"We need the truth here, Amber. The real truth."

Her eyes filled with tears again.

"You must tell us what really did happen there. I want to know the truth, and I'll find it out one way or another, but it'd be best if you told me yourself." My words came out sounding like a threat, and despite my sympathy for Amber, I suppose that's how I meant them.

"Jadie done it."

I didn't speak.

"Jadie does awful things. Once, she killed our cat." Amber looked up at me. "But she can't help it. That's just the way she is."

When Jadie entered and saw Amber standing in her underwear, her face went gray. She wavered on her feet and for a moment I feared she might faint.

When Mr. Tinbergen asked for an explanation, Jadie gave no response. Indeed, she gave no word, no nod, no sign of any sort that she'd even heard the question.

"Jadie, the time's come for us to talk to Mr. Tinbergen about what's going on," I said.

"No," she mouthed, although the word had no sound. Tears came immediately to her eyes and spilled down over her cheeks, and she made no effort to check them. She only lowered her head.

"Come on, Jadie. We must talk about things." I rose to my feet to come toward her.

"No," she cried and it was a plea.

"There's no reason to get upset, sweetheart," Mr. Tinbergen said tenderly. "Like we said to Amber, we're not going to get mad at anyone. We just want to find out what's happened."

Head down, face crumpled into tears, Jadie didn't respond.

"Amber says you did this," Mr. Tinbergen continued. "Is that true?"

There was a tiny pause, like an abrupt intake of breath, and then Jadie raised her head. "Yes. It was me that done it," she said, then she began to cry bitterly.

"We-e-elll," Mr. Tinbergen replied in a fatherly way and reached his arm out to her, "that was a very naughty thing to do, wasn't it? And I can see you know it was wrong. You're not ever going to do anything like that again to your little sister, are you?"

Jadie continued to weep inconsolably.

"There, there, there," he said and hugged Jadie to him with one arm. With the other, he reached out to touch the mark on Amber's abdomen. "I'm sure your mommy and daddy have gotten after you quite enough for this, so nobody's going to get mad about it here. Besides, it doesn't look very serious. Just a scratch, really. And nearly healed." He looked at Amber. "This was a very, very silly thing for your sister to have done to you, wasn't it?"

She nodded.

"All right, then. You get your clothes back on and both of you may go."

After the girls had departed, Mr. Tinbergen turned to me. "I think you were right to query it. These days you never can tell. Better safe than sorry, hey?" He paused. "But I don't think this was very serious. I daresay, I did even worse things to my brother when we were kids. Got him through the shoulder with a penknife once." Mr. Tinbergen laughed. "Accidentally, of course, but then we should probably never examine the motives of siblings too carefully." And he laughed again.

Deeply troubled, I returned to my class. I didn't know what to think now. While the degree of Jadie's disturbance had always been an issue in interpreting the things she told about, it had never crossed my mind that she, herself, might actually be the perpetrator. This threw everything into an entirely different light, and I was horrified by the implications. The worst of all for me was Amber's chance remark about Jadie's killing a cat. Had that been Jenny?

My instinct was to confront Jadie regarding all this, and had we been going back to a situation where we were alone together, I probably would have. Instead, we returned to the hurly-burly of a class upset by the unexpected change in routine my time in the first-aid room had caused, and I had my hands full getting everything back under control. The desire to confront her faded very quickly, to be replaced by a weary sense of confusion, wherein nothing made much sense to me. I realized that any confrontation I might bring about would be more to assuage my own feelings of having been duped than to help Jadie.

Jadie seemed aware of the intensity of my emotions and openly avoided me for the remainder of the day, which only reinforced my feeling that I had been the fool in all this. I left her alone, however, because I knew Jadie too well to think I could make her talk when she didn't want to.

Friday followed the same pattern. Jadie approached me only when I was well surrounded by the boys and, thus, unable to have a private conversation. Otherwise, she made herself scarce.

The following Monday, I had a case meeting after school over Brucie. His parents, his pediatrician, Mr. Tinbergen, and Arkie were there, as well as a new speech therapist, who would be working with him. When the meeting was over, I cornered Arkie.

"Listen, I have to have a chat with you over Jadie Ekdahl. I really do."

