Nobody rose to the bait, though clearly they were all disgusted, he could see that. Or maybe he was kidding himself, maybe this was what it all came down to in the end: clown suits.

“They’ve got their own Ken, just like us—Ken Babbs,” Charlie said.

“And he is the major domo,” Fanchon said, “the right-hand man, just like our Ken, and isn’t that funny?”

“Synchronicity,” Ken said.

Charlie drained his cup—milk, he was drinking milk, and it left a faint white trace on his upper lip till he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “He’s a good guy, he is, and smart as a whip—you would have liked him, Fitz . . . if you weren’t hiding your head in the sand. Where were you? Don’t tell me you were down at that bar again—”

He didn’t answer. The cereal—Cheerios, little puffed loops of flour, sugar, starch and tripotassium phosphate—rattled into the bowl he’d set on the counter and now he was busy dribbling milk from the carton into it. The morning was almost gone. “Anybody seen Lori?” he asked.

Chapter 6

6.

Nobody had seen Lori because Lori wasn’t there. She wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the library or the pool and she wasn’t in the rowboat or up in the tree or anyplace else he looked. The kids hadn’t seen her—and he questioned them all (except for Nancy, whom he couldn’t seem to find), trying to be casual about it, but that was a sham because he really had no interest in any of them since Corey had left and they knew it as well as he did. He kept telling himself there was nothing to worry about—Lori had gone missing more times than he could count, and she always came back—and yet there was something about that morning, about the absence of the bus, that turned everything upside down. But no, no, no, she wouldn’t have gone with those people, no way in the world—she was part of this, this was her home, her community, and she was as integral to it as Fanchon was, as Tim, as anybody. Besides which, her backpack was still in her closet, all her clothes stuffed deep inside it and her shoes tucked under the bed, including the outsized pair of white tennis sneakers she liked to flap around in when she bothered with shoes at all. Her books were on her shelves still, her drawings on the walls. He told himself she’d probably just gone into town.