“Do you want to do it again?”

“Sure.” They had five minutes.

This time he stuck the tiniest tip of his tongue between her lips and let it hang there, barely breathing, as if he expected her to object or push him away. Instead she had to concentrate on not widening her mouth reflexively and drawing his tongue in the rest of the way. She was well trained by now, expert in the techniques it took to speed through the nightly transaction. What would Ruth, the real Ruth, do, if she hadn’t burned up in a fire when she was four years old? What would Ruth know, how would she act? The tip of Bill’s tongue rested on her lower lip, like a fleck of food or a strand of hair she wanted to brush away. But she let it stay.

“What else do you want to do?” Bill asked, pulling back to breathe.

He didn’t know, she realized. He had no idea of all the things that could be done, even in five minutes. For one moment she considered showing him, but she knew that would be disastrous. When their five minutes finally ended with the others pounding on the closet door, screaming at them to put back on the clothes that weren’t even disheveled, Bill was still as ignorant as she wished she were. Then Kathy’s mother called downstairs that it was time to go home, and she didn’t have to call anyone’s number.

“HOW WAS THE PARTY?” Uncle asked.

“Boring,” she said, telling the truth, but a truth she knew that would make him happy. If the party were boring, maybe she wouldn’t want to go to another one. He worried about her when she was out in public, without someone in the family watching her. He didn’t quite trust her when she was out of the house. Besides, she liked to make him happy. In his own strange way, he was on her side, and no one else in the house really was, not even the dogs, who were rough and nasty, good only for muddying coats and tearing her tights.

“I thought I’d go outside,” she said.

“Cold as it is?”

“Just around the property. Not far.”

She walked to the orchard, to the cherry tree. This time of year, it was hard to say if one really saw buds or if it was just wishful thinking, a trick of the March dusk, creating gray-green shadows that looked like the promise of new life.

“I kissed a boy today,” she told the tree, the twilight, the ground. No one was impressed, but the normalcy of it made her feel that maybe she could be normal again, that she could retrace her steps and get things right. One day.

She was Ruth, from Bexley, Ohio. Her whole family burned up in a fire when she was three or four. She had jumped out the second-floor window, breaking her ankle. That’s why she was a grade behind where she should be, because of all the time in the hospital. No, she had not been left back. She just didn’t get to do any schoolwork that year. And school was different in Ohio. That’s why she didn’t know some things she should know.

Yes, she had scars, but they weren’t where you could see them, even when she wore a bathing suit.

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Odd, the things that stuck with you from school. Infante hadn’t been much of a student, but he’d liked history for a while there. In Jane Doe’s hospital room Friday morning-and he was insisting on thinking of her as Jane Doe, now more than ever-Infante was reminded of something he once heard about Louis XIV. Or maybe XVI. The point was, he remembered how certain kings made their servants watch them dress, and that was supposed to establish their power. Dress and bathe and God knows what else. As a fourteen-year-old in Massapequa, he hadn’t bought it. Who looked less powerful than a naked man, or a guy taking a dump? But watching Jane D. do her thing this morning, the history lesson came back to him.

Which isn’t to say she was disrobing for him-anything but. She was still in her hospital gown, her bony shoulders draped with a bright shawl. Yet she was ordering around Gloria and the hospital social worker, what’s-her-name, in this very queenly fashion, acting as if he weren’t in the room at all. If he didn’t know the first thing about her-and, again, he was sticking by that notion-he would have diagnosed her a rich bitch, or a daddy’s girl at the very least, someone used to getting her way. With men and women. These two were jumping, vying for the right to do things for her.

“My clothes-” she began, eyeing the outfit she had been wearing when she was admitted, and even Kevin could see why she wouldn’t want to put them on again. They were sweat-type things, a loose top and yoga pants, the Under Armor brand that was so hot locally, and they were giving off a stale smell-not the hard-core acrid odor of a workout but that slept-in, lived-in-too-long kind of smell. He wondered how many miles she had driven in them before the accident. All the way from Asheville ?Then how did you buy gas, with no billfold or cash? Could she have flung her wallet out of the car? Gloria kept trying to portray the events after the accident as pure panic, the faulty decisions made by adrenaline. But you could counter that it was all calculated, that she had fled the scene to give herself time to come up with a story.

A story that had been enlarged to include a cop-perpetrator when this woman learned that the state’s attorney thought she should be grand juried or locked up. And sure enough, the state’s attorney had blinked, agreed to let her stay out of jail as long as Gloria would vouch for her remaining in Baltimore. Infante had to admit, a person would have to be really ballsy to flee Gloria. She’d hunt the woman down for her fee alone.

“There’s a Salvation Army over on Patapsco Avenue,” said the social worker. Kay, that was it. “Really, they have some very nice things.”

“ Patapsco Avenue,” Lady X said in a musing, remembering tone, a little arch to Infante’s ears. “I think there was a discount seafood place up there, once upon a time. It’s where my family bought crabs.”

He jumped on that. “You came all the way over here to buy seafood, living in Northwest Baltimore?”

“My dad was big on bargains. Bargains and…idiosyncrasy. You know, why drive ten minutes for steamed crabs if you could go clear across the city, save a buck a dozen, and have a story to tell? Come to think of it, wasn’t there a place around here that served deep-fried green-pepper rings dipped in powdered sugar?”

Kay shook her head. “I’ve heard people speak of them, but I’ve lived in Baltimore my whole life and never seen such a thing on any menu.”

“Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” She was queenly again, lifting her chin. “I sat in plain sight for years and no one ever saw me.”

Good, she was finally in the neighborhood of where this conversation should have been going all along. “Your appearance wasn’t altered at all?”

“Nice’n Easy took my hair two shades darker. I asked to be a redhead like Anne of Green Gables, but what I wanted was seldom of interest.” She met his gaze. “I’m guessing you weren’t much of an L. M. Montgomery fan.”

“Who was he?” he asked obediently, knowing he was being set up, letting the trio of women laugh at him. He could afford such laughter-use it to his advantage, even. Let her think he was an idiot. Wouldn’t it be great if Gloria went on the clothes-shopping mission with Kay? But he was never going to get that lucky. “Seriously-”

“I started to grow,” she said, as if anticipating where he was going. “And although everyone knew that I’d have to grow if I was still alive, I think that was part of the reason no one ever recognized me. That, and being just the one.”

“Yeah, your sister. What happened to her? That would be a good place to start.”