She sat fretting on the toilet long enough for the seat to make a red ring around the back of her thighs, and she would have stayed there longer except her legs had started to fall asleep. She was drying her hands on the pink embroidered hand towel when she heard a knock on the front door. She froze and looked at the lock on the bathroom door. The knock came again and Charlotte unhooked the lock and cracked the door just a couple of inches.

“Vivian?” the muffled voice sounded through the front door sidelights. “Anybody home?”

It was Mrs. Gifford, their neighbor. Charlotte released her breath, left the temporary safety of the bathroom, and stumbled back through the living room, rushing to the front door, desperate to see a familiar face.

“Hi!” She flung the door open.

“Oh, Charlotte,” Mrs. Gifford said. “Hi, honey. Is your mom home?”

“Not right now,” Charlotte answered, no longer breathless, but still speaking more quickly than usual. “She’ll be at work until eleven tonight.”

“Okay, could you just give her these for me? I found them out in the alley, behind the Messners’ garage, when I got home.” She handed Charlotte the can of Spray Net she had dropped, and a small white card. “They must have fallen out of her purse. She must have been in an awful hurry if she didn’t hear that can hit the ground!”

Charlotte looked down at the small card Mrs. Gifford had handed her and saw that it was her mother’s driver’s license.

“Thanks,” she said, still staring, puzzled, at the license.

“Tell your mom to give me a call!”

“I will.”

Charlotte closed and locked the door as Mrs. Gifford made her way down the porch steps. Her mother’s driver’s license. Could it have fallen out of her book bag when she grabbed the Spray Net? What was her mother’s driver’s license doing in her book bag? She went to the kitchen and placed the license next to the empty cookie jar.

Charlotte couldn’t focus on her homework, or even on My Cousin Rachel. She had read and reread the same sentence at least ten times, so she gave up and decided to go to bed early. She and her dad had had a quiet dinner of leftover ham-noodle casserole, and then they’d played checkers for a while. She didn’t know if she should tell him what had happened. The more she thought about it, the more she thought maybe even she didn’t really know.

As she put on her pajamas, she glanced uneasily at the window. She had pulled down the roll shade as soon as she entered the room. It hadn’t even been dark at the time, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Now the room felt too warm. She normally would have raised the shade halfway and pushed the window open, just a few inches, to let in the cool outside air. But not tonight. Someone was still out there, and it wasn’t Max Zimmerman.