Helen Manning saw the sun come up that Sunday. More accurately, she saw the light seeping into her kitchen, which faced east, while she sat in her still-dark living room. Her glass was long empty, had been for hours. She had allowed herself exactly three cigarettes, and these were long gone, too. The cigarettes had been the tobacco variety because dope was something she had only when the right man was in her life, and there were fewer and fewer men these days. Strange, but she had dated even more infrequently after Alice went away, which seemed counterintuitive. After all, it should have been easier to meet men when she was unencumbered, but she found she had little taste for it. Helen preferred the admiration of men to their companionship. And that was easy to get, as long as a woman kept herself up. Helen could go weeks on the warmth of a single glance in the supermarket. She still turned heads.

Finally she heard the sounds she had waited all night to hear-a car door slamming, footsteps on the walk, the storm door opening, the key in the unlocked lock, turning one way, then the other.

“Good morning,” she said to Alice.

“You don’t need to wait up for me.”

“It’s six A.M.”

“Really, you shouldn’t worry.” Alice ’s voice, which had been husky even as a child, was a pleasant contralto, all warm concern.

“You’ve been out all night. Where did you go? Who were you with?”

“Nowhere. No one. I’m sorry, I just can’t sleep these days. So I walk.”

“It’s dangerous.” Her voice scaled up, unintentionally tentative, making the maternal assertion sound like a question.

“Not where I go.”

“Which is-”

“You know, you should go to sleep, Mom. You’re useless if you don’t get your eight hours.”

It was just what Helen said about herself, all the time. I’m useless if I don’t get my eight hours. Alice had repeated it back in her usual pleasant voice, with no judgment attached. Yet Helen felt judged all the same. With or without eight hours of sleep, she was useless to her daughter now and would be until she gave her what she wanted, until she told her what she wanted to hear.

If only she could.

Brittany Little disappeared late in the afternoon on the first day of the holiday weekend, wandering away from her mother and her mother’s boyfriend while they shopped for a sofa in Value City.

“One minute she was there,” her mother, Maveen Little, kept telling police, “and then she wasn’t.” No one seemed to believe the minute part, Maveen could tell. Who could lose a child in a minute? But she was adamant: She and her boyfriend, Devlin Hatch, could not have turned their backs for more than a minute as they studied the love seats and sleepers and couches. A minute was a long, long time. “Count it out for yourself,” she snapped at the young officer, who was acting sympathetic. But if they believed her, why wasn’t she talking to a detective yet? Why were these officers baby-sitting her and Devlin in their own apartment, instead of searching the city for her baby?

The two patrol officers had said they needed to come to the apartment to get a photo of Brittany for the evening news. Maveen knew they also wanted to poke around her home, look for evidence that wasn’t there. They seemed to suspect Devlin more than her, but that was just as infuriating.

“Look, when a child goes missing, we always find them,” said the younger of the two young officers, Ben Siegel, the one who had been left to sit with her on the old sofa. This was the piece of furniture Maveen and Devlin had hoped to replace when he got his insurance check. She wanted to explain that she knew it was beat-up and old, that it had been a castoff from her mother. Maveen never would have chosen a light solid that showed the dirt, not with a child. But Officer Siegel didn’t seem to notice. He sat between Maveen and Devlin as if he spent every night here, waiting for the ten o’clock news to come on.

“You always, always find them?” Maveen asked.

“Always. I can’t remember a single case where a child truly went missing for more than a few hours.”

She caught that truly. He was still accusing. Everyone was judging them all the time.

The news finally came. Maveen felt a weird burst of pride to see her baby’s photo up there, the second story of the evening, and Devlin smiled in a fond way that he seldom did when Brittany was here. You didn’t have to be rich or famous for your missing baby to matter. A lost child was a lost child. That’s what made the U.S. of A. a great country. And Brittany was so beautiful, people couldn’t help taking extra notice, Maveen thought. It had killed Maveen’s parents when she had taken up with Byron, but who could argue with the result? Brittany had skin the color of a coffee that was half cream, ringlets just a shade darker, and green eyes with lashes so long you’d swear she was wearing false ones. She was delicious looking. Even other children wanted to pinch her cheeks, stroke her hair.

The telephone rang before the last notes of the newscast’s theme song had bounced away. Maveen jumped on it, only to hear another officer, Donald something, tell her to put Officer Siegel on the phone. Reluctantly she turned over the phone, feeling a strange sensation, as if a moth or a bug was trapped in her throat.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded when he hung up the phone. “Something’s wrong, I can tell. What did he say? What’s going on?”

Crazily, the thought ran through her head that she should beat on his chest with her fists, the way women do in the movies, only to have men grab their wrists and kiss them. It wasn’t that she wanted to kiss this cop, who didn’t appeal to her at all. But if she started acting like it was a movie, maybe it would end like a movie, with everyone safe and happy.

“Nothing’s wrong, exactly,” he began, licking his lips. “The thing to consider is that it’s a lead, and leads are good. Assuming…if…Ms. Little, did you mention what Brittany was wearing today?”

“I told you and told you. She had on a sundress, denim with white stitching at the pockets, and white tennis.”

“And she was toilet trained?”

“Sort of. She was wearing pull-ups.” Officer Siegel looked confused. “For when she forgot.”

Brittany had been forgetting a lot lately, ever since Devlin came to live with them, but Maveen didn’t see any reason to tell the officer that.

“It’s just that”-he put his hand on her shoulder, and Maveen flinched as if someone had hit her, as if a two-by-four had fallen on her-“the custodian at the mall was doing the bathrooms and he found something in the trash. It was a denim jumper-”

Maveen broke down so completely that the officer didn’t finish his piece. He let her collapse, crying, into Devlin’s arms, standing awkwardly to the side. It was left to the homicide detectives, who arrived within the hour, to decide if they wanted to tell the still-sobbing mother about the shorn hair at the bottom of the wastebasket and the blood-soaked T-shirt that was on its way to the lab for testing.