I started to say it wasn’t her money but her mortal soul that I was worried about, but Joey wouldn’t understand and I was beyond explaining it.

“When do I get paid?” There, that should be prosaic enough for Joey.

“After I get paid. I’ll call you sometime during the day. We’ll arrange something.”

“I may be in and out,” I hedged. I didn’t want Joey to think I’d sit at home waiting for his call. “But you can leave a message on my machine.” I got out of the car.

“See you, then.” He pulled away.

Still tightly clutching the magazine, I let myself in, trudging up the three flights to my apartment. It was almost dawn. Alone, on my home ground, I realized how wearing the pretense had been. I was reluctant to look at the pictures, to see the images, let alone what I might find there. Finally, I forced myself to sit down and open the tattered cover.

I quickly skimmed the magazine again, looking only at the faces of the young girls, trying to blot out all the other details. They were all girls. It was hard to be sure of their ages under the makeup and costumes they were wearing, but I guessed that the youngest was perhaps six, the oldest no more than twelve. They were all made to look like the “perfect” middle-class little girl—no glasses, color added to give them rosy cheeks, one Asian-American, the rest white.

But some of them could have been cut out of cardboard for all the emotion they allowed their faces to show. Others had eyes that were haunted, trapped animals in a cage. Who suffered the most, those who tore their emotions into little pieces like so much trash no one wanted them to have, or those who felt and showed the full brunt of how powerless they were? I closed the magazine. I didn’t want to know these girls. Even behind the makeup, the façade of fantasy, their personalities showed, anger in one, bewilderment in another.

I didn’t find Cissy. But something nagged at me, as if there was an image in there that I had seen before. I thought of leaving it until morning, but I knew sleep wouldn’t be possible while the phantom thought hovered just out of reach. I forced myself to look at the pictures again, one by one.

At last I found it, the face that had seemed familiar. I hadn’t caught it at first, because I had never expected to see her here. I had only seen the autopsy photos. In this picture, she stared at the camera, her expression caught on the cusp of fear and longing, a girl who wanted to trust and believe in the kindness of others, but who knew it wasn’t always there.

I stared for a moment at the picture, wondering if Judy Douglas had ever decided on fear or trust. Then I began to wonder if it really was an accident that caused Judy Douglas to trip and fall. Or had she been running from monsters so embedded in her mind and memory that, even when she was alone, she couldn’t escape them?

Chapter 23

What little sleep I did get was restless, my dreams disturbing. Cissy’s face replaced that of Judy Douglas as she lay on the autopsy table, then, as a young girl of ten or eleven, my own. But when I lay there, I wasn’t dead, merely immobile, unable to talk or do anything. I heard voices and saw movement in my peripheral vision. I knew someone was coming for me. I awoke from the same dream several times.

With the light of dawn, the dreams finally left me and I slept. I didn’t wake until a little before two in the afternoon. Distracted as I was when I went to bed, I had forgotten to set my alarm clock. Today was Wednesday and I was supposed to be at Cissy’s school in an hour to pick her up for her appointment with Lindsey. I jumped out of bed, debated about skipping a shower, but decided that last night’s miasmas had to be washed off. I took my hurried version, not even waiting for the water to warm up before jumping in. It was a ruthlessly efficient way of fully waking myself up.

I paused long enough for a cup of coffee. My hair was still wet, and, given the overcast drizzle, probably would remain damp for the foreseeable future.

I got to the school just as the bell was letting out classes for the day. There was just an illegal sliver of parking, but Cissy was outside waiting. She had no problem noticing my beat-up, lime green Datsun amid the sleek and polished sedans.

“Hi, how are you?” I asked as she got in.

“Okay, I guess.” She seemed a bit down.

“What did you do in school today?” I swerved around a van that was parked even more illegally than I had been.

“Nothin’ much. Mr. Elmo yelled at us.”

“What does he yell at you for?”

“Not me. He yells at other kids. I’m always a good girl,” Cissy added with emphasis.

Traffic ground to a halt. There was an accident at the intersection ahead that people were inching through. Cissy didn’t seem inclined to talk, so we drove in silence. She didn’t even seem interested in looking at the wreck as we drove by.

Cissy finally broke the silence by asking, “Do you think Dr. McNeil will let me go to the bathroom?”

“Yes, I’m sure she will,” I answered, taken by surprise at her question. “Just a few more minutes and we’ll be there.” Then I added, “Why shouldn’t she let you go to the bathroom?”

“I dunno. Some grownups don’t.”

“Who hasn’t let you go to the bathroom?”

“I dunno. Nobody.”

“Some teacher?” I probed.

“No, nobody.” Again, we drove in silence.