“Come on, idiot,” she said through her teeth. “What if they’re home? Come on...” The sound of a car punctuated Juno’s sentence, and suddenly Joe started moving. Hesitantly. She dug her fingers into the underside of his arm and hauled him away. He allowed himself to be pulled out of the alley and a few steps down the sidewalk. Juno stopped in front of the little wall she’d once sat on to watch the construction on the Crouches’ house and glanced around nervously.

“What are you doing following me?”

Joe had a look on his pale face Juno didn’t like. As she looked at him, she noticed the skin was burned pink around his cheeks and nose. What she’d mistaken for him being high was actually him being perfectly sober.

“You lifting something from that house, Juno...?”

“Yeah, sure, Joe. I was trying to get to the TV,” she joked. “Thought I could carry it down to the pawn shop to—”

“You were a shrink in your last fancy life, weren’t you. Yeah, I remember.”

Juno emptied her eyes and smiled dully at him. “Sure, yeah.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but Joe’s questions were making her heart run fast. He had that knowing smile on his thin, crusted lips. He took a moment to turn his head back to the Crouches’ house and study it, picking at the dead skin near his mouth.

“Yeah, I think you’ve got something going on, you old motherfucker.” He leaned all the way down so that she smelled the rot in his mouth and saw the pockmarks on his nose. “I think you’ve got something...” And then he walked off toward the park in the same loll-headed walk. She stared after him, tiny pinpricks of fear tickling at her stomach. He’s just a junkie. He’d forget they even had this conversation by tonight, she told herself. But he hadn’t asked her again where she’d been; it was like he...knew. And if she wanted to get inside the house before Winnie and Nigel came home, she was running out of time.

“Hurry up, you old motherfucker,” she whispered to herself, echoing Joe, as she made her way once more toward the alley. She glanced up at Sam’s window and saw the light on. What would Sam do if he caught her sneaking through his house?

      18

   WINNIE

Winnie hadn’t looked through the mail in three days. That wasn’t the only thing she hadn’t done: dishes were stacked around the sink, and there was a load of moldy wet clothes in the washer she’d been too lazy to transfer over to the dryer. Lazy wasn’t the right word, no, she was spent. Meanwhile, she lay awake all night waiting for the dark figure to materialize next to the window so she could shake Nigel awake and prove she wasn’t crazy. There’d been no apparitions after that day, and Winnie had spent a good portion of her nights convincing herself that what she’d seen had been a figure of her imagination. This was an old house, after all. She was standing with her foot propped on the pedal of the garbage can, dumping various store catalogs and flyers inside, when she came across the envelope.

It was the hand-scrawled address that drew her attention. There was no return, just Winnie’s name and address and a stamp.

She ripped it open, and a flurry of paper drifted out, landing across the kitchen floor. Swearing, Winnie knelt to pick up the pieces. They were cut in different-sized rectangles. She held one up to her face and saw that they were printouts of online news stories. The first one read: Baby abducted in supermarket!

The story was of Rosie Jhou, taken from her stroller in the late nineties from a chain grocery store. Winnie remembered the story. As far as she knew, Rosie Jhou had never been found. That would make her over twenty today. But why would someone send Winnie this? She reached for another clipping, this one asking, Where is Karlie Karhoff? in bold across the top. Eight-month-old Karlie Karhoff had last been seen in the nursery of her family’s home in Montana. Her distraught parents said they’d put her to bed the night before, like usual. “She had a cold and was sleepy,” her mother, Hillary Karhoff, told authorities. But to their horror, they found her crib empty the next morning, baby Karlie gone.

Winnie reached for another, this time her stomach in her throat; it was about a missing Detroit girl named Hellie Armstrong. Hellie hadn’t made it to her second birthday party; she was taken from her yard a week shy of it while wearing her yellow Princess Belle dress. Her mother said it was going to be a Disney Princess party. By the time Winnie was finished picking up the pieces of paper, she held over a dozen clippings in her hands, which were shaking so hard she dropped them all over again. She stuffed everything back into the envelope, every child who had never been found, and quickly dropped it into the trash. The lid closed and Winnie placed a hand over her racing heart.

Rosie Jhou’s little face was in her mind as she took deep, gulping breaths. But she paused, the toe of her shoe pressing hard on the pedal of the trash can so that the lid sprang back. She stared down into the peels and rubbish, at her name and address handwritten on the envelope, and a chill swept across her body. That was a woman’s handwriting, she was sure of it. She shoved the envelope farther down, pushing the rest of the trash over it. Someone knew.

* * *

She spent the rest of the week and the weekend in a kind of shocked stupor. Everything made her jump, and the sound of Samuel’s loud TV shows set her on edge, their laugh tracks making her want to scream. Why did kids have to watch things that were so obnoxiously loud? On Friday night she put her hair into a ponytail, got into her sweats, and hid in the bathroom, citing cramps. Nigel and Samuel retreated to the den to play video games, leaving her to her own devices, which included obsessively Googling the stories of the kids in those articles. None of them had been found. None. She paced the bathroom floor in her socks, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other over her mouth. It was Josalyn she was thinking of, the petite blonde with the thin, ratty hair. The girl had one of those faces; she’d looked insolent and angry even when she hadn’t meant to. She’d looked no more than fourteen, though she’d been a woman of eighteen when she came to the program at Illuminations. Winnie remembered the bitten down fingernails, and the sleepy way her eyes looked when she’d first sat in Winnie’s car on the way to a doctor’s appointment. She had two STIs and half of her teeth were rotting in her mouth; other than that, Josalyn had been healthy of body. Her mind, on the other hand, was a stewpot of issues and she was often suicidal—the evidence of that on her wrists, scars slashed the wrong way, the way a fourteen-year-old girl might attempt. Sitting at a little table in Starbucks, Josalyn told Winnie that she’d almost overdosed on sleeping pills the year before in California. Winnie distinctly remembered the flat way she’d told her about her suicide attempts—very matter-of-factly. Her therapist said she was suffering from PTSD and handed her a diagnosis for Bipolar-1. She’d just been a kid to Winnie, some kid who needed help. Winnie had come home each night thinking—no, obsessing over Josalyn’s fate. Her coworkers told her that it was normal to have those feelings when you started out. But she’d gotten under Winnie’s skin, for whatever reason. Did it matter? She wanted to help her. She’d done the opposite.