"You read newspaper now, eh?" the clerk said, whistling through his teeth as he rang her up. "Before, you just get coffee. Now you like newspaper, too."

Outside again, Vera propped her suitcase against the bodega and stood under its canopy, hurriedly reading the article in the Journal. She had not expected another article to appear so soon, and this one was worse than she could have prepared herself for.

Jensen Willard, 15, who disappeared last Friday, may have taken some inspiration from a novel she was reading for her soph.o.m.ore English cla.s.s.

When last seen, Willard was dropped off at 113 Wheaton Road, which she gave as the address for a friend of hers named Phoebe Caulfield. Police have since verified that no one bearing that name lives there and that Phoebe Caulfield is a character from The Catcher in the Rye, a novel that is required reading for tenth graders at Willard's school. This was brought to the police department's attention through multiple tips after Officer Gerard Babineau made a presentation at the Wallace School.

According to Willard's English teacher, Melanie Belisle, who is currently on maternity leave, The Catcher in the Rye is a story about a 16-year-old boy who hides from his family after being expelled from school. "Jensen Willard is not a student I got to know as well as some," Belisle told the Journal. "She was very private. But it isn't hard to imagine that she might have run away to look for some excitement."

Willard's parents disagree. "If Jensen had a problem, she always came to me," said her mother, Linda Willard Cudahy, 55. "She has had some trouble with depression and got help for it. Since then she has been fine. It's hard to believe she'd just up and run away."

On March 30, the day before she disappeared, Willard withdrew several hundred dollars from her bank account, leaving only a small sum in savings.

Recent national statistics on missing teenagers show that the vast majority of children between the ages of 12 and 17 who go missing each year are runaways. However, Babineau says that the police force is "looking at all options and possibilities." The law enforcement response to date has included interviewing neighbors and relatives, contacting registered s.e.x offenders, and questioning drivers who travel the Wheaton Road in case they might have seen something unusual. Yesterday a sheriff's team covered a 12-square-mile area extending from Willard's home to the point on the Wheaton Road where she was last seen, and farther past that into Portland.

People have called in with tips about sighting a girl matching Willard's description, but none have panned out.

Vera read the article again. She was still holding her leaking coffee cup in her free hand, and she set it down on the ground by her suitcase. She thought of the desk clerk at the Roundview Hotel; why wasn't he coming forth with what he knew about a young girl named Phoebe Willard? Recalling the clerk's enlarged pupils, the pungent and unmistakable smell of weed that had wafted up as he leaned over the counter, Vera thought that maybe he didn't have the brainpower to put two and two together after the fact. But this was not something to be counted on with any sense of security.

Digging around in her purse for her phone, she called the number of the Wallace School and got Sue MacMasters's voicemail. Her impulse had been to call in sick, but the sound of Sue's voice made her lose her resolve; she hung up without leaving a message. Still, she felt soul-sick and a little doomed, like someone whose days of grace are numbered, as she dragged her suitcase in the direction of the school.

Vera arrived in her empty cla.s.sroom almost an hour early and set about arranging her handouts for her three English cla.s.ses. While she was reviewing her day planner, a woman came into her cla.s.sroom with a clicking of high, stiletto-heeled boots. Please, Vera thought, please don't be another cop. Dressed in an exquisitely tailored jacket, her hair slicked back into a chignon, this woman looked at least as old as Vera was-possibly older. As she came closer, Vera saw her smooth, taut skin, marred only by one poorly camouflaged pimple on her forehead; she then recognized one of the young teachers she'd met in Sue MacMasters's office.

"Hi," the teacher said as though she and Vera were old friends. "How are you doing?"

"Not too bad." Vera tried her hardest to remember the woman's name and to keep this particular ignorance off her own face. Amanda? Amber? Something that bore no resemblance to either?

"I hope you don't mind if I bug you for just a minute. It's about Jensen Willard. Have you seen this?"

Vera was expecting to see that copy of the morning paper again, but instead the woman handed her a printout from the home page of the BRING JENSEN HOME website.

Are you a whiz at computers? Handy at making flyers?

"Oh, the website? Yes, I have seen it."

"Well," the woman said, "my husband, Paul, is one of the organizers. He's known the Cudahys for years. And I've signed on to help him as much as I can. I know teachers are busy-I'm definitely busy myself-but those of us with any time to spare owe it to one of our students and her family to offer some small bit of help, don't we? Even if it's just an hour out of our day."

Vera gave this quietly impa.s.sioned young woman a long, appraising look. "I'm so embarra.s.sed to say this, but I've drawn a blank on your name."

