“He vanished. Years later I made Sheila Brown, my final and best caseworker, tell me what happened. She managed to find out that the two of them made bail and disappeared into the city. I’ve no idea where he is, if he’s even alive. I guess I convinced myself that my father wasn’t to blame for what his brother did to me. When I was in foster care, I used to fantasize that he would suddenly appear and rescue me from those places I was in, but he never did. I gave up hoping after a few of years.”

“How old were you when you were taken into care?”

“Six. I was a problem for the foster care people from the get-go. My father hadn’t officially given up his parental rights, so I couldn’t be adopted. He had to register with Child Services before—I wasn’t in school, I guess—and genius that he was, he said I was a Muslim, which, as an Albanian, he may have been. Sheila said he must have thought I’d get better treatment if I was a minority, but it just meant none of the religious agencies wanted me. Back then the system was dominated by Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organizations. So instead of having a chance at some reasonably appropriate placement, I was put in a kind of temporary group home, and a janitor there tried to abuse me like my uncle did, but I fought him off. I complained about it, and I guess that marked me down as a troublemaker.

“I ended up in juvenile court a couple of times. I was lucky not to get locked up, I suppose, but I was designated a ‘person in need of supervision’—I love that phrase. So the first dump I got sent to was called the Wilhelmina Shelter for Troubled Children. I got in trouble a lot. They’d write me up for not looking the staff in the eye, which they interpreted as being insufficiently remorseful, that kind of thing.”

Pia looked at Rothman. His face was impassive. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

“When I was twelve or so, I got shipped to the Hudson Valley Academy for Girls, in a town called Eden Falls. It sounds nice, right? Eden Falls. The supposed school was a nineteenth-century institution. They used to send teenage prostitutes there, you know, to reform them, but when I was there it was all the hard cases who’d been thrown out of everywhere else—the girls no one wanted to adopt or deal with appropriately. The girls lived in these cottages. The paint was peeling, the plumbing didn’t work. Roasting in summer, freezing in winter. That was bearable. It was the other girls that were the problem.