On Sunday morning, Des and I sat in beach chairs in front of the shop, waving paper fans at our faces. A feral cat crept up from under the boardwalk and splayed itself in the shade of our awning. I poured it a small dish of milk, but it wouldn’t drink and the milk curdled in the heat. A middle-aged couple in matching khaki shorts approached from the candy store. A plastic sack of salt water taffy dangled from the woman’s hands. She paused in front of the doorway and stared into the shop.

“Come in,” Des called to them, in the voice she used for clients—honeyed and sweet—though she couldn’t always keep it up. The gruff, cigarette-roughened Des eventually slipped through. “Come find out about your future. We do tarot readings, palm readings, anything you like.”

The woman leaned into the man’s shoulder, whispered something in his ear. He shook his head, took her hand, and they walked on. I watched the sweat stain on the back of his gray T-shirt move down the boardwalk until they disappeared.

“Fuckers,” Des said. “I’ll tell you what’s in his future: heart disease. You see the gut on him?” I tried to hide my smile. Des was probably the last person who should be calling anyone out for a lack of self-control. After all, the pills kept her thin.

“Hey Des, have you heard anything about that missing girl?”

“What girl? There’s always missing girls.”

“The one whose poster is all over town. She was here, apparently.”

Des shrugged. “Someone is wasting a lot of paper, if you ask me.”

“Her uncle came in. For a reading. Wanted to know if I could help.”

“Shit. What’d you tell him?”

“Nothing much. That I could feel her presence in the air.” That had been true. That feeling, that pressure on my throat, the tears that had built behind my eyes—I had convinced myself that they meant something, that I should care about what happened to her. Maybe that’s why I stole the bandana—I wanted to keep a piece of her close. “You don’t know anything, do you?” I asked. Sometimes, Des had said, girls showed up at the club looking for jobs as dancers. Runaways, girls fresh off the bus from farm towns in Pennsylvania, the smell of hay and manure lingering in their hair. Girls who hadn’t heard that any glitz had rubbed off Atlantic City years ago.

“Zilch. Though she better not trot out that young ass, looking for a job. I’m probably about to be canned any day now. All Larry needs is some fresh little thing with decent tits waltzing in there, and I’m out with the garbage.”

“You say that every week.”

“Gets more and more true all the time. You should probably be more worried.”