“Mom?” Albie’s voice seemed to be coming from the kitchen. “Are we going to have lunch?”

“Soon,” she called back from the desk in the family room, still looking at her photo, trying, and not for the first time, to see herself as Walter had seen her. She looked nothing like his two known victims, tall blondes. She understood why he had taken her, but why had he let her live? He claimed he had been planning to let her go when he started driving toward Point of Rocks, but was that just a story he told after the fact? It didn’t matter. They had found Holly’s body at the bottom of a ravine; they had already dug up Maude, the Maryland girl he had attempted to bury in Patapsco State Park.

It occurred to Eliza, truly for the first time, to try her old name in an Internet search. Paging Dr. Freud, Vonnie would have said with a snort. But Eliza’s identity had been so entrenched as Eliza Benedict by the time the Internet became a part of daily life that she had never stopped to think about Elizabeth Lerner. It was a common enough name that multiple Elizabeths popped up, in family trees and press releases and blogs. The first reference she found to herself was taken from that book. Ugh. Murder on the Mountain was a disgusting quickie churned out by Jared Garrett, a bizarre cop groupie who had followed Walter’s story with what even a teenager could see was an inappropriate fascination. There was an excerpt on Google, and her name leaped out from the leaden prose.

A boyish girl who looked younger than she was, Elizabeth testified that Walter did not attempt sexual congress with her for several weeks, but that she was, ultimately, subjected to his advances. Curiously, he left her alive. Walter clearly considered Elizabeth different from his other victims, although he himself has refused to explain the relationship, other than to remark once, in an interview with state police: “She was good company.” Asked if she was a hostage, Bowman said: “I didn’t demand ransom, did I?” His answers did little to deflect curiosity about the true nature of the relationship between the two.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MOM?” Albie leaned against the doorjamb, hands in pockets. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his mother’s activities, merely bored enough with his own life to try to engage her.

“Nothing,” she said, erasing the cached history and closing the window. She wouldn’t want Iso’s prying fingers to wander into any of these Web sites. “Are you hungry? What do you want for lunch?”

“Those sandwiches that Grandmother makes?” he asked hopefully. Peter’s mother made elaborate sandwiches from deli roast beef and dark bread, chopping cornichons and putting them in brown mustard, then adding horseradish and a judicious sprinkling of salt and pepper.

“I might not have everything Nonnie has, but I think I could make a fair approximation,” she said, taking a quick mental inventory of the refrigerator’s contents, calculating that butter pickles would approximate the experience Albie craved, which was more about the chopping and mixing, making an exciting ritual out of something mundane. Albie loved productions, and with a child as easily pleased as Albie, it seemed a shame not to try to meet his expectations. Especially now, when everything and anything she did antagonized Iso. “Mom, you’re breathing too loud,” she had said the other day in Trader Joe’s. “Loudly,” Eliza had corrected, then felt awful for using grammar to one-up her daughter. Not that it had worked.

Albie put his hand in hers, as if the walk to the kitchen were a journey of miles. She wished it were, that he would stay this age for three, four years, then be nine for a decade or so, then spend another ten years being ten. But onetime graduate student of children’s literature that she was, she knew there was no spell, no magic, that could keep a child a child, or shield a child from the world at large. In fact, that was where the trouble almost always began, with a parent trying to outthink fate. Stay on the path. Don’t touch the spindle. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t pick the rose.

1985

HE HAD GONE TOO FAR this time. Literally, too far. He had headed out Wednesday morning, telling himself he had no plans, then driven and driven until the landscape had changed, civilization coming at him all of a sudden. He would never get back in time for dinner now. And, although there were girls everywhere, they were never alone, but traveling in groups, gaggles. He stopped at a mall and almost became dizzy at the sight of all the girls there, girls with bare midriffs and short shorts. He leaned on the railing on the second floor, watching them move in lazy circles below, flit in and out of the food court, where they would briefly interact with the boys, then plunge back into the mall proper. The boys looked baffled by these quicksilver girls. They were too immature, they couldn’t give these girls what they wanted.

But neither could he, unless he got one alone, had a chance to sweet-talk her. He would go slow this time, real slow.

He drove past a fenced swimming pool-that was a kind of water, wasn’t it?-stationed himself in the parking lot, stealing glances through the chain-link fence. The girls here seemed intertwined. Not actually touching but strung together by invisible threads, their limbs moving in lazy unison. They would flip on cue, sit up on cue, run combs through their hair at the same moment. Boys circled these girls, too, silly and deferential. They didn’t have a chance.

He caught an older woman, a leathery mom, frowning at him, decided to move on.

He had almost given up, was wondering how he would explain all the miles on the truck-he could fill the gas tank, but he couldn’t erase seventy, eighty, ninety miles from an odometer-when he saw the right girl. Tall, filled out, but walking as if her body was still new to her, as if she had borrowed it from someone else and had to give it back at day’s end, in good condition. She was on a sidewalk in a ghost town of a neighborhood, a place so empty and quiet that it felt like they were the last two people on earth. He stopped and-sudden inspiration-asked her for directions to the mall, although he knew his way back there. Her face wasn’t quite as pretty as he had hoped-Earl, the other mechanic back at his father’s place called this kind of girl a Butterface-but she had a serious expression that was very touching, as if she wanted to make sure she gave precise directions. Only she kept getting a little mixed up over the street names, trying to give him directions according to landmarks he couldn’t know-the Baileys’ house, the nursery school where her little sister went, the High’s store.

“I admit, I just can’t follow all these directions,” he said with an aw-shucks grin. “Are you going that way? Maybe you could show me.”

Oh, no, she wasn’t going that far. She just had to catch a bus to Route 40.

Maybe he could take her as far as she was going?

The sun was strong, so powerful that everything looked white, unreal. This was a pale girl, one who didn’t get to spend her afternoons at the pool. She was heading to work. He could take her to work, Walter said, and then she could draw him a map on-where did she work?

“An ice-cream parlor.”

“Friendly’s? Swensen’s? Baskin-Robbins?”

“Just a local place. It’s kind of old-fashioned.”

She could draw him a map on a napkin, then, once he dropped her off. How would that be?

He waited until she was in the cab of the truck and they had driven a little ways before pointing out that she would be early for her shift. Right? She had been walking to a bus stop, and the bus would take so much longer than a direct shot in the truck. He was hungry. Was she hungry? Would she like to stop for something?