I listened to the tick-tick-tick of the Crazy Mouse crank up the tracks. I wondered if she was making up everything else. Was all this about the missing girl and the inexplicable visions, the strange sensations, the bad dreams, a way to ask for help without having to talk about the other things that were really going on? I could tell her fear was genuine, even if she was masking it behind this search for these women. And I even believed that she saw things sometimes. But this, with the women, could it be true? I sat on a bench, rubbed my temples. My life here was supposed to be simple, even dull. And now here was this girl—a thief, a con, a prostitute, and maybe a psychic—insisting she needed my help. I didn’t know what Clara could actually see or not, but either way, I didn’t want to fail anyone the way I had failed Steffanie.

I stayed like that until I had the sense that I wasn’t alone—that I was being watched. I looked up and scanned the boardwalk, and the loose, loping gait, the narrow shoulders. Luis. He had already turned his back on me, but I was sure it had been him. What was he doing here? It wasn’t strange that he might come to the boardwalk, but why, when I lifted my face to look at him, had he turned away? Was there something off about him, something I should be worried about? A sense of dread bloomed in my gut, souring the evening’s beauty: the light on the ocean, the creamy-looking sand. Across the boardwalk, the sign on Clara’s door still said Closed. The curtains remained shut. I lingered for another twenty minutes, but nothing changed, except the steady sense of worry that crimped my shoulders and my neck.

JANE 4

YOU DON’T KNOW HOW HE’S tracked you down. You left no trace, no clues. And then one day you see your own face on a poster at the boardwalk, on telephone poles, in the windows of stores. It’s your old face, the face of a girl who still believed she could live a different life, who believed she could hide from her shadow-self forever. At the bottom, the phone number your uncle had you memorize when you first moved in. You’ve still got the rhythm of the numbers in you—you could call that number from the middle of a dream.

How did he know you were here? You’ve been so careful. You don’t like this, the inversion of things, your second, better life reaching to haul you back. You’d made up your mind about who you are and what you deserved.

Who you are: a girl who sleeps at the shelter, listening to the others cry in their sleep.