She hammered for a moment longer, then listened, but couldn’t hear anything. She sprinted down, out of the store, and up the fire escape. But the door was wide open, the apartment empty. He must have gone straight out with Baby. She ran into the street and looked around but couldn’t see him anywhere. Running up Main, she screamed for him. Lights came on in the apartments above the stores. She could hear windows opening. A feeling of utter unreality seemed to bore down into her from the suddenly heavy and precarious sky. The bright full moon mocked her, sour in the darkness. Dozens of roads and alleys branched off Main, ending in fields and woods. These paths and fields and woods seemed to multiply around her, Baby, broken into a thousand pieces, absorbed, as air through lungs, into the body of night. From everywhere the cicadas screamed like electric babies.

“Baby,” she shouted. Her child didn’t have a name. “Lew,” she screamed. But that name meant nothing.

She sprinted through the alley between Snyder’s and Novus and up to the edge of the fields. Doors were opening and people were calling to her. She screamed at them to get the sheriff, her baby had been taken. As she went to run into the fields, she felt hands on her shoulders. Mr. Talhausen pulled up the fallen straps of her nightdress, and a moment later she felt his jacket go around her. Other people were surrounding her now, including her mother.

“Lew took Baby,” she said. “He’s got my baby.”

Annie sat in her parents’ kitchen, surrounded by women, the first light of dawn seeping into the room. What she was feeling was like a day of heat lightning: numbness with abrupt flashes of panic or fury. She had stood up a few times, her body needing to do something, but a soft wave of women would instantly overwhelm her, washing her back into her seat. The fury was at herself for letting Baby be snatched like that. She should have closed the door, gone home to make the phone call, fought harder. She had the bizarre impulse to run up to her apartment and try even now to break through the front door, so she could be sure it wasn’t possible. And all at once these feelings, as if her spine had melted, would dissolve, and she would be sure that Baby was dead. Outside, on Main, she could hear vehicles gathering, men shouting.

Ruth appeared, Raj behind her with his rifle. Getting up, she took hold of them both.

“Is it Lew?” Raj asked.

She nodded. “He came last night. He’s naked.”

“Naked?” Ruth said.

“He had a bath. I cleaned him up. He just ran out.”