She walked to the tree beside the dogwood, a pillar of a pine. God knew how, but Chelsea had managed to affix long streamers of ribbon from a branch nine feet off the ground. Gilly picked up a silver ribbon and smoothed it between her breasts, over her belly and thigh. She arched her back, and the other girls were transfixed-channeling a spirit was one thing, but here Gilly was shifting shape, turning into a siren as if she had done this a hundred times before. “Now,” she said softly, “we celebrate.”

Addie woke up, her cheek flush against Chloe’s pillow. It was so easy to see her daughter’s little face, her flyaway hair. She touched her hand to the worn cotton, pretending that it was Chloe’s soft skin beneath her fingers.

It isn’t.

She heard the words as clearly as if Jack had spoken them, a thought that dropped like a grenade, and was just as devastating. Even more upsetting was the intrusion of Jack into her mind when she was stubbornly trying to think about Chloe. She tried to force her memories to the surface but kept seeing more recent ones: Jack sliding his arms around her waist; Jack looking up at her as he chopped peppers in the kitchen, Jack’s slow smile. The truth was that although she found it hard to believe and had no idea how it had happened, she could no more picture her life without Jack than she could without Chloe.

Frustrated, she threw back the covers of the bed and began to pace through the house. At the bottom of the stairs, she automatically touched the small picture of Chloe that hung there, the same way she did every time she came up and down, as if it were a mezuzah. And that was the moment she realized she’d lied.

Jack might never mean more to her than Chloe. But God, he meant just as much.

Addie sank down onto the bottom step and rested her forehead on her knees. The last person she’d loved had been taken away. This time around, her second chance, she should have been holding onto him tightly, with both hands.

“I love him,” she murmured out loud, the words bright as a handful of new coins. “I love him. I love him.”

Addie stood suddenly, giddy and dazed, like a cancer patient who’d just been told that the disease had disappeared. And in a way, it was not all that different-to find out a heart she’d believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed. She took a deep breath and felt it: every space in her soul that had been left empty when she lost Chloe was now swelling with the very thought of Jack.

She had to find him. She had to apologize. Addie slipped on her clogs and shrugged into a coat. She was halfway to the door when she hesitated. With the resignation of a man walking to the execution chamber, she started back up the stairs.

In Chloe’s room, she stripped the bed. She carried the linens downstairs in a bundle, remembering what it had been like to hold her newborn just like this in her arms and walk her through her colic at night. She threw the sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine, added soap, and turned the dial.

The fresh scent of Tide rose from the bowl of the machine. “Goodbye,” Addie whispered.

Amos Duncan couldn’t sleep.

He sat up in bed and turned on the light, finally giving in to his insomnia. He was being ridiculous, he knew. As a parent, he was overprotective; more than a few times he’d heard town matrons talking about the tragedy it was that he’d not married again, for Gilly’s sake. But Amos had never found anyone who meant more to him than his daughter. Where was the tragedy in that?

It was 11 P.M.; the movie she’d gone to see would probably let out in half an hour. It made sense to have Gilly stay over at the Saxtons’ because the movie theater and, well, just about everything else was on the other side of town. Plus, Charlie probably slept with a gun next to his bed. For all Amos knew, so did his wife. And not even Jack St. Bride would be stupid enough to tangle with the detective’s family.

Gilly would be in good hands.

Which didn’t explain why, at 11:30 P.M., Amos got dressed and drove to the Saxtons’ house to take his daughter home.

Jack tried to wipe the back of his mouth with his hand, but it took him three tries before he could connect. That made him laugh-great guffaws that gave him the hiccups, so that he had to take another long swallow of whiskey to get rid of the spasms-and by the time he did, he couldn’t remember what he had been laughing about. He canted back in his seat, only to realize his stool didn’t have a back. The next thing he knew, he was staring at the pitted ceiling, flat on the floor. “Roy,” he yelled, although the man was sitting ten inches away. “Roy, I think I may be getting a little drunk.”

Marlon snorted. “Fucking Einstein,” he muttered.

Jack staggered to his feet-something truly commendable, because he couldn’t sense anything past his knees-and hauled himself up by yanking on the rungs of Roy’s stool. He peered into the empty insides of his whiskey tumbler. “Jus’ one more,” he said, pushing it toward Marlon . . . but Marlon was no longer beside the bar. Craning his neck, he found the bartender standing beside Roy, who had passed out cold.

Jack would have been horrified . . . if he’d been in a condition to feel anything at all. Roy was slumped over the bar, snoring. “Lemme help,” Jack insisted, but the moment he stood up, the entire room became a tornado around him.

Marlon shook his head as Jack wilted back onto the stool. “You should have stopped after the fifth one.”

Jack nodded, his head as heavy as a bowling ball. “Absholutely.”

Rolling his eyes, Marlon heaved Roy into a fireman’s carry. “Where’re you taking him?” Jack yelled.

“Relax, buddy. Roy’s slept off plenty of late nights in the back room here.” He disappeared into an adjoining nook not much bigger than a closet. Jack could hear him banging around, dumping Roy’s unconscious body on a cot.

“I gotta go home,” Jack said, when Marlon reappeared. “But I don’t have a home.”

“Well, Roy here just took the only accommodations. Sorry, pal.” Marlon scrutinized Jack, assessing just how bad off he was, and apparently decided he was just about as bad as they come. “Hand over your car keys.”

“Don’t have any.”

The bartender nodded, satisfied. “Good thing. How much trouble can you get into walking?”

Jack staggered up from his stool. “Trouble,” he said, “is my middle name.”

Charlie opened the door in his bathrobe. “You may be the richest fucking guy in this town, Duncan, but that doesn’t mean you own the civil servants. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow.”

He started to close the door but was stopped by Amos. “For Christ’s sake, Charlie. I just came to pick up my daughter. She isn’t back yet, I take it?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

It was the absolute calm in Charlie’s voice that frightened Amos to the core. Charlie functioned under pressure by turning down his internal emotional thermometer.

“Meg invited her to a movie. Your wife . . . she went with them.”

“My wife is upstairs, asleep,” Charlie said. “Meg told me she was staying over at your house.”

“Charlie-”

But the detective had moved away from the door to grab his radio. Amos stepped inside the foyer, and Charlie met his sober gaze. “It’s Saxton,” he said, when dispatch picked up. “We’ve got a problem.”

Wes was in his cruiser, wishing for a cup of coffee, when the APB came through. Two-possibly up to four-teenage girls missing. They could be anywhere at all. Christ, that was a recipe for all hell breaking loose, especially with a rapist in town.

He turned on his cruiser’s silent blue lights and began to prowl slowly, ten miles an hour, through the back streets of Salem Falls. Dispatch would have called in the reserve officers, but as of right now there were only three cops on patrol in the town. If Wes found the girls before anyone else, he stood a very good chance of being awarded a promotion.