"I hope we don't lose any more people," Jamie said.

"I hope that, too. Are we going to hold strong at nine, girls? Is anyone else thinking of transferring elsewhere? I certainly hope no one else is of a mind to disappear."

"My parents are talking about moving," Autumn said, sounding bored. "They think it isn't safe in Dorset anymore."

"Anyplace can be unsafe, Autumn, but far be it for me to question your parents' wisdom. I would hate to see any one of you go-just know that much."

The girls' flat expressions told Vera that this feeling of attachment was not mutual. She told herself that this was all right-they didn't have to like her in order to respect her. Whether or not they respected her was another story, but that, Vera thought, was something best left unexamined for now.

It was only two weeks before Vera's Wallace School girls were to have their weeklong spring break. Vera had begun to think that the hiatus from cla.s.ses might do them all some good.

With the days ticking by, bringing her closer and closer to her school vacation, Vera had distributed all the BRING JENSEN HOME flyers she could possibly carry and had even carpooled with Lacey Tondreau and Karen Provencher to circulate the flyers as far south in Maine as York and Kittery, near the New Hampshire border. Now that the supply of flyers was temporarily exhausted, she had been a.s.signed the duty of making phone calls to local businesses to thank them for their donations and slyly gouge them for more. Vera, who hated that sort of thing-both the a.s.sertiveness required for it and the possibility of rejection-took as much time as possible to go through the names on her list, sometimes going for a head-clearing walk around the block before proceeding to the next phone call. The other volunteers noticed her behavior and saw it as a source of humor: "There she goes, revving up for the cause again!" Paul said, and Vera did not have the heart to tell him it wasn't a question of revving up but of avoidance.

One afternoon at headquarters she sensed the excitement among her fellow volunteers that was always palpable right before law enforcement stopped in. She had seen Detective Helen Cutler at the copy center only once, but at that time, the detective had made a special point to stop by Vera's semiprivate workstation near the kitchen.

"Good to see you getting even more involved," Cutler had said.

Stifling the urge to say something wry, Vera had said, "Thank you for approving it. I do want to help my student and her family if I can."

On this day Cutler came in and spoke quietly to Paul for a while, then to Robin, who handed her a series of notes that the detective looked through with care. What was on those notes? Why was Robin given all the interesting things to do? When Cutler had finished checking in with the other volunteers, she came by Vera's station and informed her that the Cudahys were planning to stop in soon and would probably want to meet with her. This news. .h.i.t Vera from out of left field.

"Jensen's parents want to meet me?"

"Well, yes. You were Jensen's favorite teacher. I plan to sit in for the conversation, if you don't mind."

This seemed like a setup. Vera didn't like it one bit. However, she didn't feel as if she was in any position to say that she did mind Cutler sitting in, and she had to admit that she was keen to meet Jensen's parents-to meet the people she felt she already knew through Jensen's journals. She went into the bathroom and tried to spruce herself up so that she would look more refreshed. Dabbing water over the crown of her head, where cowlicks were always appearing, and wiping away some of the makeup that always seemed to smudge around her eyes, she decided she looked presentable enough.

When the Cudahys came in a half hour later, Vera was taken aback. She had seen in the paper that Jensen's mother was fifty-five years old-that made her forty when she had had Jensen, not what most people would think of as a young mother-but she looked a good ten to fifteen years older than her actual age. A stooped, gaunt man was at her side, holding a ba.s.set hound at the end of a leash. Both the man and the ba.s.set hound seemed to be sniffing the air in the same discontented way, with the same glum expression. Had the ba.s.set hound been given clearance to come in? She guessed so.

"Are you the teacher?" Jensen's mother said. "The English sub?"

Vera felt a hitch in her stomach as the woman's watery eyes sought out hers. Detective Cutler remained pa.s.sive in the background, but Vera was deeply aware of her, and she thought: If you're going to watch me, d.a.m.n you, I'm going to kill the whole lot of you with kindness.

She stood up and extended her hand. "Vera Lundy. And you must be the Cudahys." Both Jensen's parents' hands felt slight and tremulous as they gripped hers in turn. Seeing Jensen's parents, the frailty of them, made her think of her own parents-her lonely mother, her late father-and a feeling of protectiveness swelled inside her.

