If he gets what I’m implying, he doesn’t seem to—which makes him either very dumb or very smart. He doesn’t even blink. “So you of all people should appreciate how serious this is.”

I’m tempted to tell Sheriff Kahn about the car tailing me last night, but I’m sure he’s the type to chalk it up to female hormones.

I switch tactics. “You were sheriff back when I was in high school,” I say, “back when Kaycee Mitchell disappeared.”

This time, he’s not quick enough to repress a slight ripple that moves his expression into one of distaste. “Oh sure. Biggest to-do this town’s ever had. Hysteria. Teenage girls going cuckoo.” He smiles thinly. “You weren’t one of them, were you? One of the…?” He holds out both hands, mimics a small seizure, the wild flapping of the hands.

“No. I wasn’t.” I’d seen what real sickness looked like. I knew that being sick didn’t make you special. It just made you sick. “I just wanted to know whether you ever considered the possibility that she wasn’t making it up.”

“No,” he says shortly. “It was all for attention. Everyone knows that. The other girls copped to it afterward.”

“You mentioned hysteria. That spreads by copying, emulation. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t some truth in it.”

He smiles again. “That’s just like a lawyer,” he says. “Always trying to make the plain facts more complicated. Kaycee lied and got embarrassed when it all blew up.”

Every single person who talks about Kaycee mentions that she was a liar. But if she really was sick, she was the only one who wasn’t lying. At least, not about that.

“Running away because she didn’t want to admit she’d been faking it seems pretty extreme. Especially if she was as good a liar as everyone says.”

He waves away the distinction. “That’s old business, anyway. Can’t see why it matters to you.”

A memory surfaces: sophomore or junior year, I was passing Misha and Kaycee in the hall when Misha began to bark. That was her newest cruelty—I was ugly as a dog, she said, and she had started growling whenever I passed.

But that day Kaycee was with her. She turned to Misha and slapped her hard, once, in the face, so quickly and unexpectedly I almost missed it. And for a moment all three of us froze, stunned—Kaycee, lit up with fury and something else, something I couldn’t name. Misha, shocked, her face slowly flushing with color.

I hate dogs, was all Kaycee said.

“Do you know where she is now?” I ask him.

“No idea.” He’s watching me closely. “She rang me up maybe a few weeks after she left. Told me she was in Chicago then. But that was ten years ago.”

“She called you? Here?” This surprises me. “Why?”

He shrugs again. “Must’ve heard I was looking for her. Her friend Misha talked to her a few times.”

I wonder if there’s a possibility that even now, Misha is covering for Kaycee—and knows exactly where she is. “What did she say?”