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Rhonda nodded, looked away from him, focusing her eyes on the monitors that kept track of his pulse and blood pressure.

“Rhonda, I don’t…I’m sorry. Sorry for being dishonest. For leading you in the wrong direction. You know Peter’s keys? I got them from Pat myself and dropped them in the cemetery when we were there, so you’d find them. I did everything I could think of to get you off the trail.”

“So it was all an act then?” Rhonda asked, biting her lip again.I will not cry. I will not let them see me break down. There are enough victims in this story already. “What happened between us. Another trick to distract me?”

“No!” His eyes were moist and sincere. “God, no! Rhonda, what happened between us…it was…the only honest thing I’ve done since I’ve been in Pike’s Crossing.”

Rhonda nodded, unsure of what to believe. She knew she’d started to fall in love with Warren. And her being with him had helped her to let go of Peter—to move on in some intangible way.

“I think that all along, part of me wanted you to discover the truth. Part of me needed all this to be over. I tried to tell you myself. I tried last night, then again this morning. But I couldn’t.”

“So what did you do after you left my place, after your failed attempts to tell me the truth?”

“I drove around for a little, thinking it through. I stopped off at the house to change clothes. Then I went to the Mini Mart. I told Pat what really happened that afternoon, said I was going to
Crowley myself. She lost it. She went after me with a crowbar and then I guess she stuffed me in the suit and put me in the car…God, she must have been crazy with rage, to do all that. But I don’t blame her. She loved that little girl. She kept saying how all this was going to save little Ernie, that she’d be the nation’s darling. Have offers for movies and books. Have her face on the front cover ofPeople . Her and Pat together. That’s the way it was supposed to be.”

A nurse came in, lifting the oxygen mask. “You’ve got to keep this on,” she scolded.

Warren pushed it away again.

“Please tell Trudy how sorry I am. Tell her—oh fuck it.” He was crying again. “What can anyone say? Tell her that on Ernie’s last day at school, during that F contest, the word she came up with wasfable . Tell her that, would you?”

Rhonda nodded dumbly down at Warren as the nurse attached the mask again, adjusted the flow.

Was that what all this had been? Rhonda wondered. A fable in which the rabbit plays a terrible trick, but at the end they all learn a lesson? But what could possibly be the moral here?

SEPTEMBER 3, 1993

PETER SHOWED UPat Rhonda’s door, breathless.

“I need Clem,” he panted, shoving his way past Rhonda. Clem came out into the living room.

“What is it, Peter?”

“You’ve gotta come quick. It’s Mom. She’s in the bathtub. She used a razor. There’s blood all over!”

Clem ran out of the house with Peter. Rhonda started to join them, but her father stopped her. “Stay here!” he ordered.

Rhonda’s heart thudded in her ears. She went to find her mother to tell her what had happened.

“There’s nothing we can do to help right now,” Justine said.

“Let’s do our best to keep busy.”

So Rhonda sliced vegetables for stew, listening to sirens draw near.

Forty-five minutes later, Clem returned with Peter and Lizzy.
Lizzy had a suitcase. Peter carried a knapsack, a sleeping bag, and his old army pup tent, which he went to work setting up in the yard.

“You’ll freeze in there,” Justine warned, handing over a pile of thick blankets from the linen closet.

“Can’t you make him come inside?” Rhonda whined to her parents, who just shook their heads and told her to leave Peter alone for now.

Lizzy went straight to Rhonda’s room, set up her suitcase in the corner, and began doing homework at Rhonda’s desk.

“Want to talk?” Rhonda asked her. Lizzy didn’t even look up.

“Oh that’s right, you don’t talk anymore. I forgot.”

Rhonda stomped out of her room and down the hall, where she caught sight of her parents in the kitchen. Clem was just hanging up from his call to the hospital. Rhonda ducked into the shadowy bathroom to eavesdrop.

“She’s going to pull through,” Clem reported.

“Thank God,” Justine said. “Did they say how long she’ll be there?”

