Wanda comes out from behind her post at the bar to talk for a while. She’s dressed as Pippi Longstocking, with wire hangers suspending vivid yarn braids out over her shoulders. She’s got a big stainless-steel bowl of mini–candy bars in her arms—Three Musketeers and Crunch and Special Dark. “How’s Cameron doing?” she asks as she reaches down to lavish her usual affection on Cricket, balancing the bowl on her hip.

“Better every day. She went home last week.”

“That’s wonderful.” She’s only half listening as she rubs Cricket’s face and ears, the two of them having a moment.

Just then I spot Will and his kids round the corner onto Ukiah Street, Beth nowhere in sight. As I watch them, two preteen girls stop in front of us, saying hi to Cricket while Wanda drops an entire handful of candy into each of their orange plastic jack-o’-lantern buckets. They grin as if they’ve won the lottery, both dressed like Little Red Riding Hood.

When they’ve walked off, capes waving like flags behind them, I say to Wanda, “If it were up to me, I’d keep her in the hospital until we find Caleb. It’s safer, I think. Easier to monitor than her home.”

Her usually unruffled stance calibrates as she listens to me. “Are you okay, Anna? You wanna come in and have something to eat? The soup is good tonight.”

“Thanks. I’ll be all right, I guess. I just wish these kids would get off the streets. You know?”

She follows my eyes with her own. So much innocence on parade. So much fragile human life. “I see where you’re coming from, but I also think it’s sort of brave to be out trick-or-treating tonight. Not just for the kids, I mean, but the parents as well. As if they’re saying, You can’t take this, too.”

Cricket leans against my leg as if she agrees with Wanda’s point, but I don’t.

“He could if he wanted to, though, Wanda. He could take it all.”

—

After a while, I decide the best place for me is home, and head out from town with Cricket in the back seat, along the pitch-black juddering road. In my current mind state, the forest seems to distort beyond my headlights, single trees jumping out like hooked black shadows. I keep spinning on how many victims Caleb might have had over the years, how many targets of obsession. In the dozens of photographs in his room, at least, the girls all bear a striking resemblance to one another. Same long dark hair and gently rounded face shape. They also suggest more than a passing physical connection to Jenny, as if Caleb has been searching for variations of his own sister.