Then again, Alice wasn’t a first-timer. And she had been cagey at eleven, Nancy recalled, almost preternaturally consistent, according to the detectives who caught the case. They had taken the baby because they thought she wasn’t safe. They were scared to return her after her parents made such a big deal of her disappearance. And then the baby got sick. But Alice didn’t know why Ronnie killed her. She wasn’t even there at the time.

“Why don’t you tell me,” Nancy began, her voice as bland as possible, “where you were Friday afternoon and evening.”

“I was walking.”

“Walking?”

“I’ve been walking a lot. It’s a good way to lose weight.”

Nancy willed herself not to let her eyes drift down to the indistinct bulk beneath Alice ’s bright pink T-shirt. The girl had to weigh almost two hundred pounds. God help her if she had weighed more when she came home.

“Walking? For how long?”

“Well, I don’t walk every minute I’m out.” Alice must have seen where the question was going. “I walk for a while, then take a break inside someplace air-conditioned, someplace they’ll let you sit or browse.”

“Like a fast-food restaurant.”

“Yeah, although there you have to buy something. At least a drink. Which is a waste of money, they put so much ice in.”

“Or a mall?” Keeping it generic was deliberate. No need to mention Westview yet.

“Sure.”

“So where did you walk on Friday, where did you stop?”

“I started out Route 40 and I filled out an application at an Arby’s-I’m looking for a job. I don’t want to work in fast food, but my mom says I can’t afford to be picky.”

“It’s not so bad. I did it for a little while.”

“Yeah?” She seemed genuinely interested.

“I was a counter girl at Long John Silver’s the summer I was sixteen, until I got a waitressing job at a Chili’s. I was saving up for a car.”

Why had she told the girl this stray bit of personal information? It was one thing Nancy never did. But there was something about Alice that made Nancy want to curry favor-something closed off, an unspoken accusation in her face, like a stoic child who had taken an unearned punishment without flinching or complaining.

“I like Chili’s,” Alice offered, “but my mom doesn’t. Were you popular?”

“At the restaurant?”

“In high school.”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.” She was glad Lenhardt wasn’t watching this. It was bad enough that Infante was tracking the conversation through the one-way glass. She was losing control, letting Alice direct the flow of conversation. Maybe it would loosen the girl up, lead to something she could use.

“So you must have been. Only a popular person wouldn’t think about it.”

“It was just high school.”

“I didn’t get to go to high school. Not a real one. Although I got my diploma at Middlebrook.”

Suddenly Nancy knew what Alice wanted from her: pity. The girl actually expected sympathy, for missing high school and all the other normal rituals of adolescence.

“Well, Olivia Barnes didn’t get to go to high school either.”

Alice, chastised, bent her head so Nancy could not see her eyes when she whispered: “I know.”

“There’s another little girl missing, Alice.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it on the news. My mom told me.”

“Which is it? You saw it on the news or your mom told you?”

“My mom told me and then I saw it on the news for myself, this morning.”

“She disappeared from Westview Mall. Is that one of the places you go, when you’re walking? It’s on Route 40.”

Her head was still down, her voice faint. “Yes.”

“Do you know anything? Anything at all about this missing little girl?”

“I know,” Alice said, “something I’m not supposed to know. But I know it because, because…I broke a rule.”

“A rule?”

“Well, more like an admonition.” Alice raised her head, as if surprised she knew this word and could use it.

“An admonition?”

“I think that’s right. I mean, it’s not a law, or a rule, it’s just something I was told I shouldn’t do. My mom and my lawyer, they said there were certain things I shouldn’t do. And I sorta did them.”

“What did you do, Alice?”

“I didn’t walk by the Barnes house,” she said. Interesting. Asked what she had done, the girl began by citing what she had not done. If she hadn’t walked by the Barnes house, would she even know there was a new little Barnes?

“There’s no reason for you to. Is there?”

“It’s in my neighborhood and it’s a pretty street. I used to walk up and down it all the time. But I don’t go there now.”

“Have you seen the Barnes family at all?”

“No.”

Her denial felt like the most honest thing she had said so far. Which meant that she would have no reason to grab a girl who looked like Rosalind Barnes. Nancy allowed herself a moment of despair. What if this were all a coincidence? What if Cynthia Barnes’s paranoia had set them off in the wrong direction? She tried to reassure herself that she and Infante had kept all their options open. A young detective from Family Crimes was trying to stay on top of the Social Services end of it, checking out the family more thoroughly. And this, sadly enough, was the only lead Nancy and Infante had developed in twenty-four hours. If Nancy hadn’t been interviewing Alice, she’d just be taking phone calls from helpful, helpless cranks, interviewing dimwitted mall employees, watching security tapes that showed nothing.

“So that’s what you didn’t do. What did you do? What”-she chose, quite deliberately, to echo Alice ’s word back to her-“admonition did you ignore?”

She whispered: “I saw Ronnie.”

“Ronnie Fuller?”

Alice nodded, her face stricken, as if she had confessed to something horrible.

“You saw Ronnie…” She left a space for Alice to finish the thought, but the girl didn’t jump in. “You saw Ronnie do what?”

Alice looked deflated, as if she had expected a more horrified reaction. “I just…saw her. I walked over to where she works and I watched her. She didn’t see me. But I’m not supposed to see her. Sharon said.”

Sharon who? Nancy let it pass. “So you saw her. When was this?”

A flash of impatience: “Yesterday. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Yesterday.”

“You were at the Bagel Barn yesterday?”

“I didn’t go in. I didn’t even get close. I just sat on the curb for a while. I could see Ronnie, but she didn’t see me.”

Alice seemed to have no sense of what she was doing. Yes, she was placing Ronnie at Westview Mall, a few hours before Brittany Little disappeared. But she was placing herself there, too.

“Did you see her do anything…unusual?”

“No. But I saw Ronnie. I thought you’d want to know she worked there. Did you?”

“Actually,” Nancy said, “we did.”

“Oh.” Alice looked confused. “I thought that’s why you came to see me. Because you knew I had seen Ronnie. I thought that’s why I was in trouble. I couldn’t imagine what else I might have done.”

“You can’t?”

The girl shook her head.

“ Alice -did you go into the mall yesterday?”

“No. I left because I didn’t want Ronnie to see me.”

“Why did you want to see Ronnie?”

“I didn’t want to see her. I just did.”

“By accident?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of.’ It was an accident, or it wasn’t.”

“I knew from my mom that Ronnie had a job at the bagel place. But I didn’t know her hours, or what days she worked. So it’s not like I could have planned it.”

“But you went there hoping you might see her?”

Her eyes slid away from Nancy ’s. “Yes,” she said in a voice so soft that Nancy needed Alice ’s nodding head to confirm what she thought she had heard.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then, almost to herself, as if castigating herself. “I thought you didn’t know about the bagel shop, that I could help you. I want to help. I’m trying to help.”