She flings open the front door. In a dramatic voice, she says, “She was lost, and she suffered. But she has forgiven you and is here to heal your soul!” I hear voices, rising in excitement—they’ve seen Claire’s glow.

Pulling my wrist, Claire yanks me outside.

I plaster a smile on my face and hope it looks more like a kind, benevolent smile, rather than maniacal, which is what it feels like. This is a terrible idea, I think. I’m no savior. I’m glad that Peter is watching from the roof. I force myself not to look up and give him away as I walk onto the porch. At least a dozen men, women, and kids are perched and lounging on the porch and junk pile. They’re rattier-looking than either Victoria or Sean. One man is dressed in a coat sewn entirely from socks. One of the boys is wearing rags with so many holes and stains that it looks as if a stiff breeze will blow it off his body. Another woman is in a sequin dress and draped with diamond or rhinestone necklaces. Every finger is covered with enormous rings, three on each finger so that her knuckles cannot even bend. Seeing me, all of them unwind from where they lay, and they rush forward.

Claire steps in front of me, at the top of the porch steps, and puts her hands on her hips. “One at a time!” She claps her hands for attention. “You know she can’t work a dozen miracles at once! Go in the order you arrived. I’ll give you numbers.” She marches off the porch. The crowd breaks. Some are glaring at her, some are glaring at me. A few look at me in what looks like awe. One lies on his back and counts, clouds I assume, except the sky is clear. He could be counting dust particles.

A young woman shoulders her way to the front. She wears a lacy hippie shirt, a bandana around her head, and Mardi Gras beads. Her eyes are sunken in with deep bruiselike circles under them, as if she hasn’t slept in aeons. Or as if she is on drugs. “I first.” She glares at me, and I shrink back.

Claire marches down the step and puts her hands on her hips. “You aren’t ready,” she announces. I stifle a smile. As my new self-appointed manager, Claire is acting more like a forty-year-old diva than a six-year-old little girl. Granted, she is older than she looks, and being on her own has aged her... My urge to smile fades. This place is robbing her of her childhood. How long has she been here? A year? Two? Three?

The woman switches her glare to Claire. “You don’t know anything. Just because you have the glow—”

“Come back later.” Claire points instead to a boy with a backward baseball cap and shorts that ride three inches lower than the waistband of his boxers, which are bright red with blue rocketships. “You first.”

The kid shrugs and saunters up to the steps. “I’m ready.”

I don’t know what he expects me to do. Everyone is watching me. I clear my throat. Claire is beaming up at me, her eyes wide and face expectant, lit by her glow. I wonder what Peter is thinking from his perch above me. “What did you lose?” I ask.

He shoots a look over his shoulder.

I think of Victoria, how she said no one asks about the past. “How about you come inside?” Stepping aside, I indicate the door. “Claire, let me know if...” I trail off, not certain how to communicate that she should let me know if any of the crowd shows homicidal tendencies. I’m also tempted to take her inside with me, my six-year-old bodyguard.

The boy peers into each of the rooms as I lead him inside. I take him to the living room and point to one of the chairs opposite the face of the steam engine. I sit nervously on the edge of the couch. I can see the ocean out of the window, also the void.

He nods at the water. “What’s up with the ocean?”

“I think it’s mine.”

“Sweet.”

“Thanks.” I look out at it, more for a safe place to look than anything else. How exactly did I get myself into this? Oh, yeah, I trusted a six-year-old. “Do you know what you lost?”

“Yeah. It was after school. A Thursday. Not that that matters. Girlfriend just broke up with me. Rightfully so. She wasn’t what I lost. Cheated on her. Totally deserved it. I was a douche-bag boyfriend.” He talks fast, clipped, the words popping out of him as if they’re shooting out of his mouth.

“That’s...good of you to realize.”

“Ran across some guys from school. Just hanging out, you know? Anyway, there was this pack of girls. You know the type. Pretty girls. Perfect hair. Swish when they walk. Not sure how they do that without falling over. The kind that want you to look at them but then yell when you look, you know? As if you don’t have the right to have eyes?”

I nod. I do know the type. I wasn’t one of them, but they never really bothered me. I ran with the artsy crowd. We considered ourselves superior because we’d mastered the art of publicly angsting over cultural decay, even if we were privately angsting over the basketball team.

“I was sick of them looking down at me. Sick of all of it. The guys were joking... Long story short, I singled one out, one that looked a lot like my ex, one with the superior smile and that look in her eyes, and I started talking about her. Lies. But detailed lies. And it spread. Got back to her. She denied it, but no one believed her. And so I thought I’d hit on a great way to bring them down to our level. Stop them from looking so superior, or something. It was stupid. It was petty. I knew it at the time. But I was the Robin Hood of the social order, you know? Restoring fairness to the high school hallways.”

He’s flushing fiercely as he talks. His neck is bright red.

“How did you wind up here?” I ask.

“That girl, the first girl, the one that I started with telling lies. She killed herself. And after that...I didn’t go to the funeral. Didn’t think I had the right. Stood outside the church, though, and when the family came out, I...took a walk. And kept walking until I was in this part of town I didn’t recognize. Turns out it wasn’t a part of my town at all. It was here.” He shrugs. “And that’s pretty much it.”

“Okay.”

He looks at me. “So, can you help me?”

I take a deep breath and meet his eyes. “You pretty much just confessed to causing an innocent girl’s death. I don’t know what I can find that will fix that.” He hangs his head, and I wish I hadn’t been so harsh. He’s a kid. He screwed up, yes. But he’s a kid, and what the hell kind of right do I have to judge him? Besides, maybe there’s more to the story. More gently, I ask, “What will you do if I succeed?”

“See if the other girls are okay,” he says immediately. “I keep thinking...I can’t undo it for her. But those other girls, yeah, maybe. I owe something, you know? And I can’t pay it back here.”

I nod. “I’ll see what I can do. No promises. I’m new to this. If there’s any hint you can give me as to what you expect me to find...” I can hear a voice inside my head screaming at me that this is not my responsibility! This is not my problem! I have my own problems, thank you very much. But Claire’s right—if I can win over the townspeople, I’ll be safer. And I did find the star sapphire ring and the 1986 newspaper.

“Her.”

I’m not sure I heard him correctly. “She’s dead.”

“So are some people here.”

I think of Tiffany. “But...” I don’t know how to phrase it nicely. I don’t even know if I’m right. “But if she intended to die, then she wouldn’t be lost. She’d be exactly where she wanted to be. Dead dead. Not lost-dead.”

He shook his head so hard that his bandana slipped. “She can’t be. She has to be here. I need her to forgive me, or else I can’t ever return. You have to find her.”

I don’t know that she’ll be willing to forgive, even if I could find her. After all, she killed herself. That’s about as unforgiving and stuck-in-pain as it gets. But I don’t say that. His eyes are so pleading, so young, so hopeful and helpless and hopeless all at the same time. “I’ll try.” I rise. “I need...”