Rhonda heard Clem light a match, take a drag of his cigarette, then exhale. “No idea.”

“I’d think they’d keep her awhile after something like this. And when she does get out, I wonder what shape she’ll be in. Looking after the kids might be too much for her,” Justine said.

“Fucking Daniel,” Clem hissed. “I can’t believe he’s done this. Where the hell is he?”

“Like you said, he’s probably off on a bender. Hiding out from people he owes money to,” Justine said.

“These aren’t the kinds of guys you mess around with,” Rhonda heard her father say to her mother.

“I just wish we could get in touch with him,” Justine said.

“Maybe it’s time to call the police. File a missing person’s report or something. With Aggie in the hospital, someone’s gotta drag his ass out of hiding,” Clem said.

RHONDA HAD Agood view of Peter’s tent through her bedroom window and spent most of the afternoon and evening staring at the green canvas door, hoping Peter would emerge, like a caterpillar from a cocoon, beautiful and changed. When he refused to come in for dinner, Justine brought him a plate.

“Let me take it to him,” Rhonda begged.

“Not tonight, sweetie,” Justine said.

At nine o’clock that night, Rhonda was watching through her window when she saw Tock arrive, wearing her red hat and carrying her BB gun. Peter held back the front flap of his tent to invite her in. When Tock left the tent an hour later, the gun was not with her.

“She gave him her gun,” Rhonda said to Lizzy, who was lying in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep. Rhonda could tell she was faking.

“Can you believe it? She gave him her gun!”

Lizzy just moaned and rolled over.

RHONDA WOKE UPin the night to find the mattress and bottom sheet soaked. She shook Lizzy awake.

“Did you piss in the bed?” Rhonda asked, dumbfounded. But there was no other explanation for the warm, stinking urine that soaked them both.

Lizzy said nothing. She didn’t look ashamed or embarrassed. She wore a vacant look, like a sleepwalker.

“I can’t believe this,” Rhonda muttered, flipping on the light.

“Well, let’s get it cleaned up.”

Lizzy stood frozen in a corner and watched Rhonda strip the bed.

“Take off your nightgown,” she instructed. Lizzy didn’t move.

“What is wrong with you?” Rhonda yelled. “Take off the nightgown!” She threw a clean one of her own at Lizzy, who stood, frozen.

“Don’t just stand there!” Rhonda yelled. “Do something! Say something! Just open your mouth and talk!”

There was a knock on the bedroom door and Justine stuck her head in. “What’s going on?”

“Lizzy pissed the bed and won’t change!”

Justine surveyed the mattress and wet sheets on the floor, then went to Lizzy and put an arm around her.

“Come on, dear. Let’s get you into a hot bath.” She led Lizzy down the hall and into the bathroom. Rhonda heard the water running and the soft murmur of her mother’s voice.

Justine returned, carrying Lizzy’s wet nightgown, and grabbed the sheets and Rhonda’s pajamas from the floor.

“What’s the matter with Lizzy?” Rhonda asked.

“You need to be a little gentler with her, Ronnie.”

“It’s one thing to not talk, but to just stand there like a freaking statue…”

“Rhonda, Lizzy was the one who found Aggie today.”

“Oh.” The word felt small and round coming from Rhonda’s lips.

“She’s been through a lot,” Justine said. “A lot more than anyone knows, I think.”

Rhonda bit her lip. “Is she ever going to talk again?”

Justine nodded. “I’m sure she will. When she’s ready. Pestering her, making a fuss, that never helps anything. We just need to be patient.”

JUNE 25, 2006

RHONDA, IT’S PETER.”She hadn’t spoken to him since the night she sent the police to his door searching for Ernie. She didn’t know how to begin to apologize. And she still had so many questions—like who was he with at the Inn and Out Motel and why had he lied about it?

“I’ve been meaning to call,” she said. “I’m so sorry for everything, and I…”

“Ronnie,” he interrupted, “last night the police found a body.”