"Would you like some coffee? I hope you don't mind instant," Vera went on, her naturally low voice rising by half an octave-higher and sweeter. "One of the girls here-Amy, maybe you've met her-she usually bakes something. She brought in some homemade hot cross buns today. Would you like some? I haven't tried them myself, but I hear they're quite good."

Without waiting for an answer, Vera headed toward the kitchen in the back. She filled the coffeepot, turned on the stove burner, and loaded a plastic tray with Amy's hot cross buns, paper plates, and napkins.

"Oh, boy," Les Cudahy said when the tray appeared. Up until this moment, he had looked like a sulky kid who hadn't been invited to the party; the appearance of baked goods seemed to cheer him, to make him feel included. Inspecting the hot cross buns, he said, "You know, I bet these'd be real good if you put raisins in them. I never heard of hot cross buns without raisins in them."

"How can you think of a thing like that right now?" Linda Cudahy said. "These people have more important things to do than bake to order."

Vera, trying not to laugh, said, "Actually, it's a quiet afternoon. But I don't think we have any raisins here." She went back to get the coffee, making sure to bring a third cup for Cutler, who was chatting with the Cudahys as though they were old chums-which, she supposed, they practically were at this point. Cutler had that infuriating, elliptical smile on her face again, the cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.

The ba.s.set hound, freed from its leash, plodded around the adults' ankles, looking morose. Vera was trying her hardest to picture Jensen as part of this family-mother, stepfather, dog. She couldn't, quite.

"Les, you remember me telling you about the teacher who called on the phone that Friday night," Linda Cudahy said, accepting the mug of coffee from Vera. "She was already gone by then."

She. She meant Jensen, of course. Looking from Les, who was still admiring the cross-shaped icing on his hot cross bun, to Mrs. Cudahy, Vera said, "Yes, I did call that night. I'm so sorry about everything you've been through."

"It's nice of you to want to help out here. We've had so many offers of help already. It's overwhelming sometimes, but it's very kind. Do you have any children, Miss Lundy?"

"No, I don't."

"Well then." Jensen's mother settled back in her seat, looking almost smug. "You can't really imagine what it's like for us. But in a way I think that makes it more admirable that you want to help. I'm sure those flyers are helping. Police are telling us to get Jensen's name and face out there as much as we can. We can only do so much on our own, you know . . . and Les, with his bad heart and all, can't do much at all."

"Jensen is a pretty unusual student," Vera said, "and she's worth whatever a.s.sistance I can offer. She's . . . she's one of the more talented student writers I've ever seen."

"She's always been such a writer. Practically from birth. You can't teach talent," Mrs. Cudahy said.

"Oh," Vera said. "I forgot to ask if you wanted cream and sugar in your coffee!"

"Just a drop or two of cream would be good, dear."

Vera went back to the refrigerator and came back with a carton of half-and-half. She was impressed with the comment about not being able to teach talent; she was tempted to expand on this idea, but she knew this was not the time to wax pedantic. She poured the milk into their coffees while Mrs. Cudahy broke apart one of the hot cross buns with her bare hands. "Are you planning to eat that," she said, nodding at her husband, "or do you just want to sit there drooling over it?"

"Well, Jesus Christ," Jensen's stepfather grumped. "I wasn't going to just dig in before you ladies got any." He balanced the paper plate on his lap and resettled in his chair near Vera's, surveying the back room with a certain dignified imperiousness. Vera found herself touched by this display of pride in the elderly man.

Jensen's mother took a big bite into her pastry. Then, without warning, she swallowed hard and began to weep. A dollop of piped white frosting hung from her lower lip.

"G.o.d, I'm sorry," she said to Vera, covering her mouth with her hand.

Vera felt she should be close to crying, too, but her eyes were dry. She saw that Cutler had put a hand on the woman's back and was patting it absently.

"I can't help it," Linda Cudahy said. "It's the stress, you know? One minute I'll think I'm okay. I think I'm so big and strong and tough, but I'm not."

"Our house feels bleak without Jensen," Les said from the corner, and Vera saw that his eyes were watering, too. There was nothing worse, to her thinking, than seeing an old man weep. He put a wad of bread in his mouth and uttered the word again, as though it satisfied him somehow: "Bleak."

