Lacey climbed to her feet and moved quickly. The little girl’s head was bowed, water still raining from her drenched hair onto her knees. Lacey saw that her lips were moving, as if in prayer.

“Amy, what is it?”

“That girl’s talking to the bears!” a voice cried, and a buzz of wonder went up from the crowd. “Look at that!”

Cameras began to click. Lacey crouched beside Amy. With her fingers she pulled the dark strands of the girl’s hair away from her face. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, mixed in with all the water from the tank.

“Tell me, child.”

“They know,” Amy said, her hands still pressed to the glass.

“What do the bears know?”

The girl raised her face. Lacey was stunned; never had she seen such sadness in a child’s expression, such knowing grief. And yet, as she searched Amy’s eyes, she saw no fear. Whatever Amy had learned, she had accepted it.

“What I am,” she said.

·   ·   ·

Sister Arnette, sitting in the kitchen of the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy, had decided to do something.

It was 9:00, it was 9:30, it was 10:00; Lacey and the girl, Amy, had not returned from wherever they had gone. Eventually Sister Claire had surrendered the story: that Lacey had skipped Mass, and that the two of them had left shortly thereafter, the girl with her backpack; Claire had heard them leave and then watched from the window as they made their way through the back gate, to the park.

Lacey was up to something. Arnette should have known.

The story about the girl didn’t wash, she’d known that right away; or, if not known exactly, then certainly she had felt it, a kernel of suspicion that had grown overnight into the certainty that something was not right. Like Miss Clavel, in the Madeline books, Sister Arnette knew.

And now, just like in the story: one of the little girls was gone.