"Amy Nimitz."

"Oh. I knew that, I think."

"I'm Jensen's psychology teacher."

Vera hadn't heard that Jensen had been studying psychology. She felt a twinge of envy. How fascinating it must be to teach psychology to such a psychologically unusual specimen as Jensen Willard. "You teach in an interesting field," she said, looking at Amy Nimitz with new respect. "I took quite a few psych courses as an undergrad myself."

"My background is in sociology, but I'm credentialed to teach psych, at least at the high school level. Anyway, can I interest you in taking another look at BRING JENSEN HOME? You know, we've set up temporary headquarters at the print shop on Chamberlain Street, so we have some actual manpower. There's a downloadable volunteer application on the website-only two pages, nothing too complicated. Karen Provencher has already been approved to work with us. And Lacey Tondreau-she's Jensen's French teacher."

Vera remembered the young teacher, who had sat next to Amy in Sue's office. "I'll certainly give it some thought. What is this organization doing, exactly-are you doing organized foot searches?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that. Don't worry-you won't have to get dirty! This is more like clerical stuff-working with photocopies, emails, phone calls."

"Ah," Vera said, a little disappointed. She wouldn't have minded getting dirty. "I'm sure it sounds like a worthy venture, and I'd like to be a part of it if I could. May I ask you one other question? Sort of a . . . personal question, just between you and me?"

"Of course."

"As Jensen's psychology teacher . . . what was your impression of her? I mean, was there anything about her overall emotional well-being that struck you, either positively or negatively?"

"Well, as you know, I'm not a therapist. But there was nothing about her that struck me as all that unusual for a girl that age. Maybe a little rebellion, but that's normal enough, don't you think? I said more or less the same thing to the police when they asked that same question."

"I see," Vera said, as though that explained it all. "I do thank you for dropping in, Amy, really. I'm sure we'll be in touch."

After Amy Nimitz left, Vera thought: There is no way this is ever going to happen. No way in h.e.l.l can I apply as a spontaneous volunteer. She knew that such nonprofit agencies worked closely with the police, and any applicant would need to be screened. And while her criminal record was as clean as a whistle, she was well aware that the local police did not hold her in high regard at this moment. They might question her motives, her desire to draw herself closer to the case. Perhaps they would even think the worst. Perpetrators often return to the scene of their crimes or offer to help in search parties; Ivan Schlosser, for instance, had later admitted that helping volunteers comb the woods in search of one of his victims had given him a great thrill.

Vera, alone in her cla.s.sroom again, seated herself at the school-issued computer and typed in the URL of the BRING JENSEN HOME website, looking at the home page whose features she had already committed to memory. She looked again at the icon where one could fill out an online application to volunteer for the committee. I had better be careful, she thought. I'd be better off avoiding this like the plague.

On the other hand, wouldn't her role in looking for Jensen help vindicate her somewhat? Wouldn't it show her goodwill? Wouldn't it demonstrate that she cared? And better still, wouldn't serving on the volunteer committee give her access to information she might not otherwise have-information that might even allow her to locate Jensen all on her own? The more she flirted with this thought, the more her muted excitement grew-for she could not deny that this was an exciting prospect, filled with possibilities.

Vera kept thinking of Jensen's mother and stepfather, wondering how they were coping with it all. Her own mother had called her the night before to ask about the missing girl she'd heard about on TV. "This really scares me," she had said, after Vera had recounted for her a much-abridged version of Jensen's case. "Two girls dead, and now another one missing? You have to promise me you won't walk around in the dark."

"n.o.body thinks there's any connection between the three girls," Vera had said.

"Well, that doesn't make it any better. Dead girls are dead girls."

"Only two are dead."

"That you know of!" her mother had said. "Just be careful. Promise me."

"Me? I'll be fine, Mom. Even if there is someone who s.n.a.t.c.hes people off the streets, he prefers young girls. I'm too old now."

Vera sat in deliberation for a few minutes. There was no way her mother could know exactly how enmeshed she'd become in the disappearance of Jensen Willard. The worry might kill her, Vera thought. But providing Jensen's parents with what little information she had just might save them. They deserved to know about their daughter's hotel stay and what Vera had observed on that last Friday night.

She clicked on the icon asking for anonymous information. In all lowercase letters, which she hoped would help her masquerade as someone whose English skills were subpar, she rapidly typed: i have reason to believe jensen willard checked in and checked out of the roundview hotel on the night of march 30.

after that she probably walked in the direction of home.

police might want to focus on that area. thank you.

