Elizabeth, who was missing her sophomore year of high school, thought about the boys her age. They were so small, most of them. Not just short, but small. Even Elizabeth, who was not particularly tall or filled out, felt huge among them.

“I could show that Maureen a good time,” Walter said. “She’d be begging for it.”

If the book hadn’t been open on her lap, Elizabeth might have brought her knees to her chest, hugged herself. Walter had never touched her. Well, never touched her in that way. Sometimes, he tugged the neck of her jacket, if he thought she was walking too fast, or yanked her arm to change direction. She had lain in bed, those first nights, wrists and ankles tied, expecting he would force himself on her. He had raped the other girl, the one he buried. He must have. He never said as much, but she was sure of that. She thought about that girl often, although all she knew of her was her first name. Maude. Such an old-fashioned name. The kids at school had probably teased her, called her-Maude the Odd. Unless she was really, really, really pretty and popular. Pretty girls could survive anything. But a pretty, popular girl would never have gotten into Walter’s truck. Elizabeth wouldn’t have, given the choice, and she wasn’t that pretty or popular. Still, she knew better than to get in some strange man’s truck.

Then again, what if Walter had been driving along Route 40 and a sudden rain had come up and he had stopped and offered her a ride? She had taken a ride from a man under those circumstances, just once. He had asked her where she wanted to go and she was scared to give her home address, scared to let her parents know she had hitched a ride, so she told him she was headed to the bowling alley, the Normandy Lanes, only a mile or so away. He nodded thoughtfully, started in that direction, but then announced: “The rain’s too heavy. I’m going to wait it out. Better safe than sorry.” He had pulled into a parking lot, then reached across to where she was-and opened the glove compartment, bringing out a little cut-glass bottle of amber liquid, from which he took a long swallow.

“You shouldn’t drink and drive,” Elizabeth had said.

“And you probably shouldn’t hitchhike,” he’d said. There was surprisingly little menace in his words. He took another swallow, sat there with the motor running, listening to a radio station that played oldies. When the rain slackened, he took her to the bowling alley.

So, yes, Elizabeth had gotten into a strange man’s car, once. But would she have allowed Walter to give her a ride on a bright, warm August day? She thought not. Why had Maude agreed? Had she agreed, or had Walter grabbed her by the arm, as he had seized Elizabeth, and forced her into the cab of the truck?

Walter seldom spoke of Maude, except in passing, as a warning. He liked to talk about the girls he saw, though. “I could show her a good time,” he would say when he glimpsed a girl with a good figure. “I know what I’m doing. These girls, they sell themselves cheap, don’t realize what’s out there, waiting for them. They’re too busy thinking about movie stars.”

And now he was speaking about Maureen that way in great, horrible detail, yet so matter-of-factly that one might think he was talking about a trip to the grocery store. What he would put where first-his mouth on the hollow of her throat, his tongue in her ear, then his fingers-Oh, please stop, Elizabeth thought, desperate to block out his voice, but Walter continued his play-by-play. Not even he seemed to find it sexy. He might have been reciting a set of instructions he had memorized. It was like listening to a seduction scene from a romance novel, but one read by a robot, so it was reduced to a road map, where he would go when.

“She’d be begging, begging for it,” he said. “But still, I would make her wait. A woman like Maureen, she needs to be broken down. That’s what the book is trying to explain. Women have to wait. Their anatomy dictates that. They wait, they receive. Men pursue, men give.”

Elizabeth, who had read the book almost as many times as Walter-it was, after all, the only reading material available when they were in the car or in a motel room, except for a copy of The Godfather he had allowed her to purchase at a yard sale-did not think the book, awful as it was, meant to say all that. But she knew better than to argue.

“Look at that girl,” Walter said suddenly, slowing the truck. “Look at the shine on her.”

THAT EVENING, ONCE THE CHILDREN were asleep-well, Albie was asleep, Iso was probably under the covers, sending texts on the un-satisfactory cell phone they had given her-Eliza told Peter about the second letter. She wished now that she hadn’t shredded it, that he could read it himself, if only so she wouldn’t have to relive it. He listened without comment, although he raised an eyebrow at the peculiar turns of phrase she was able to re-create. Dean of Death Row. The appeals process is formidable. I won’t bore you with it. Eliza realized she had practically memorized the letter word for word.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” Eliza said. “I feel as if this is out of my control, all of a sudden. This woman-or Walter-could go to the media anytime, tell them who I am and where I am.”

“I can’t imagine a responsible news organization that would write about you, if you weren’t interested in cooperating,” said Peter. He wasn’t arguing with her, only puzzling things out, trying to imagine every angle.

“Unfortunately, the world is full of irresponsible news organizations. What if she found Jared Garrett? Do you realize how exposed we are, how exposed everyone is?”

She showed him what happened when she plugged their address into Google maps, then clicked through to street view. There was their house. Of course, this was no revelation to Peter, whose career as a journalist had taken off, in part, because of his expertise with computer-assisted research. Still, she could tell that he found this image as arresting as she did. Looking at the photo of the white brick house-complete with the clichéd picket fence-Eliza could not help imagining the score of a scary film pulsing beneath the placid image. Barbara LaFortuny had seen this house, had driven by it, then reported back to Walter-what, exactly? Anything was too much. The woman was probably gathering a dossier on Peter, the easiest household member to track, the one who had left the largest public trail. But would she stop there? What if she showed up on the sidelines at one of Iso’s soccer games? Or followed Eliza en route to school with Albie, exciting his imagination, keying him up to ask all sorts of questions. Who is that lady? Why does she want to talk to you? Why does she have a scar on her face? What if Barbara LaFortuny tried to befriend Reba, sneaking scraps through the fence? What if she poisoned Reba, who had growled at her? Would she-

A child’s all-too-familiar scream tore through the night.

“Albie,” Eliza shouted, letting him know that she was coming.

“Albie,” Peter repeated. “I hoped this was behind us.”

I hoped a lot of things were behind us, Eliza thought as she took the stairs, two at a time.

ALBIE’S NIGHTMARES HAD STARTED shortly after they moved to London. Every pediatrician and book that Eliza consulted said it was normal for a child to have bad dreams in the wake of an enormous change, but Albie’s nightmares seemed unusual to Eliza. They were incredibly detailed, for one thing, with such intense imagery and plot twists that she almost itched to write them down. It was interesting, too, to see how his unconscious reshaped the innocent stuff of the daylight hours. A book such as, say, In the Night Kitchen, which Eliza found wildly creepy, did not affect Albie at all. But other, almost bland icons popped up. The Poky Little Puppy foamed at the mouth. (She blamed Peter for this, because he had shown the children To Kill a Mockingbird.) Madeline, the usually admirable Parisian girl, turned out to be a witch, the kind of person who pinched people and then lied about it. Peter Rabbit seldom escaped Farmer McGregor’s pitchfork. That particular dream had started after Eliza had eaten a rabbit dish in front of Albie at a London restaurant they particularly liked.