The dog nosed at the wooden boardwalk as a boat approached along the canal. Pin recognized two of the high-school kids from earlier. Horace stepped from the pavilion, put out his foot, and stopped the boat so they could scramble out. The girl clutched her Panama hat, her hair wild about her shoulders. The boy grinned at Horace, took the girl’s hand, and pulled her after him onto the Pike.

Horace leaned on his boat hook and watched them go, then pushed off the empty boat and turned to wait for the next one. A few yards away, the skinny terrier paced back and forth, pausing to scratch at the dirt. Horace threw a rock at it, and it ran off.

After a few minutes, another boat appeared and halted when Horace set his foot on its prow. A young couple, Pin recognized them, too. The girl slapped the boy’s hand when he tried to help her from the boat and hurried off without waiting for him.

Pin plucked a long piece of grass and chewed the white pith at the bottom. Pieces of her dream came back to her, and her heart constricted as she remembered that her sister would have turned twelve this past April. Pin had forgotten her birthday. So had their mother.

Tears pricked at her eyes. It was her fault that Abriana had disappeared—Pin had stopped in a vacant lot near the gasworks to play a round of mumblety-peg, which she lost. When she turned, Abriana was gone. Lily Mikowski, a girl who’d been observing the game, said Abriana had followed an organ-grinder down the alley. He’d been playing “After the Ball,” Lily remembered that. Abriana was never seen again.

No one blamed Pin: they all blamed her mother. Gina did blame Pin, screaming and cursing for hours that first night. In the days that followed she fell into a strange rapt silence, as though she were sitting in church during the Easter vigil. Gina never blamed her again, but Pin knew the truth. Even if no one else knew, even if no one but Pin and her mother remembered Abriana, it would always be her fault.

Pin wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked back down at the pavilion. Here was the next boat, the one that the man and young girl had entered.

She hesitated, then hurried down the slope. If the man was Chaplin, she wanted to be able to tell Max that she’d seen him. The boat slipped along the black water, the last bars of sunlight striping it as it slowed. Horace continued to smoke, his back to the canal. The boat rocked as the man in the boater hat hopped out onto the raised wooden walkway and strode rapidly down the Pike. Pin frowned. Where was the girl?