She paused, and then, almost reluctantly, highlighted and deleted all the text she had just written. IP addresses could be traced, she knew. She moved the cursor elsewhere on the page-back to the icon linking to the application for the BRING JENSEN HOME volunteers. She skimmed the requirements of the doc.u.ment-contact info, available hours, specialized skills, criminal history, and three personal references-and began to type.

Vera had walked to the copy center on Chamberlain Street on a Thursday afternoon. She had been greeted by an older woman who sat knitting at a front desk, an L.L.Bean tote bag of yarn tucked between her enormous, parted knees. "Paul's in the back room" was all she said when Vera handed over her ID, and the large woman pointed to a doorway past the computers and photocopying machines.

The copy center had been set up in an old split-level house, which was often the way with small local businesses. The back room, Vera found, was only one of many back rooms on the ground floor. It was dominated by a ma.s.sive, unused fireplace and a long conference table. At one end of this table sat a well-muscled woman with a short buzz cut; she hardly bothered to look up from her a.s.siduous envelope stuffing as she noted Vera's arrival. At the other end, pacing back and forth as he spoke into his cell phone, was a short, intensely energetic-looking man whom Vera guessed was Paul Nimitz. "Vera!" he said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand. "How nice to meet you."

Vera had hoped that Amy might be at the center, too, or even Karen Provencher or Lacey Tondreau; any familiar face was better than none. Not that Paul was unwelcoming by any means. After terminating his call and introducing her to the woman with the buzz cut-Robin was her name-he gestured for Vera to follow him and led her into yet another room-an employee kitchen, by the looks of it, outfitted with one small table that took up most of its floor s.p.a.ce.

Paul Nimitz sat down, and Vera followed suit, noticing that Paul was the sort who looked unnatural sitting still; his legs immediately began to jiggle under the table as he smiled at her and said, "Helen Cutler speaks very highly of you."

"Does she?" Vera had to prevent herself from quipping, That's a surprise. It had been Cutler who had called her to tell her that her volunteer application had been approved; she'd even said, in her laconic way, "Maybe this'll be a good experience for you. We've got police checking in there every day, so you and I will be seeing a little more of each other." It had almost been enough to put Vera off the idea of volunteering.

"Does the detective come by here a lot?" she asked Paul Nimitz.

"There's a few from the police department who take turns. We're lucky that we have the police working so closely with us. Once in a while, the Cudahys-Jensen's parents-even come by. But they stay home as much as they can. They're afraid they might miss a phone call from Jensen, or even miss her return. That would be the best-case scenario, of course-her just walking through the door one day."

"That would be ideal," Vera said. She cleared her throat and pressed her hands together as if in prayer, resting her fingertips under her chin. "In terms of what I can actually offer you for time-I was thinking maybe evenings from four to six? And I was thinking maybe I could help you edit the website. I'm a good editor. I'm not so tech savvy, but I'm constantly learning, so if you show me around the website, maybe I could help put updates on it, or even edit the comments feature or the tips."

"Oh, the tips go directly to the police, and thank G.o.d for that. I wouldn't want to have to make sense of all the bulls.h.i.t that comes in. So far we've had four people reporting that they've seen Jensen dead, and eleven people reporting that they saw her alive. I guess one person even claimed he'd locked Jensen in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Franco-American Social Club, but that turned out to be a joke. You've got to wonder what makes people want to take ownership of stuff like this. It's pretty sick."

"Well," Vera said, "over two hundred people confessed to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, back in the day."

"You don't say." In a lower voice-even though no one else was around to hear-Paul said, "We've had some doozies, and that's not even including the phone calls. We've heard everything from Jensen practices witchcraft, to she's working as a prost.i.tute in Romania, to she's a raging drug addict who crossed the Mexican border. None of which seems to have any basis in reality. And then there's the snail mail. I'm not even going to get started on what's come in the mail."

"Good heavens. Those are doozies."

"It's such a strange case overall. It doesn't help that some of the most unreliable information comes from Jensen herself. That journal she kept-she mentions friends who don't even exist. The police looked into them and found nothing but dead ends."

"People who don't exist? Like who?" Vera ran through a mental checklist of nonWallace School people whom Jensen had mentioned in her journals. Was the neighborhood girl, Annabel Francoeur, a fictive construct? Scotty, who was big on weaponry and explosives? Bret Folger-was it possible that even Bret Folger wasn't a real person?

