“Foxes would kill it. Small things aren’t safe.”

He walked to the back of the barn, where not even the dim light from the door reached. She continued to stroke the rabbit, crooning at it, until Henry called to her again.

“The lodge is here.”

She leaned her forehead against the hutch. “Goodbye,” she whispered.

She picked her way carefully to the back of the barn. She could barely see Henry, though she heard him moving things around. Then there was a ppffft, and a blue-white flare appeared an arm’s length away. The match moved through the air like one of Clyde’s magic tricks, lighting votive candles in blue and red glass holders.

She turned, letting her eyes again adjust. When she looked back, she saw a sort of altar, made of two sawhorses with planks laid across them, its back flush against the rear wall. Black cloth covered the planks, not quite long enough to reach the floor and hide the coils of rope stored underneath. Arranged on the makeshift altar were numerous pictures, like the oversize cards her mother used to tell fortunes. Pin stepped toward the table and picked up one of them, peering at it in the candlelight.

A newspaper picture of a young girl had been pasted to a piece of shirt cardboard. Not Elsie Paroubek—Pin thought at first it might be Lillian Wulff, the girl who’d escaped from the Gypsies. But while this girl had braids like Lillian, she was thinner, pale and unsmiling. Pin squinted to read the caption beneath the photo:

Alice Porovsky, who has been missing since Thursday morning, was last seen walking from…

The rest of the words were missing. Lightning bolts had been inked above the girl’s head, with colored flowers cut from seed catalogs scattered above them.

She glanced around for Henry, spotted him in the shadows. The flickering candlelight glinted in his eyes: he was watching her. She set the picture down and picked up another card. This, too, had a photograph clipped from a newspaper, a towheaded girl with a huge grin and several missing front teeth:

Parents bereft by Sonya Castillo’s murder. “Who would rob us of our precious angel?” mother cries before fainting.

Stars had been drawn in a circle around the girl’s picture, zigzag lines and a row of Xs. Words were printed at the top in childish block letters:

ALL GIRLS WILL AVENGE THEM!

Pin replaced the card and picked up the next one, and the next, moving around the altar as the candles guttered in their votive glasses.