Mrs. Davies shook her head. “I didn’t know that she had. Donnie lived in the neighborhood, of course, but so did twenty or so other kids. They all ran around. We never thought much of it, back then. The kids went out to play. When it was time for dinner, you called out the front door, and they came home again.”

“Were there some kids in particular she seemed to hang out with more than others?” Phil tried.

“Donnie’s older cousin, Charlie. Charlie Sgarzi. He and some of the bigger kids had a bit of a, I don’t know, gang would be too strong of a word. But they were always hanging out. Black leather jackets, cigarettes, pretending they were tough.”

“Charlie was friends with Shana?” My turn to speak up, as this was news.

“Friends?” Mrs. Davies repeated with a frown. “Oh, I don’t know that Shana had friends. But for a bit, we saw her hanging with that crowd. I was concerned about it. They were a bunch of aspiring hoodlums, and she had enough problems. I tried to talk to her about it, but she just laughed. Wannabes is what she called them. Then later, I heard from one of the other moms it wasn’t those kids she was interested in, but one of them had a twenty-four-year-old brother who dealt dope. That’s who she was really spending time with. A fourteen-year-old girl, getting involved with a twenty-four-year-old . . .”

Mrs. Davies shook her head. All these years later, she still sounded dismayed.

“How long did Shana live with you?” Phil asked.

Her expression changed, abruptly sobering up. The lines appeared deeper in her face. “Three months,” she whispered. “Three months. That’s all it took. And then we were done.”

“What happened that day, Mrs. Davies?” D.D. spoke up gently.

“I don’t know. God’s honest truth. Shana got up around eleven, left the house. We fed the other kids a snack around four, when they got home from school, but still no sign of Shana. Then, sometime around five. Yes, five; I was about to put dinner in the oven. I heard screaming. Mrs. Johnson, her house is just a few doors down. She was screaming and screaming. My baby, she kept crying. My baby . . .

“Jeremiah ran out the door. By the time he got there, someone had already called an ambulance. But according to Jeremiah, nothing for the EMTs to do. Just looking at the young boy’s mangled body . . . Mrs. Johnson never got over it. That family, that poor, poor family . . .”