Tentatively, Vera said: "I saw the new article this morning about your daughter."

"Us, too. We get the paper."

"I'm guessing you already know that it was my cla.s.s that was reading The Catcher in the Rye." She looked over at Cutler in a manner that she hoped looked confident and conspiratorial: We're in on this together, you and me.

Mrs. Cudahy had controlled her tears but was still swiping at her eyes with a paper napkin. "She loved your cla.s.s," she said. "I feel so stupid. I read The Catcher in the Rye when I was a kid myself, but that was forty years ago. It must not have made much of an impression. Do you know what I did, though? I found Jensen's copy in her room and started rereading it. But then the police came by and took it so they could look at it themselves. That Detective Ferrari-he thinks he's so smart."

Cutler coughed good-naturedly.

"No offense, I know you work with him, Helen. He thought our daughter might have written in it, with underlines or highlights or something." The woman looked at Cutler, whose smile only broadened with a sympathetic cast, then back at Vera as though waiting for her to say something. "I think that woman is full of it-the teacher who had the baby. I think her comments in the paper today are insulting, and I'm half of a mind to call her up and tell her so. I don't see any connection between Jensen and this book at all, do you?"

"Not really. Only in a loose sort of way. But you know, Mrs. Cudahy-"

"Call me Linda."

"-Linda. You know that Jensen was writing a journal for my cla.s.s. The journal requirement was to make connections between the novel and the student's own lives. Were you aware of this journal?" She turned to Helen Cutler. "Did you-I mean, is this something you've discussed with them before?"

Cutler nodded, but the look she gave Vera seemed to contain a warning that Vera couldn't read.

"Oh, sure, we've been asked all kinds of questions about it," Jensen's mother said. "But like I've said to Helen, Jensen's always writing something, you know. Always carrying a notebook around with her. When she was younger I used to tell her, 'Don't ever write down anything that you wouldn't want the world to read.' And a couple years ago she started arguing with me about this and saying that a writer has to write everything down, even if it hurts some people. I've been trying to understand it."

"Mrs. Cudahy. Linda," Vera began again. She steeled herself, for she knew that the next thing she needed to tell her must be phrased in the most prudent way. "The police also may have mentioned this to you, but in some of Jensen's journal entries, she sounded . . . upset. Especially in the final pages. She wrote them as though she was thinking about . . . hurting herself. I feel like I should have told you this much sooner. I feel remiss, not having told you."

Vera wished she could say the next part-the part about how her phone call had been originally meant to warn them of Jensen's intentions on Friday night. But in so doing, she knew she would also have to own up to her own role in how Jensen had vanished. If only Cutler had not been sitting there, she was sure she would have said something; instead, she found herself wishing the Cudahys were sharp enough to read between the lines of what she was saying-sharp enough to read her mind.

"Something you need to understand about my daughter," Mrs. Cudahy said. "This is the same thing I keep telling the police over and over: She likes to write things for shock value. She's always thinking about how to get reactions to the things she writes. Even when she was little, she would write stories and add in these touching details that would make me cry because my tears would make her feel . . . I can't think of what the word is . . ."

"Affirmed?"

"Not what I was thinking, but I guess that works, too. I was thinking more like powerful. I brought some of Jensen's early writings for you to look at. As her English teacher, I thought you might get a kick out of seeing them. Would you?"

Vera said that she would. She had not expected Jensen's mother to be this receptive to her, a stranger. She guessed that Mrs. Cudahy missed her daughter so much that any opportunity to talk about her, to share thoughts with anyone willing to listen to her, was welcome. There was no other explanation for her warmth-unless, of course, this was all part of the setup that Cutler had puppeteered. She could not lose sight of that possibility.

"s.h.i.t," Mrs. Cudahy said. "I left the papers in the car. Give me a second and I'll go get them."

While his wife was away in the parking lot, Mr. Cudahy said, "My heart can't take all this. It's too much, isn't it, Tessie?" Vera inferred that Tessie was the ba.s.set hound. The dog had settled into a fat puddle at her master's feet and had begun licking at her red, raw-looking belly. As the old man leaned toward her, scratching her neck under the collar, the dog's grunts filled the room.

"Your stepdaughter will come home soon, Mr. Cudahy," Vera said. "You can't lose hope."

