“Did anyone see her when you checked in?”

“No, I always made sure she stayed inside the car with her head down low. And she knew about stranger-danger. If anyone talked to her, she’d give them a fake name. Like Kate.”

“Kate?”

“It’s a common name.”

“Does she have friends or family out here? People she could’ve run off to?”

“I was her only friend. If she was a well-adjusted girl she’d never be with me, let’s just put it that way.”

Kate surveyed the room and returned to the clothes on the bed. The queasy feeling returned. Why had Brittany left all of her stuff?

“Why don’t you go and take a shower while I think of something.”

Bluto nodded obediently and rose from the chair, wobbly on his feet. Lumbering forward like a zombie, he gave her a final pleading look before disappearing into the black hole of the bathroom. “You have to help me, Kate . . .”

When she heard the shower running steadily, she let herself out of room 105 and raced to her car, heart pounding. Her hands were icicles and she panicked that her engine wouldn’t start, the way it would have stalled at precisely this point in a movie. But the car did start and she backed out of the lot with her headlights off. She kept her head low until she reached a major street, and then hit the gas with a vengeance.

As she sped home, she felt the unflappable eyes of the missing girl on her. She looked up at the rearview mirror—they were her own eyes, of course. Bluto hadn’t lied. She and Brittany looked almost exactly alike. Separated by a lifetime, and now, by the inscrutable night.

She made a left onto Santa Claus Lane.

III.

III.

GIRL ON THE BED

—

August 2006

to

October 2006

– 7 –

– 7 –

MAGICAL THINKING

Mr. Z pulled down the projection screen. Rosemary noticed he behaved very differently with this class, maybe because there were now twenty-two of them and not just four. He was less intimate, more formal, as if some of these kids had parents he needed to impress. In other words, he acted exactly like a schoolteacher.

“I want to show you two of my favorite paintings in the world. They’re both created by an underrated nineteenth-century Frenchman named Hippolyte Delaroche, known to his friends simply as Paul. Paul Delaroche was a Romantic, with a capital R.”

He clicked on the first slide. Two little girls with page-boy haircuts perched on the edge of a creepy-looking four-poster bed. One looked off to the side with vivid dread on her face, and she had an illuminated manuscript in her hand. The other girl leaned on her companion for support, staring back at the viewer with a nauseated expression. Near them was a lapdog peering into the void beyond the bed.