Wendy kept hoping she would hear from him, that he would send her a postcard or a letter or something just to let her know he was all right and that he was thinking about her. They had been best friends since the third grade. But more than a year had passed with no word. In her darker moments Wendy wondered if the Evil Bitch might have killed him, just like Tommy’s father had killed all those women.

The world was such a dark place. So many bad things happened. It made her feel stupid to have a sunny yellow bedroom.

After everything that had happened with the murders, and Tommy’s dad attacking Miss Navarre, and Tommy disappearing, Miss Navarre had tried to get their fifth-grade class interested in something good, something positive.

They had begun to follow the space shuttle program and learn about the astronauts and the scientific experiments they would perform on the next mission. It had been especially fun because one of the astronauts—Christa McAuliffe—was a schoolteacher. They had all been so excited to watch the launch on the twenty-eighth of January. But seventy-three seconds into the flight the space shuttle Challenger had exploded, killing everyone on board right before their very eyes.

Weeks later the navy had found the crew compartment in the ocean with the bodies of all seven astronauts still inside. Wendy had had nightmares for weeks about looking inside the capsule and seeing the rotting corpses.

And not long after that a nuclear power plant had a meltdown in the Soviet Union, and killed and poisoned thousands of people and animals and the environment, and now there would be freaks and mutants there like something out of a horror movie—only it was real.

It just seemed like everything in the world was bad and wrong.

Now her mother’s friend Marissa was dead. Wendy had known Marissa too, and Marissa’s daughter, Haley, was so cute and sweet. Wendy had begged and begged to babysit for Haley, but her mom thought she was too young and wouldn’t let her babysit until she was at least thirteen. Two whole years away.

And her parents wouldn’t say exactly what had happened to Marissa, but Wendy knew she had been murdered, because she had heard part of the story on the news.

She didn’t know why people did these things. Why had Tommy’s father killed those women? Why would anyone kill Marissa? No adult had given her a real answer. They didn’t know. Did people just wake up one day and decide they wanted to kill? Did they just get so angry they couldn’t stop themselves?