"Eeee," Arkie replied, pulling her lips back in a grimace. "Bad time. Super bad. Up to here at the moment. Could it wait 'til the end of the month?"

"I don't think so. I'm pretty desperate."

"You're determined to get that dinner out again, aren't you?" And she laughed. "Tottie's? Friday night? That okay?"

Frankly, I would have much preferred the peace and quiet of my classroom, but realizing that to see her at all would require an after-hours meeting, I agreed.

After everyone had left, I remained a while longer, making notes of the conference for Brucie's file and then putting away the materials we'd used. Then I pushed the chairs back in around the table, turned off the lights, and left, too.

Down in the parking lot, I headed around the side of my car to put my books into the passenger seat. In the process, I very nearly tripped over Jadie. She was sitting on the ground in the narrow space between my car and the one parked next to it, her back against the other car's rear door.

"Good grief, you frightened the life out of me," I said. "What are you doing there anyway? You could have been badly hurt, if I hadn't seen you in time."

"I would have moved," she muttered, but she didn't move. Lightly dressed for a November evening, she remained with her legs drawn up close to her body.

We regarded one another.

"Can I talk to you?" she asked at last.

Looking back over my shoulder at the school building, I knew Mr. O'Banyon would already have locked the doors. "You want to get into the car with me?"

"I don't want no one to see me."

"Well, get in and we'll drive somewhere." So quickly she scuttled up and opened the door.

I didn't know where to take her. In previous years, I'd always been able to fall back on the anonymity of a McDonald's or such place when in retreat with an unhappy child. In Pecking, there were no fast food restaurants. I was reluctant to go into one of the local cafes, where we'd draw attention to ourselves and most likely be recognized. So, for ten minutes or so, I simply drove around, completing the circuit from Main Street up to First and back again several times. Silence wrapped around her like a garment, Jadie laid her head against the shoulder strap of the seat belt and gazed out the window.

After the umpteenth circle, I was desperate to stop. Pulling into a gas station on the southern edge of town, I hopped out and bought us two cans of pop from the soft drinks dispenser.

"Here," I said, getting back into the car. And with that, I pulled the car around into the gigantic parking lot that fronted the supermarket. I turned off the ignition.

Jadie inspected the can of pop. "I don't like orange," she said.

"You like Dr Pepper better? Here. Trade me."

"My mom doesn't let us have pop before dinner."

"Very well. I'll drink them both, then."

She didn't hand the Dr Pepper back.

Silence.

"You want to talk?"

Jadie leaned forward and peered into the little hole left by the pull tab. Night was nearly upon us and the huge sodium lamps in the parking lot bathed us in a pale, orange glow.

"We're going to have to go soon," I said. "I don't feel at all comfortable about your being here without your parents knowing."

"They won't miss me. I told them I was going over to Rachel's."

Silence again.

I finished the orange pop, being pulled back by the taste to childhood summers spent on the banks of the Yellowstone River, and the bottles of orange NeHi my grandfather used to buy me when he took me fishing.

Gently, I squeezed the aluminum can and a metallic crackling broke the silence. "I didn't tell Mr. Tinbergen anything about what you've told me, if that's what you thought."

Barely raising her head, Jadie looked sidelong at me.

"Has that been bothering you these last couple of days?" I asked. "Did you think I'd told? Did you think the whole game was up? No, I didn't. I promised I wouldn't, and I kept my word. We found that mark on Amber by accident, so Mr. Tinbergen still doesn't know what you've told me."

Jadie turned her attention back to the Dr Pepper. Agitating the can gently, she sloshed a bit out onto the top. Then she lifted the can and sucked the pop off with a noisy slurp.

"When I saw the mark, I showed it to Mr. Tinbergen, because I thought it might be a good way to get things out into the open without your being implicated. See, I thought that nobody would get mad at you, if I was the one who discovered the symbol on Amber and ... But ..."

Jadie's entire attention seemed absorbed in sloshing up the pop onto the can and then slurping it off. After listening to so much of this, it took saintly patience not to rip the can from her hands. The noise itself was annoying enough; her recalcitrant silence capped it off. Irritated, I turned the key in the ignition.

Jadie looked up abruptly.

"I'll drop you off in the school parking lot."

A disconsolate expression crossed Jadie's face. "You don't believe me, do you? You believe Amber."