"It's all neither here nor there, really." Paul Nimitz looked behind his shoulder at no one, seemingly embarra.s.sed, as though he had been caught gossiping. "Getting back to the question of how you might be of service . . . we've got the edits covered. That's my area, actually. And we've got Robin handling most of the phone stuff here at headquarters. Frankly, the flyer distribution is where we have the greatest need. Let me show you what we've got for our flyer prototype right now. Amy designed it herself, and the idea is to get these made up and good to go within a couple of days."

Trying to squash her feelings of disappointment at the idea of being relegated to flyer distribution instead of something more hands-on, Vera looked at the countertop where Paul was gesturing; a flyer with Jensen's squinting face and the words HAVE YOU SEEN ME? printed across the top in large letters-as though Jensen were somebody's missing pup, Vera thought.

Over the next couple of workdays, Vera became familiar with the ways of the BRING JENSEN HOME committee. While she waited for the flyers to be ready, she stuffed envelopes and smoothed return labels on their upper corners and dabbed liquid sealant on their flaps. Once she got into the groove of these mundane tasks, she found them less than hateful; she even began to look forward to this transition from her long, tiring, interactive days teaching to this steady, self-contained, almost Zen-like work. Still, she sometimes brought student papers along with her to correct during the slow times. No harm doing busywork, she reasoned, when there was no actual work to do.

Jeannette Blais, the woman who owned the copy shop and always sat at the front desk with her bag of yarn, was a regular fixture at headquarters-the person who always greeted her comings and goings with a characteristic grunt. Secretly, Vera considered Jeannette her favorite person among the volunteers. She seemed the type who spoke only when she had something important to say, and when she did, her voice betrayed a thick, halting French-Canadian accent.

She might not have had such affinity for Jeannette had not Paul, who was turning out to be the most delicious sort of gossip, mentioned that the woman had donated more than one thousand dollars of her own money to the BRING JENSEN HOME effort. "It's because she had a grandson who disappeared in 1985," he had whispered to Vera during her second day at headquarters. "He would've been Amy's cousin, but she wasn't born yet."

Once, when it was only she and Jeannette in the office, with Robin working in the back, Vera had sat close to the older woman, after asking if it would be all right if she worked near the sunny window in the front office.

"I don't care," the woman had said. So Vera took her stack of student papers and curled up in the window seat by Jeannette's desk, enjoying the rhythmic clack of knitting needles. The big woman's silence and steady, unflinching presence was somehow comforting to her. Occasionally, when she dropped a st.i.tch, she cursed in French and sucked on her upper denture.

"You spend a lot of time here," Vera stated when the woman had taken a break from the knitting to clean her eyegla.s.ses with a tissue.

The woman nodded, not looking up from her task. "Oh, yes," she said with a knowing roll of her eyes, which looked small and puffy without her gla.s.ses. "It's my shop."

"But you stay here even beyond business hours."

"What else am I going to do?" The woman shrugged. "I like it here. Nothing better to do. Nothing better for you to do either, eh?"

"Maybe not," Vera said. She itched to ask Jeannette Blais if the grandson who had disappeared in 1985 had ever been found alive. She had a feeling, however, that she already knew the answer, and she did not think it was right to try to chip away at the woman's stoicism.

She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of knitting needles flying again as she waited for Robin to finish her work and give her the next a.s.signment. She was glad that Jeannette Blais allowed her to sit there in companionable silence without asking her to leave. In a strange way, her volunteer efforts gave her a sense of something she didn't ordinarily have: a quiet sense of belonging.

The new flyers were ready a few days later, still warm and gleaming when Vera showed up at four o'clock; their stacks covered the length of the conference table, and more boxes of them were stuffed underneath it. Paul showed these proudly to Vera. "I was thinking you could start distributing some of these on the east end today? I have a map with all the businesses that have approved them."

"I could," Vera said, not wanting to say no. She had not considered the logistical angle of flyer distribution up until now. Then, hesitating: "I don't actually have a car. It might be hard for me to get to the east end carrying a really heavy stack."

"You don't have a car? You mean you walk over here every day?"

"Yes," Vera said firmly, seeing his pitying look. Why couldn't the locals adjust to the idea of someone who couldn't drive? "I like walking."

"We'll switch your route with Amy's, then. She'll do the east end and you can do the neighborhood right around here."

Vera, her tote bag filled with flyers, rolls of Scotch tape, and packets of thumbtacks, set off down the street. She tacked the signs onto the bulletin boards of coffee shops, hair salons, and small grocery stores around Dorset. Sometimes pa.s.sersby stopped in their tracks and ogled her, wanting to see what she was hanging up; most walked away, seeing nothing that interested them, but others felt compelled to comment.

