Miss Waldron spent the next few years running away. Some of these attempts were more successful than others. At fourteen, she disappeared at the zoo, slipping into the foliage of the primate house. The detectives found her two days later, living with a family of lemurs, her uniform bargained for bananas.

At fifteen, she hired a crop duster with her birthday money. The plane touched down in a field behind the school during a class in calisthenics. The girls finished their round of jumping jacks and Miss Waldron broke from the line, her white legs streaking across the grass. The pilot dropped her off near the train station, where she joined a passing carnival. After reporting this, the detectives received their first telegram—FETCH HER FROM THE CIRCUS AND RETURN HER TO THE NUNS—and finally caught up with Miss Waldron a few weeks later in Louisiana, where she was performing as a veiled trapeze artist.

The nuns made an example of her. This example involved the scrubbing of toilets, the repetition of the rosary, and silent but carefully directed guilt. It did not stop Miss Waldron from escaping, but they noticed it kept the other girls from getting close to her. Then came the Italian.

Maria arrived at the convent with an enormous mane of dark hair that fell to her waist and a personal maid whose job was to take care of it. She was the illegitimate daughter of a contessa and her gardener, drank tumblers of amaretto liqueur, and wore high-necked dresses that were specially tailored to hide a stunning red birthmark in the shape of a penis.

On a class trip to Silver Lake the girls were partnered together for a canoe ride. As they set out across the water, Miss Waldron asked the Italian what she did for fun. Maria spun around, nearly upsetting the boat, and said, Never will I have happiness away from Fredo.

Fredo, Miss Waldron soon learned, was Maria’s stepbrother from the contessa’s brief third marriage. He had thick eyebrows and sideburns that went down to his chin. In the three weeks the new siblings had spent together they managed to commit six mortal sins and forty-seven venial. Maria explained their plans to get married and, as her paddle made soft spirals through the water, said, You must come visit us, in a quiet, conspiratorial way that reminded Miss Waldron of characters in a novel, inviting each other over to their country estates.