Before anyone could reply or even attempt to stop her, she ran out of the room.

But not in tears.

She often wondered if she had any left.

Chapter Two

When Sarah Thompson was two years old, her mother and father took her to the first of many parking-lot carnivals. This particular carnival featured a “freak show” which consisted of a bearded lady, a goon calling himself The Strongest Man in the World, a woman who was only two-and-a-half feet tall, and Thalidomide Man.

Born with only fleshy, boneless stumps where legs should have been, Thalidomide Man walked around on his larger-than-average hands which he protected with thick, heavy gloves. Upon his back he kept a quiver filled not with arrows but little hand-carved figures: horses, soldiers, tiny dolls, and a small batch of gourd-shaped figures that had only stumps for legs, incredibly long arms, and almost ridiculously large hands. He joked with passersby that these last figures were “…cartoon versions of myself—or the way a lot of people see me.” Why a cartoon version of himself? “Because,” he’d said to Lucy, “I wanted to work for Disney once, but they never took to the idea of an animated character named Dickey Dildo. Life is so unfair.”

He’d given Sarah one of each figure he carried in his quiver, but the one she loved the most was gourd-shaped carving with the long arms and large hands that was supposed to be the “cartoon version” of himself.

“It’s Misserhands,” she said, proud to have named it.

“Take good care of him,” said Thalidomide Man, “and he’ll take care of you.”

From that day on, whenever Lucy and Eric had taken her to a carnival, Sarah would inevitably ask where “Mr. Hands” was, thinking that they were bound to run into Thalidomide Man again.

Regardless of never having seen Thalidomide Man again, Sarah always carried her little carved Mr. Hands with her at all times whenever she went out. “Mr. Hands is good luck,” she’d say. “He won’t ever let anything happen to me.”

That figure was the thing Lucy had found the night her daughter vanished forever. It had been covered by mud a few feet from where Sarah’s first shoe was found. The figure—like all the other items of Sarah’s found that night—had been spattered with blood.

Lucy never reported finding it to the police or FBI, nor did she tell anyone else—even Eric, her husband of almost ten years—that she had it.

And she never washed the blood from its body. Somehow, she came to believe (with more than a little help from her ever-present friend, Crown Royal Scotch) that because the figure had part of Sarah on it, maybe Mr. Hands was watching over her, wherever she was, and doing his best to keep her safe.

She thought then of her secret room back at the house, the one where she kept all the clippings taped to the walls. Newspaper and magazine stories detailing parents who had brutally killed their children, or tortured them, or raped and mutilated them, a shrine to the monsters of this world. She had begun collecting them a few months after Sarah’s disappearance, much to Eric’s dismay. At first there had only been a small file filled with the stories, but as the months went on, she became obsessed by the sheer amount of stories detailing the abuse, neglect, and murder of children. She’d even gone so far as to do some math and was sickened to discover that at least five children were murdered or found murdered every month.