At the top of the rise volunteers were handing out blankets and warm soup. There were a hundred and eighty of us, all told. Maybe two hundred. They lined us up on red plastic chairs arranged in rows behind heavy ropes that kept us from the main house.

Elsa leaned close to me. “They won’t let us into the buildings,” she said. “We have to follow things from out here.”

“You serious?”

“Yeah,” said Vee. “Which you have to admit is fucked up.”

“Hush.”

Vee turned toward the man who had spoken. “Don’t hush me.”

Near us sat a couple with the saddest eyes you can imagine. I tried to make some kind of contact first with the woman, then with the man, but before I could nod they turned to each other, speaking quiet words into each other’s ears, glancing toward us as they spoke. Then they both turned full on to us; they stared at Vee with an expression very much like reproach.

She’s fifteen, I wanted to say. Please understand . . .

“I’ll stay here with Vee,” said Elsa. “Go use your press card.”

“Yeah, Mum,” said Vee, looking toward the couple. “Chaperone the frick out of me. Because apparently I shouldn’t say what everyone else is thinking.”

“Vee,” I said very quietly. “Shh.”

I put my press card on a lanyard around my neck, walked slowly over toward the house. When I looked back, the man with the reproachful eyes was staring at me.

The wood on this side of the house was rotting beneath the yellow paint. The window glass had not been replaced. It was hard to make out the figures moving through the gloom inside.

There were two male stand-ins, placed where the brothers must have been as they addressed the children. Actors dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans with white sneakers, allowing their bodies to be moved, their limbs to be repositioned.

There was Tvist too, his face glowing red in the light of a space heater, his long woolen coat turned up at the collar. He caught me looking, nodded a greeting. I nodded back.

Nearer the window, lit by the low sun, was a young woman, blond-haired with a pretty, open face. She turned into the room, listening to an instruction read by a court official from a large ring-bound file. She was playing Licia, then.

Funny.

Almost.

The actress turned away. I realized with another lurch that Paul Andersen was speaking to her. The actual Paul Andersen, the murderer of children, correcting some minor detail of Licia’s position. There he stood, with his brother, at the far end of the room. A court official crossed the floor, moved the girl a couple of paces closer to the door. The actress turned, looked questioningly toward the Andersen brothers. Paul Andersen nodded.

The actress walked out of the light and toward the center of the room, where she joined the huddle of lawyers.

“Cal.”