Corner to corner I scanned the room and saw only the usual bits of equipment, paraphernalia, tables, stools, glass vials, books, burners, measuring cups and spoons, scraps of notepaper, lists of trials and errors. In the corner, a broom. Against the wall, my axe. No, not the axe after all, for it was upstairs. I hadn’t known she’d be coming down here again, so I hadn’t brought it.

I’d been so afraid for her that I’d forgotten to arm myself.

“Lizbeth.” Doctor Seabury called to me, and I was startled—I’d looked right past him. He was there, but I hadn’t noticed him. You see? Such things are possible after all.

“She can’t be gone,” I insisted to him, not answering his summons except to give him some indication that yes, I was still in possession of my senses. “There’s no way out of the basement except up the stairs, and out the exterior cellar doors, but they’re locked.” I could see the barred fastener from where I stood. It had not been disturbed. “Did she . . . did you . . . did she push past you? Shove you aside?” It didn’t hurt to ask.

“No,” he told me gently. “No, Lizbeth. We lost her.”

Exasperated, I spit—“Through the walls? Like some kind of ghost?”

“Through the walls, past them—I surely don’t know and can’t say. But she’s left this place.”

I clapped my hands over my mouth, then changed my mind and pressed them over my breasts instead. Holding myself down. Holding my horror inside, so I did not scream it out. Quietly, with only what little whispered breath I could spare—lest it all fly forth at once—I said, “He was telling her to do something awful to us. To you, me, and Emma. She was fighting him. That’s what she meant.”

“That’s one reading of the situation,” he replied, more coldly than necessary, in my opinion.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense!” I shouted back at him. Not shouting was too hard.

“Sense has long ago gone out the window here, my dear. She’s gone. That’s the main thing. She neither did anything awful to us, nor did she fling herself into the cooker—that’s all we know for certain.”

“Then we have to go looking for her!”

Now he was exasperated with me; it showed in his eyes. He tried to steady his voice, to lend at least one of us some sense of calm or control. “Lizbeth, if she is trying to protect you by leaving . . . would you undo her efforts by chasing her?”

“Yes!” He was right. Sense had gone out the window, or perhaps out through the walls, like a ghost.

I pushed past him, since she had not. I ran up the stairs, two at a time, noisy as a horse on a boardwalk.