He stirs from his gloomy stare and looks at me.

"I don't know," he says quickly, simply, like it never crossed his mind. Something in it, the briskness, the resignation, reminds me of Dusty.

He shakes his head and turns from me, his voice suddenly breaking high. "My mom, shea I hate her."

"You hate her," I say back, because I know he wants me to. Because it's the saying of it that calms, consoles, subdues, and I know it means: I love her, I love her, I love her, and he's ruined us all.

The bolting despair in him, I feel it howling through me too. I think I might touch him, but it seems impossible to touch him. It seems like he could never be touched.

But then I touch him anyway, on the hot inside of his arm. I put my fingers on him, feel the ribs under his T-shirt, feel the shudder.

I hate her, I hate her, he murmurs, over and over again, and you can't ever know anyone's private darknesses.

"Where did you send the money?" I whisper, fingertips touching, moving. And his voice lifts, high and trembly, and my hands are there, and he says it, he gives it up, he tells me.

I can see all the sorrow veining through him, but I can't know where it comes from or how to stop it. I don't know that I'd even want to stop it because I've come to feel that deep sorrow and the longing for lost things is the most beautiful thing ever.

Sixteen.

It's Evie," I say. "It's Evie. She called me."

I practice the words over and over again. I say them into the dawn hours, fully dressed under my sheets, waiting for light to come.

I have it in my hand, the answer, the key, the way to end everything. Pete Shaw gave it to me. I just have to figure out how to use it. I have to figure out if I want to protect him, or if he even wants me to.

I choose to protect him.

In those minutes, that half hour after he gifted me in this way, well, I gave him what I could and I don't regret it.

It was just my hands on him and it was nothing but a kind of healing, a try at the laying on of hands.

Hearing the catch in his throat, the tight gasp, my hands there, I'd given him something, hadn't I?

I know I could not heal ita"the wound torn across him will always gape hollow, deathless, but I tried, I tried. Or maybe I tried for other reasons.

Whatever the reason, I did it and I'm not sorry.

And now, my mother off to work, I'm standing in the driveway, Mr. Verver has his arm propping the screen door open, open for me. He's saying good morning and he has a cup of coffee in his hand, and he's wearing a maroon T-shirt with a picture of a sunset on it and it says, I know I will remember this always, "Paradise Is Yours."

I open my mouth.

The lie is immense, and I don't hesitate.

"It's Evie," I say. "It's Evie. She just called me."

In my bedroom, practicing into the pillow, in the bathroom, saying it to the mirror, it had sounded grave and real.

Now it sounds like a quavering string, a girl's sputtered nothing.

But that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter because all he hears are the words. The words are magic.

He's looking at me, and he's not saying anything at all.

I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.

Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.

I feel so powerful, like a G.o.d, thunderbolt in hand.

And my thunderbolt hit.

Seventeen.

We're sitting on the living room couch, but I'm still feeling that feeling, standing in the doorframe, my face pressed against Mr. Verver's T-shirt, the way he held me and it was so hard, his arm against me, pressing against my neck so I thought it might break. Like he'd forgotten I was just a girl and he just might crush me from holding me so tight.

I'm thinking of the smell of his T-shirt up against me, the smell of him. The way he always was, that strong, warm scent of cut gra.s.s and fresh air and limes and Christmas morning all at once. So many things, and all these things, and I'm feeling them all so much and I need to concentrate, and I have to focus, but I can't focus at all.

"It was right after my mom left for work," I say. "The phone rang and I answered and she said, *Lizzie, it's Evie. Can you help me?' And it was hard to hear her, like she was whispering, and all I could get was the Five of Diamonds Motel. And then she hung up."

Keep it short, I tell myself. It's the only way to keep it straight, to keep straight about it.

For a minute, I'm sure he is going to get in the car and go, even though, riffling through the phone book, which keeps slipping from him, sprawling to the floor, he has no idea where the motel is. He tries to find it, the pages nearly tearing in his hand, as the questions fly from him and he can't seem to stop.

"You're sure it was her?"

"What did she sound like?"

"Did she say she was alone?"

"Did she sound scared?"

It takes him a few minutes to call the police and I think it's because he really is contemplating tearing out of the driveway and going himself.

All of this worries me, not the least of which is this: I know that just because Pete Shaw wired money to the Five of Diamonds Motel two days ago doesn't mean they're still there.

But what if they are?

I'm sure they are.

Waiting, going places in my head, I picture myself tapping on a big motel window, the brown-tinted gla.s.s. I'm tapping there, and peering in, peering through curtains tugged shut with a plastic stick. Let me in, let me in. Oh, Evie, you are so close, it's like we are six and playing tag and I am chasing, heart booming, and you are so close and I reach out and I can feel the ends of your dark hair on my fingertips. I can feel them tickling my fingertips.

Oh, Evie, gone so long, near gone to nothingness, do you see? I will deliver youa The police are harder. Their questions are better and they are listening with cooler heads. They ask me over and over about what I did or did not hear, what I said, and most of all why I think she called me and not her own family.

I say I don't know.

I am cool, stone-cold perfection.

I have pa.s.sing fears of phone records. Can they track calls to our house? Will they know? On TV, they know everything. But, Lizzie, they might say, there's no record of any calls to your house this morning. But I push it to the side. I have to.