"She was two years old when I married her mother. I always think of her as mine, you know . . . my own little girl. And she's a good girl, mostly. A good girl. I never thought she'd run off like this. She knows how much it would upset her mother and I."

Her mother and me, Vera almost corrected him, but stopped herself just in time.

Cutler was saying something consoling to him, something Vera could not hear, when Mrs. Cudahy returned with Jensen's writings. Vera looked through some of the pages, written in the large, generic printing that most children have before they develop the idiosyncrasies of their own penmanship. There was a story by Jensen about a little boy who rode on a magic feather bed that floated through the air. There was another story of a girl who sat on the moon, looking down at all the things on Earth below her. Vera thought that the recurring theme might not be insignificant-the idea of solitary children separated from others, looking down at others from on high. What she said out loud was, "They're very sweet. You can definitely tell that she had writing ability even then."

"All my kids were talented, and all of them were good people," Linda Cudahy said.

"All talented," Les echoed from the corner. "Every last one of 'em."

"I have two older sons," Mrs. Cudahy explained to Vera. "I know I should say had, but when anyone asks how many children I have, I say I am the mother of three. Ross was eleven years older than Jensen, and Nicholas was eight years older. The boys died together in a car accident when Jensen was only four. My daughter didn't write anything about that?"

The surprise must have shown on Vera's face. She managed to say, "She didn't. I'm so sorry to hear this." She glanced at Cutler, whose expression was placid; clearly this was not news to her.

"Les, show her that picture from your wallet," Mrs. Cudahy said, and the elderly man took his sweet time getting it out, even pulling the photo out of its cellophane sheath to place it in Vera's hand-this small, black-and-white portrait of two chubby little boys seated close to each other on a bench. The bigger of the two was dark-haired, looking rather like Jensen and, Vera supposed, like Linda Cudahy. "There's Ross and Nicholas. All three of my babies were built like little Sherman tanks. Even my daughter, though you'd never know it now. Both boys were very much their own people, just like Jensen is. Ross was going to be a filmmaker-he was only fifteen, but he'd made these short films that would knock your socks off. And Ross was a writer, too, like Jensen-you could already tell. I always told my kids, 'Be whatever you want to be when you grow up, just as long as you grow up to be a good person.' And all my kids would have grown up to be good people-no one can ever take that from them."

"Or from you," Vera said.

Without asking, Vera got up and refilled the Cudahys' coffee mugs. Detective Cutler had not touched her own coffee. "She likes you, you know," Mrs. Cudahy said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Our daughter likes you. That's why she wrote all that stuff in her journal. If she likes you, she'll go on and on and on and on. Lots of words. Lots of thoughts. All written down. She said you seemed different from the other teachers."

The corners of the woman's mouth were starting to jerk tearfully downward again; her effort to fight against this and force a smile verged on grotesque, and Vera had to look elsewhere. "It just makes me sick to think what might have happened to her. I just can't see her running away. A runaway is a bad kid, a kid who doesn't worry about hurting her parents. At first, though, I hoped she might have gone to see her boyfriend, who's going to school in New York City."

"Bret Folger," Vera said. Recalling what Paul Nimitz had said about some of Jensen's friends being fict.i.tious, she couldn't help but feel a jolt of relief to know that Bret, at least, was the real deal.

"Oh, so you know Bret?"

"Only from Jensen's journals. And even then, it's a pretty limited portrayal, I think."

Ignoring that last comment, Mrs. Cudahy said, "She went to New York to see him one time-with permission, of course. So I got this idea that maybe she'd gone down there again to be with him. Now bear in mind, my girl doted on him, hung around near the phone every Sunday night waiting for his phone call. But the police have spoken to him several times. There's no reason to think she's there with him, so they say. Still, I wonder." The woman shot a defensive, almost apologetic look at Cutler. "I know there's no reason to think that anymore. But I'd rather think that's where she is than think-something else."

"Wow." Vera mulled over this for a while. The dog had lifted itself up from Les's feet and now whined at her side. She thought of petting it, but the dog smelled sour and sharp-like somebody's behind, Vera thought. "Judging by what Jensen wrote about Bret in her journals, he doesn't sound like a very sensitive boy."

