It was a circle with a slash through it, like the sign for something that wasn’t allowed.

She stared at it. Goodson began to look uncomfortable.

“Well. I got people to do and things to see, sweetheart. So if you’re not buying or selling, we’re done here.”

But before he closed the door, he winked at Carrie. Actually winked at her.

All right, she decided. Game on.

Carrie looked for every possible clue. She dusted the sales brochures for Goodson’s fingerprints. Her father ran them, and found no arrests. (“Nothing? At all? Jesus Christ, Dad,” she’d yelled at him. He’d given her that look between amused and annoyed, and said, “I thought it would be good news that a guy who works with kids doesn’t have a criminal record.”)

She staked out the hotel, watching from her Geo parked across the street. Unfortunately, there was nothing criminal that she could see. She recognized some dads checking in with women who were not their wives, but other than that, she got nothing.

Goodson had two helpers. Big guys. There was a wide, bald guy, thick with muscle, who favored white T-shirts and tight blue jeans, and a tall, skinny guy with a greaser haircut who preferred gray coveralls. She called them Thing One and Thing Two. They unloaded boxes of candy from a big, white van. Business was apparently booming. She took photos with her LookSharp digital camera, another gift from her parents. (It could hold more than a hundred photos on a card a little bigger than her thumbnail.)

She called police departments in the cities where Goodson had been in the past: Adenville, Bayport, Midston, Rocky Beach, Stoneybrook. The bored staff who answered promised someone would get back to her. Nobody did.

Maybe they were moving drugs. She wondered how she could get into that van. She couldn’t figure it out, and it was driving her nuts.

Then she was out of time. A day later, it was all over.

The kids in her hallway weren’t chanting anymore. They were cheering. Twenty of them had been selected — Brianna was one of them — for the Grand Prize Vacation package. Wade and the Warriors had made the cut as well. They’d sold hundreds of boxes. They were all going to drive to the airport later that day, and then fly to Los Angeles, and then drive to Disneyland. Their parents had all signed permission slips.

“Congratulations,” she told Brianna when she saw her at their lockers.

“Thanks, Carrie,” she said, the first time she’d spoken to Carrie in weeks.

“I was being sarcastic. Don’t go,” Carrie said. “He’s still a sleaze. I just can’t prove it.”

Brianna slammed her locker door shut and stalked off.

Later, in the parking lot, Carrie watched as Brianna and nineteen other kids piled into two white vans and drove away, whooping and hollering and celebrating.