them up hitchhiking. We looked at the map, trying to find French Creek. It was southwest of Pottstown. Graterford was east. I felt sick thinking about what could have happened to Ellen.

“There’s nothing in these about Barbie Man,” I said.

“He wouldn’t report it, though, would he? They’d ask him why he was attacked, and what would he say? Because I kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl?” Sage was right. He wouldn’t have told the police.

“What if he doesn’t know why he was attacked?”

“Wilson told those boys why they were going up there. One of them will have said something to him. Probably Wilson. It wouldn’t feel like justice unless he told Barbie Man why.”