"Oh, I've heard about that girl," one woman in a flowered, tent-like dress said. "So heartbreaking for the parents."

Another woman, her words suspiciously slurred, asked: "Is that your daughter?"

"What?" Vera said, horrified. "Oh, no. She's one of my students."

Vera stopped on one quiet residential street in a neighborhood where all the house facades had been designed to look alike: The village of the d.a.m.ned, Vera thought, expecting malevolent towheaded youngsters to start drifting onto their doorsteps. Down the street a ways was a bus terminal whose gla.s.sed-in walls seemed a good place to tape another flyer. Several discarded bottles of vanilla extract littered the ground below the terminal bench; Vera noticed these and hypothesized that some of the local teenagers had bought these in order to get drunk. Maybe not such a quiet neighborhood, after all.

A boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen-one of the imbibers? Vera wondered-was riding a skateboard up and down the outer edge of the sidewalk. He wore army pants cut off at the knees and Chuck Taylors like Vera had worn in the '80s, though his looked cleaner and newer than hers had ever been. The sight of these new, clean sneakers touched a nerve in Vera; she did not know why, but her intuition told her to be mindful of this young boy.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched him slow down, and he and his board came to a stop a few feet away from Vera, one foot resting on his skateboard and the other on the pavement. She could feel him watching her as she stood on her tiptoes, a.s.sessing the height of the gla.s.sed-in walls and trying to place the flyer at what would be eye level for most people.

The boy laughed softly. His laughter had a strange, adult quality, and Vera could not have been more startled if he had reached out to her and touched her on the cheek.

"What?" said Vera, whipping around so fast that she dropped her roll of tape to the pavement. The flyer with Jensen's picture on it fluttered to the ground. "What's so funny?"

Pointing at the fallen flyer, the boy said: "That b.i.t.c.h is evil. She scarfs down crazy-berries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

Vera c.o.c.ked her head and looked at him, giving his comment the same grave consideration she might give to one of her own students. "I'm sorry? How do you know that?"

"Oh, trust me, I know. A lot of us do." He laughed again, as though Vera were too stupid to understand, and mounted his skateboard and took off down the street in a squeaking of wheels. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt with something printed on the back; straining to read what it said, Vera first saw the word FETISH, and then the letters settled down and arranged themselves into what she could only a.s.sume was a surname: FITTS. She wondered fleetingly: Do I know that name from somewhere? She didn't think so. The boy wore a second shirt tied around his waist, a black b.u.t.ton-down, and it flapped in the wind as Vera kept her eyes on him, hoping he might turn his skateboard around; it was only when the boy was well out of sight that Vera bent down to pick up the dropped flyer. A partial footprint from Vera's own shoe now covered Jensen Willard's half-closed eye, leaving an impression like a bruise.

Though it was still April, the cruelest month-a time when freezing winds and snowfall weren't uncommon in Maine-the weather outside was warming, almost humid. The restlessness of spring had already infiltrated Vera's cla.s.sroom; her girls were now about a third of the way through The Bell Jar, and they were not responding to it as Vera had thought they might. They did not like the young protagonist, Esther Greenwood. They found her dated and laughable, with all her mentions of finger bowls and hats and gloves and dances, and they zeroed in on the inconsistencies of her voice and her mood.

"One minute she's cracking jokes, and the next minute she's thinking about killing herself," Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey said. "Who does that? I really think she just likes being unhappy. Happiness is a choice. And what does she have to be so unhappy about, anyway? She has a mother who loves her. She's going to a good college. She gets to do all these cool things in New York City."

The girls seemed to have even more derision for Esther than they had had for Holden Caulfield. They cut her no slack at all. Typical female self-loathing, Vera thought sadly. Or am I really this out of touch with what today's girls might respond to? How she wished Jensen had been there-if not to defend the book publicly, then to write her journal responses with their own inconsistencies of mood and voice that proved the other girls wrong.

"Before I let you go today, I do want to share with you a memo that I received earlier this morning," Vera said to her girls. "It seems that Katherine a.r.s.enault's parents have withdrawn her from Wallace. They plan to enroll her at Andover. This is a decision that was made rather suddenly, so far as I can tell." She waited a beat, stopped dramatically between the rows of tables, and intoned: "And then there were nine."

She meant it to be funny, but as soon as the words were out there, she knew they were not.