"He is number than a pounded thumb. And spineless? Let me tell you about spineless! I wouldn't trust him to tell the truth if she's with him."

Vera thought about New York City. She thought about Jensen saying, with a dreamy look on her face, Sometimes I thought I'd go down to New York to live with Bret. I printed up this map once of all the places Holden goes in New York, thinking I might go there sometime. It seemed a long shot; how could she have gotten there? By bus? There were coaches to Boston that ran every hour, twenty-four hours a day. Unlikely though it seemed, a blind hope began to rise in her.

"I lived there for a few years," she told Mrs. Cudahy. "New York City, I mean-not far from Columbia University. I daresay I know Bret's neck of the woods pretty well."

"h.e.l.l of a place," Les said ambiguously.

"Yes," Vera agreed. "h.e.l.l of a place indeed."

The conversation seemed to fizzle out. Jensen's mother smiled at Vera-whether sincerely or insincerely, she could not tell-and Vera looked from her to her husband to the mute detective, who gave no indication whether she was paying attention to any of this, though Vera knew that she had to be. After a c.u.mbersome silence, Jensen's mother said she needed to excuse herself to go to the lavatory.

"It's to the left," Vera said, charmed by the old-fashioned word lavatory-a word straight out of her own mother's vocabulary.

"I know where it is. Do you want to join me?"

Vera did not know how to respond to this invitation. She had never been the type of woman who liked an entourage when she took a restroom break, and she didn't particularly wish to join the woman in the bathroom. Absurdly, she thought of Bret Folger inviting Jensen into his bathroom so he could kiss her. But then she told herself: Don't be a dummy. This is your one chance to talk to her without Cutler horning in.

"If you'd like," she said. She got up and followed Jensen's mother down the hall. Take that, Cutler, she couldn't help thinking.

"I wasn't sure about Jensen going to the Wallace School, to be honest," Linda Cudahy said as soon as she'd shut the bathroom door. The bathroom had a tub in it-sometimes the volunteer committee used this tub as storage s.p.a.ce for flyers-and Vera perched on its porcelain rim, discreetly turned away from Jensen's mother as the woman unzipped her pants. She tried not to reflect too much on the ridiculousness of this situation; the woman's voice rose over the resounding stream of her urine. "All those snotty people, and the teachers are the worst of them. But you really are different. I want to thank you for that. Thank you for becoming a friend to my daughter in such a short time. Thank you for what you've done, and for what you're doing."

"You shouldn't thank me," Vera said. She felt humbled-a sensation she was not used to feeling. She was not used to feeling humbled by the basic goodness of people. The ba.s.set hound, loose still, was scratching outside the bathroom door to get in. Vera thought about how she used to follow her own mother into the bathroom, chatting at her while she bathed, chatting at her while she peed, barely taking note of the fact that she was using the toilet and might prefer some privacy. For some reason the thought made her sad. That kind of closeness to anyone had all been such a long time ago.

Jensen's mother, having finished her bathroom business, gave Vera a hug, fl.u.s.tering her even more. Back in the workroom, Vera shook hands with Les Cudahy and even gave the dog a farewell tap on the head as she bade the Cudahys good-bye and wished them well. Cutler stayed behind, writing something down in her notepad, and Vera waited until Jensen's parents were gone before she spoke to her.

"How do you think that went?" she asked.

"Went? I think it went fine. What did you think of them?"

Now why had Cutler asked her that? Did she think the Cudahys were suspects in their own daughter's disappearance? Flattered that Cutler wanted to know her opinion, Vera said, "I guess they seem on the up-and-up to me."

"Good people."

Vera couldn't tell if the detective was agreeing with her or simply trying to clarify what Vera had meant. "Good people," she seconded. "So far as I can tell, anyway. What do you think?"

Cutler looked less now like the cat that ate the canary than like the cat who has pocketed the canary in its cheek for safekeeping. "Cla.s.sified information," she said.

On the Monday of her school break, the lethal boredom of Sat.u.r.day and Sunday had already done its work on Vera, and she could no longer stand to stay sequestered in her studio or wander pointlessly around Dorset looking for something to do. She headed to the BRING JENSEN HOME headquarters early in the afternoon, her thoughts full of last Friday's morning cla.s.s and their further attempt to discuss The Bell Jar.