Mrs. Verver is back home, having driven from her parents' house, her hair now spreading gray at the roots, like she's turned middle-aged in just a few weeks. Her tan gone, her skin stretched tight across her bones, she walks like the school librarian, shuffling endlessly to find you your book, turning pages slowly with licked fingers.

She says over and over again, "How can we be sure? How can we be sure it's not a prank? Kids at school. Kids are so cruel. Kids are the cruelest things."

One of the officers tries to comfort her, Mr. Verver too manic to help, huddling with the officers like the football star ready for the big play.

Detective Thernstrom tells us they have found a Five of Diamonds Motel in Indian Wood, twenty-three miles away. He's sending officers. He's going too.

Mr. Verver says he's going with them and no one stops him.

"Shouldn't Lizzie go?" he says, his arm lunging out to me, pulling me close, tucking me under his shoulder. "If she called Lizzie, Lizzie should be there."

I am buried beneath his arm and there is a discussion and even raised voices and I don't hear any of it, my head hot, my stomach doing zithery things, but they will not let me go. They will not let me go.

"She has to come. She's the one Evie reached out to. She can stay in the car, but she has to come." That is what Mr. Verver is saying, in the sternest voice I've known from him.

I spot Mrs. Verver standing by the door, her purse over her shoulder, and she's not even looking at any of us, and that's when I realize I don't even know where Dusty is and I wonder if anyone else does either.

"She has to come," Mr. Verver says. "I need her to come."

The diamond is so large, and it spins and I bet at night it glows. You can see it from the highway, a big metal sign, far bigger and more beautiful than the motel, which looks like a flattened shoe box.

The police have called my mother and she made them put me on the phone before she'd give permission. She made them promise I wouldn't leave the car, that an officer would be with me at all times.

It went on and on and by the time she said yes, Mr. Verver was already ahead of us, miles ahead, with Mrs. Verver and two detectives.

Now they're inside the registration office and I'm in the car with two other officers, and one of them, with a bright-white crew cut, keeps singing about a girl who had diamonds from the mines for eyes.

We are waiting in the parking lot, the officers and me. We sit there under the FREE CABLE AND HOTTUB sign and he hums for a while and then we play I Spy, which I am too old for but it was my idea. It was my idea because I can't stand the feeling anymore.

"I have a good feeling about this," the crew-cut one is saying to the other one, like I can't even hear. "But if it doesn't pan out, we go to the phone company, see if we can get a log of incoming calls to her"a"he nods back at mea""house. Get a number for where the Verver girl did call from."

I try not to think about what might happen if they find that log. If they find no phone call at all came that morning.

Evie. Evie. Evie. Are you fifty feet from me now, behind one of those red doors, each one painted with one crooked black diamond, the seeing-eye hole in the very center, glittering in the sun? Are you there?

Because, Evie, truly, I haven't felt you alive in the longest time.

I see them walking across the parking lot toward us, Mrs. Verver slumped against Mr. Verver, and I feel myself tighten inside.

"You stay here, little miss," the crew-cut officer says, and he steps out of the car. All the men are helping Mrs. Verver, whose face looks flat, like a white sack.

I watch as they put her in the other car. They fold her into it like she has no bones to hold her up.

Mr. Verver goes around the other side and gets in too, to help her.

It is not until the officer comes back that I find out what's happened. He and the other officer talk about it the whole way home, as if they've forgotten I'm there.

The motel manager looked at the picture of Mr. Shaw and said he sure looked like Mr. Curtis.

Mr. Curtis had been staying in Room 202, had been there for nearly a week with his young daughter.

He said the daughter looked about thirteen, yes, but he thought she had blond hair, not dark brown. He looked closely at the picture they handed him and said that it could be her. He said he'd seen the missing child reports, like everyone else. He said if she'd had dark hair, he'd definitely have called the police. He was a Good Samaritan.

No, they haven't checked out, the manager said, so he couldn't explain why their cara"yes, a maroon Skylarka"was gone and why their room was empty, except half a six-pack of Dr Pepper.

They must've left in a hurry, he guessed. But he couldn't understand why, since Mr. Curtis had come by the night before to settle his bill and pay ahead, cash.

Oh, and he almost forgot. A money order came for Mr. Curtis while he was here. No, he didn't bother to check ID, he rarely did, but he did tell Mr. Curtis that he would have to wait forty-eight hours for the money. Motel policy. Mr. Curtis did seem concerned about that.

He seemed a pleasant enough fellow, the manager said. And he took good care of his daughter. He went into town to get her pizza every night.

We are halfway home when I tell the officers they need to pull over. I jump out of the car and am sick for a long time, the one with the crew cut holding me by the waist.

From the corner of my eye, I see them looking at each other.

The last ten miles, I hunker in the corner of the backseat, covering my face.

Mr. Verver spends the afternoon at the police station. My mother comes home from work hours early. She asks me to tell her everything two, three times. She stands at my bedroom door, even as I pull the itchy sheets over my head.

I don't want to talk about any of it.

I don't know what I feel.

My mother keeps saying what I should focus on is that this is all good news. It seems to mean Evie is alive and now the police have a hot trail. That's what she calls it: a hot trail.

I don't say anything. I open and close my lips under the sheets, letting the worn cotton sink into my mouth.

I can't wait for her to leave.

She says she's going to see Mrs. Verver.

"Annie's all by herself," my mother says. "Like always."