“She guessed right. I promised her forty bucks. I’m sure she’ll hold out for more.”

The two days they spent waiting to return to the homeless camp they speculated on what the woman might bring them—clothes, papers, books; not valuables, but items they could use to identify the man she had called Mack.

Having emboldened themselves—Sharkey smoking a joint—they went back, choosing midafternoon, a time when they imagined the children would be home from school, counting on their presence to bring an air of calm to the place that was menacing in its clutter and stink.

And the children were there, as they’d hoped, seated at the picnic table over their papers and schoolbooks, doing homework, looking diligent, though they’d slipped off their flip-flops and kicked the dirt beneath them as they worked. The way they sat, with their backs turned to the world, seemed their way of shutting out the sight of the disorder. Nor did they glance up when Olive and Sharkey entered the clearing, not even when the small dog with the batlike ears and the pinched snout began to yap, shaking its head.

“Ola,” the fat man said, and scooped up the dog, smiling at the tense expression on Sharkey’s face. He said, “You got big maka‘u. Is the dog or me?” and showed his teeth.

“I’m not afraid,” Sharkey said, but he stepped away.

“Ola wen’ smell you fear.” He snorted, affecting superiority. “You panty.”

One of the children gasped, then looked away.

“We’re looking for Lindsey,” Olive said.

“No names here. We like the Foreign Legion.”

“Lindsey had a name.”

“She split. Not in the legion anymore.”

“We were supposed to meet her.”

“You got appointment, yah?” The man mocked them with his body, dropping the dog and crossing his arms while the dog darted at them, yapping.

Olive said, “Do you know where she is?”

“She high somewhere,” the man said—he hadn’t stopped smiling in his grim way, though it wasn’t really a smile, it was a scowl of defiance. “I think maybe someone give her some money. Wonder who?”

“She junk.” The words were distinct and near, but whose?

It was the other woman. Now they saw her, so still on the torn car seat under the tree that, camouflaged by her rags, she seemed like a lumpy part of it, or a heap of rotting cloth. The children at the table crouched with lowered heads, averted eyes, scratching at open notebooks, ignoring the strangers, the dog yapping and slavering.