After Milk finished their set and the crowd dispersed, we called the police. Two hours had elapsed and still we hadn’t found E. The owner of the club came in. He was a small man with a sleep-creased face. He listened to what had happened and thought for a while, looking at the ground. Then he looked up. “Has anyone checked the basement?”

The door to the basement was open, and the stairs were sandy with dust. A network of large pipes covered in silver duct tape were fastened to the low ceiling, so we had to stoop in order to walk. It was hot down here. There were twelve people looking for E at this point: two cops, the members of Milk, the members of our band, Dougie, Holly, Manfred, the owner of the club, and me. The beams from our cell phones and the cops’ flashlights crossed one another constantly. Speakers and amplifiers were stored in metal cages pushed to the edges of the room. We started moving the cages, which were on rollers, to see behind them. She might be hiding, I thought. If she had wandered out of the greenroom, she would have heard the loud music, and it might have scared her. She might be hiding somewhere. That had to be it.

“E!” I kept calling. “Come out! Come on, E, it’s okay!”

The two cops had stopped moving stuff around, had their flashlights trained in the same place. They were quiet. I saw Holly’s face. Her hand was over her mouth.

I walked toward the cops. One of them held his hand out to stop me. I clutched his arm, looked past him, and saw her. Her eyes were open. Her hands were clasped over her chest, as they always were when she was asleep. One of her little socks had come off, and her slender, white foot lay splayed out. On one toe, there was a bloody cut. She was lying on top of a speaker, beneath a water pipe. She had crawled in there and died like a rat.

I answered the knock on the motel room door without asking who it was. My mother walked in and opened her arms. I let her hold me.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.