"Don't believe you? You haven't said anything for me to believe. The only thing I don't believe is that you want to talk. If you did, you'd talk. But as for what we're doing at the moment ... well, missy, it's after school hours. Time for you to be at home with your family. Time for me to be doing my own things."

"I didn't do that mark on Amber's stomach. Sue Ellen done it. Amber's going to die, just like Tashee did, and Sue Ellen had to make the mark. She done it with the knife, that one I told you about, the one that's shaped like this." With a finger, Jadie drew a crescent on her jeans. "And it's got this twisty design on the handle and curves up with this special sharp point for cutting. It's what they put in Tashee. In her throat, right here."

"Then why did Amber say you did it?"

"'Cause she had to. 'Cause that's what they tell her to say."

"Then why did you say it?"

Lowering her head, she pulled her lips back into a tight grimace. "'Cause I had to," she whispered.

The silence, diseased, oozed back in around us. I sighed. Turning the ignition off again, I gazed wearily out across the empty parking lot. There were only seven other cars in the lot, all clustered down in front of the supermarket, which, without exaggeration, was probably a quarter of a mile away.

"Do you believe me?" Jadie asked, looking over.

"To be truthful, Jadie, I don't know what I believe anymore."

"You don't, do you?" she muttered gloomily. "You think I'm making it up. You think I'm crazy."

"I didn't say that. I said I don't know what I believe, and at the moment, I don't."

Crossly, Jadie thumped the side of the Dr Pepper can, making the liquid leap up and spill across her hand.

"Amber says you killed the cat."

"I didn't!" Jadie shrieked out, as if electrified.

I regarded her.

"I didn't! She's lying. Can't you see she's lying!" Jadie broke into tears. "I'm the one who tried to save Jenny. It was because of Jenny that I told you."

"But Amber's only little. Why would she lie about something like that? How would she even know to?"

This seemed too much for Jadie and she sobbed heavily, bending forward in the seat.

Turning my head, I looked out across the parking lot. We were on the farthest eastern edge, where the asphalt simply petered out and the buffalo grass took over.

"She said it, 'cause she thinks I did," Jadie said at last, her voice ragged. "'Cause Miss Ellie said I did."

I turned back to look at her.

"I was on my back on the floor and they laid Jenny on top of me. Bobby and Clayton were holding her. I didn't have no clothes on, and Jenny was on my tummy. But I was screaming and Miss Ellie told me not to, but I wouldn't stop. They were tickling my pranny with her tail, and I thought they were going to stick it inside and I didn't want them to do that. I thought Jenny was going to scratch me. So Miss Ellie made J.R. and Ray come up and hold on to Jenny's other two legs. Each of them had her legs and they started to pull." Jadie began to sob again and didn't catch her breath for a moment or two. "They just kept pulling 'til she came apart. 'Til the blood started running down on my tummy and her insides came out. And Miss Ellie said it was my fault."

I drew my lower lip in between my teeth and bit it, concentrating on the pain, willing the pain to overwhelm the rising sense of panic. The confinement of the car intensified my feelings. I was acutely aware of being unable to jump up and run away, which I dearly longed to do.

Beside me, Jadie fought for control of her tears. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers tightly against her temples.

"Jadie, you must tell," I said, when I could finally trust my voice again. "This can't go on. It needs to come out into the open."

"I can't tell."

"You can. If the things you're telling me are true, then we must stop them. I can't do it alone. I can't do it without your help, but it has got to stop. These are wrong, bad, terrible things and they should never be happening to anyone."

"I can't tell," she said again, plaintively, the tears thickening her voice.

"Then, if you can't, let me tell."

Jadie didn't answer immediately. Instead, she lowered her head and stared at the can of pop still in her lap. I sat quietly, listening to the tinny dashboard clock going pink, pink, pink around the dial.

"I can't tell," Jadie whispered at last.

I turned to look at her. "You won't die. Whoever told you that is wrong. Nothing will happen to you that is any worse than what already has. Nothing will be as bad as what Miss Ellie is doing to you."

"But the police'll come. They'll put us in jail."

"Little children don't go to jail, lovey."

"But they can make my mom and dad go to jail. They can make me and my sisters go to live in a children's home and never see our folks again."