“We’re leaving,” Mom said when word of Kennedy Lichtenstein came through. The whole exodus happened within minutes of the news. Emily packed a bag as Jan instructed her how little she needed.

“We’re leaving till this is over,” she’d said. “And anything we forget, we’ll buy out on the road.”

The road. Yes. Emily Holt, the Samhattan High School girls’ basketball team’s starting center. It’s a role she worked hard for, spending hours on footwork and boxing out, catching the ball high and “staying tall” despite a proclivity to drop the ball to her waist, to hold it at her hip like a gunslinger. She’s put in the time. Cherishes how far she’s come. Cut as a freshman, she got into two games her sophomore year. While Kit Lamb and Dana Berger were heralded from the start, Emily had to work her ass off. It didn’t hurt that she grew five inches before her junior year. Now she’s about the size of Mom, who drives the Blazer through the city streets at midnight as if the news were about her own daughter.

Emily gets it. And she agrees. Why wait around to see who’s next?

“You’re too young to know about Randy Scotts,” Jan says, making a hard turn on Fifth Street, a shortcut to the highway but one most Samhattanites avoid. “It hasn’t felt this dark in Samhattan since he was alive. A bona fide serial killer. A mailman first.”

“I know,” Emily says. “He took people’s lips.”

Jan eyes her quick. A glance to make sure her daughter is okay with what she just said.

“Yep. He did. They found a trunk full of mouths when they caught him. And for a few weeks, nobody smiled in this city.”

Men sit on shadowed stoops, others stumble up Fifth like they’re walking from one end of the bar to the other. Emily hasn’t been down here in a long time. Just driving through makes her a little nervous.

Daphne isn’t the only Samhattan legend, and a lot of news comes from Fifth Street.

But the city seems to be mostly asleep. Indoors anyway. And Emily and Jan are leaving town. First Tammy, then Melanie, now Kennedy. Yes, time to go indeed.

“Even when they caught him and killed him and buried him,” Jan says, “it took some time for us to feel safe again. We’d spent so long seeing him in every corner, behind every door, that he’d taken on this ghostlike quality. He may as well have been a demon to us. And so, what did it mean that they caught him? You can’t catch a demon, you understand. A ghost can slip through the bars of any cell, slip right out of a pair of cuffs. Some things are hard to accept at first because they go against what you’ve come to believe. It’s like that now. Feels the same. Everything’s completely on edge. And I always said if something like that ever happened again, I’d leave Samhattan and take you with me.”