“Just that. Did you leave anything behind?”

Her eyes widened. “The purse. Of course, I dropped my purse. How I mourned that purse. I know this will sound weird to you, but it was easier, in the back of that van, to worry about the purse than to think about…” She began to cry, and her lawyer handed her a tissue, although these were the kind of tears that no mere tissue could sop up, hard as rain.

“Can you describe the purse?”

“D-d-d-d-escribe it?” It was all Willoughby could do not to reach out and grab the sergeant’s hand. This was it, the moment that he and Nancy had planned this morning.

“Yes, could you describe it? Tell me what it looked like, what was in it?”

She appeared to be thinking, which didn’t seem right to Willoughby. She knew or she didn’t.

The lawyer spoke for the first time. “C’mon, Nancy. What does it matter if she can describe a purse she had when she was eleven?”

“She described her Snoopy watch in pretty definite detail.”

“It was thirty years ago. People do forget things. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday-”

“Denim with red rickrack,” she said firmly, her voice rising over her lawyer’s. “Attached to a set of wooden handles by a set of white buttons. The purse had a muslin base, and you could attach various covers to change the look.”

“And what was in it?”

“Why…money, of course. And a little comb.”

“Not a key or a lipstick?”

“Sunny had the key, and I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, just Bonne Belle.”

“That was the complete inventory of the purse?”

“What?”

“A little comb, Bonne Belle, and money. How much?”

“Hardly any. Maybe five dollars, less what I’d spent for the movie ticket. And I’m not sure I had a Bonne Belle. I just told you that’s all I was allowed to have. I can’t remember everything. God, do you even know what’s in your purse right now?”

“Billfold,” Nancy Porter said. “Tic Tacs. Diaper wipes. I have a six-month-old. Lipstick. Receipts-”

“Okay, you can. I can’t. Hey, when they stopped me Tuesday night, I didn’t even know why my billfold wasn’t in my purse.”

“We’ll get to that.”

9:10 P.M.

“So once in the van…”

“We drove. We drove and we drove. It seemed like a very long time, but maybe my sense of time was off. He stopped at some point and got out. We tried the door-”

“You weren’t tied up, like your sister?”

“No, he was in a hurry. He just grabbed me and threw me in. I have no idea how he subdued Sunny.”

“But you said, ‘We tried the door’-”

“I untied her, of course. I didn’t let her stay tied up. He stopped, we tried the door, it was locked from the outside. And there was mesh between the rear of the van and the passenger compartment, so we couldn’t get out that way.”

“Did you scream?”

She looked at Nancy blankly.

“While he was outside the van. Did you scream, try to draw attention to yourselves?”

“No. We didn’t know where we were, if there was anyone out there to hear us. And he had threatened us, told us horrible things would happen-so no, we didn’t scream.”

Nancy glanced at the tape recorder but didn’t speak. That was good, Willoughby thought. She was using silence as a goad, waiting the woman out.

“We were in the country. There were…crickets.”

“Crickets? In March?”

“Some strange sound. Strange to us. Perhaps it was the absence of sound.” She turned to Gloria. “Do I have to talk about this part in detail? Is it really necessary?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she began the story that she claimed to be so loath to tell. “He took us into this house in the middle of nowhere. A farmhouse. He wanted to…do things. Sunny fought him, and he killed her. I don’t think he meant to. He seemed surprised when it happened. Sad, even. Is that possible? That he could have been sad? Maybe he had always meant to kill us, kill both of us, but then it happened and he realized that killing wasn’t something he was equipped for. He killed her, and then he told me that I could never leave him. That I would have to stay with him and his family, be a part of it. And if I didn’t…well, if I didn’t, then he would have no choice but to do to me what he’d done to Sunny. She’s dead, he said. I can’t bring her back. But I can give you a new life, if you let me.”

Willoughby had a vision of a highway, the way it shimmered sometimes in the late summer, how the air seemed to get wavy at sunset. There was a similar quality in this story, although he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. It began with the crickets, even though she had disavowed them. All he knew was that she was moving in and out of the truth, that parts were accurate but others had been… molded. Shaped. To whose expectations? To what purpose?

“His family? So there were other people involved in this?”

“They didn’t know everything. I’m not sure what he told his wife and son-maybe that I was a runaway who he’d saved from the streets in Baltimore, a girl who couldn’t go home for whatever reason. All I know is that he went to the library and read old newspapers until he found what he needed-a story about a fire in Ohio, several years before. An entire family had been killed. He took the name of the youngest child and applied for a Social Security number in that name. With that, he was able to enroll me at the parish school up in York.”

“Without anything but a Social Security number?”

“It was a parish school, and he told them that it was all I had, that everything had been destroyed and it would be months before he could get a birth certificate. He’d been a police officer, well respected. People generally wanted to please him.”

“So he enrolls you in school, sends you off every day, and you don’t try to tell anyone who you are or what you’ve been up to?”

“This didn’t happen right away. He waited until the next fall. For almost six months, I lived under his roof, with virtually no freedom. I was pretty broken down by the time I started going to school. I’d been told every day for six months that no one cared about me, that no one was looking for me, that I was dependent on him for everything. He was a grown-up-and a cop. I was a child. I believed him. Besides-I was being raped every night.”

“And his wife put up with this?”

“She turned a blind eye to it, as families do. Or maybe she rationalized that I was at fault, that I was a baby prostitute who seduced her husband. I don’t know. Over time you get numb to it. It was a chore, something I was expected to do. We lived between Glen Rock and Shrewsbury, which felt like a million miles away from Baltimore. Up there no one ever spoke about the Bethany girls. That was something that happened down in the city. And there were no Bethany girls anymore. Just a Bethany girl.”

“Is that where you live now? Is that where you’ve been all this time?”

She smiled. “No, Detective. I left there a long time ago. When I was eighteen, he gave me money, put me on a bus, and told me I was on my own.”

“And why didn’t you take the bus back to Baltimore, find your folks, tell everyone where you’d been?”

“Because I didn’t exist anymore. I had been Ruth Leibig, only survivor of a tragic fire in Columbus, Ohio. Normal teenager by day, consort by night. There was no Heather Bethany. There was nothing to go back to.”

“So that’s the name you’ve been using, then. Ruth Leibig?”

A broader smile. “You won’t get it that easy, Detective. Stan Dunham taught me well. I learned how to search old newspapers, too, how to find unclaimed identities and make them mine. It’s harder now, of course. People get Social Security cards earlier and earlier. But for someone my age there are still lots of little dead children’s names to use. And you’d be surprised how easy it is to get birth certificates if you have some basic information and a few…skills.”