Rhonda closed her eyes. At last, it was over. The police had been searching the woods around Nickel Lake for Ernie’s body since Warren and Pat were taken into custody. Rhonda had studiously avoided the news stories about the botched kidnapping. She didn’t want to hear the pile of charges being heaped against Pat and Warren. The one piece of news she’d heard had haunted her. When the police searched Pat’s office, they found a little girl’s
sneaker soaked in blood, decades old. Pat had kept Birdie’s shoe with her all these years, a gruesome reminder of her loss.

Rhonda heard Peter breathing into the phone.

“Where?” she asked. “Where did they find it?”

Rhonda hated herself the minute she said the words, turning Ernie from aher into anit .

“In our woods, Ronnie. Under the old stage.”

There was a long pause. Rhonda drew in a breath. She heard a strange crackle on the phone line. She felt a pain in her head and reached up instinctively and ran her finger over the scar. Rhonda had this crazy idea then. She thought maybe they’d just dug up that old bogeyman. He’d decomposed to the point where they looked at him and thought he’d once been a person. Maybe that was the body they’d found—their childhood fears given form, weighted down by stones, as if such a weight could hold them down forever.

“That can’t be,” Rhonda found herself saying, more of a gasp than a sentence.

“I want you to get in your car right now and come straight over here, Ronnie. Get here as soon as you can. We have to talk before you see anyone else, especially the police, okay?”

“The police?”

“Yeah, they’re going to want to talk to you.”

“But I don’t understand,” Rhonda said, her voice sounding squeaky and strange; it was her eleven-year-old voice.

“I know you don’t. That’s why you need to come see me. Promise me you’re on your way.”

“I promise,” she said, the words tumbling easily out of Rhonda’s tight, dry mouth.

RHONDA HUNG UPwith Peter and met Crowley coming up the steps to her apartment as soon as she opened the front door.

“Has something happened to Warren?” she asked. The last time she’d seen Crowley was at Warren’s bedside a week ago.

“Warren? No. He’s fine. He’s out of the hospital and a guest of the department of corrections. Pat too. They kept her in the hospital awhile because she hasn’t said a word since you hit her. The docs say there’s nothing wrong physically—just won’t talk.”

Rhonda nodded.Elective mutism , she thought. Jingled the keys in her hands.

“Got a minute, Miss Farr?” he asked.

“I was just on my way out.”

“This won’t take long. Can we go inside?”

She offered him a cup of coffee from the pot she’d just turned off and they sat together at her table, stirring milk and sugar into lukewarm coffee.

“Tell me about the summer of 1993. The August Daniel Shale disappeared. You did a play then—Peter Pan, right?”

Rhonda was taken aback by the question.

“Uh, right. I was Wendy.”

Crowley sat across from Rhonda, taking notes as they spoke, referring to his black book as he questioned her. But the questions he asked made no sense.

“I’m not sure what this has to do with…”

“Just answer the questions, Miss Farr,” Crowley cut her off.

“Now, if you would please, take me back to that summer. Tell me about the play. About the last time you saw Daniel Shale.”

“Daniel? Um, the last time I remember seeing him was the evening of the play.”

“Right,” he said, thumbing through his book, “the play ended, to the best of everyone’s recollection, around seven thirty, then you had a cookout. Now can you remember anything unusual about that evening? About him?”

Rhonda strained to remember. She thought of the photographs
in Clem’s album, which showed all of them after the play. Lizzy up on Daniel’s shoulders. Daniel sword fighting with Peter.

“He was clean shaven. He’d always had this thick walrus kind of mustache but sometime that summer he shaved. There are pictures in my father’s album of him that night.”

“I’ve seen the photographs. Your parents said you have a video of the play?”

“Yeah, I borrowed it a couple weeks ago.”

“Would you mind if I took it for a few days?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Rhonda said. She got up and walked into the living room, where she found it on the shelf below the television—where she left it the morning she and Warren watched it together, cuddling on the couch. She shrugged the memory off, grabbed the tape, and headed back to Crowley. When she returned to the kitchen, Crowley was up, snooping through papers on the counter—old grocery lists and receipts.