There was a silence, then the cop was folding his notepad back into the inner pocket of his jacket and the three kids, still with their heads down and shoulders slumped, filed into the house. She took hold of the door, thinking to ease it shut yet feeling that something more should be said—Thank you? Good night? Go home and die a quick death?—but before she could speak the cop leveled a look on her and said, “I hope you understand this is a onetime-only thing. There won’t be a repeat, correct?”

“I understand,” she said, and then, as she was easing the door shut on a snowy dark sliver of the night, on the porch light and the cop’s slick black patrol boots and his black uniform and puffed-up jacket, she paused to add, “Thank you. We’re all very”—what were they?—“grateful.”

Later, after the guests had taken their white robes and flakes of group mind up the candlelit stairs to bed, she pulled on her boots and coat and went out to the Bowling Alley to confront Corey. She was seething. Angrier at the girls than him, but furious with him all the same. What was he thinking? He couldn’t have said no? Couldn’t have stood up for himself? She imagined the girls talking him into it—Nancy, Nancy talking him into it—so he could serve as a distraction, holding the store owner’s attention while they stole things and nobody the wiser. That wasn’t how she’d raised him. Neither she nor Fitz had ever been in trouble with the law in their lives, not even for a speeding ticket, and to have her son mixed up in this—brought home by a cop, no less—was just beyond the pale. And the project, the sacrament, the unity of the inner circle—didn’t he realize how everything they were striving for was threatened by something like this? A cop on their doorstep? With all the notoriety the press had stirred up and what the other kids were saying in school and the way rumors must have flown around a stick-in-the-mud little hick town like this? And that was what it was too, a hick town, just as Corey had said right from the start. It was infuriating, so infuriating she barely noticed the snow she was kicking through or the wind beating at the flaps of her parka.