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confusion and hurt hang like basement dank outside Lark’s doorway. Ruby steps into the room, approaches the bed, tugs at a corner of crumpled purple sheet, tucks the blanket around the tangle of daughter and dog.
    “Go away.”
    Ruby pulls her hand to her side. “Lark, honey.”
    “Go away.”
    At the window, Ruby checks the locks, pulls the shade, turns back toward the bed. Clyde shifts, glares at Ruby with doggy reproach. Lark rolls over to face her. The breeze from the ceiling fan ruffles the honey hair around her face.
    “You lied to me, Mama.”
    Ruby would sell her soul to stop the ache in Lark’s eyes. If only she hadn’t already made that deal nine years ago. The books on mothering, those weepy women on Oprah , they are all on the mark. The worst pain in the world is the pain of a mother who can’t fix her child.
    “Baby bird—”
    “Go. Away.”
    One backward glance, that is all Ruby allows herself at the doorway. Lark lies there under the smoky purple comforter, expensive Calvin la-di-da Klein designer bedding that Lark had begged and begged to get for her last birthday. To think that just a handful of months ago, Lark thought her world would end if she didn’t have grown-up sheets covering her little-girl body. To think that just a handful of months ago, Ruby thought she could keep her child happy, safe even, with a sackful of overpriced bedding.
    She resists the urge to step back into the room, to tuck those sheets around her daughter’s prostrate form and sing the daffy song. Fancy linens and sentimentality aren’t going to fix this one , she thinks, as she crumples to the floor and sobs.

SIXTEEN
    As the white afternoon light shifts to evening violet, Margaret and Molly show up, the greasy smell of Chinese food wafting around them like silk dragons in a parade. Margaret rustles in the kitchen, stashing takeout bags in the oven, while Molly heads down the hall. Strands of Molly’s dulcet voice curl around Lark’s higher-pitched tones, not quite damping the anguish.
    “We’ll go for a walk,” Molly says when she reappears, herding Lark and Clyde toward the front door, where the Ms’ two dogs wait and whine.
    Ruby wants to scream “No!” She imagines a black sedan pulling up beside them out there on the road, Molly returning with dog but no daughter. Be rational , she tells herself. Even if an article in a weekly gossip rag generated new interest in an old case, they couldn’t know Ruby was involved, couldn’t have tracked them here. Yet. She swallows the scream in her throat and watches her daughter disappear out the door.
    “Okay, spill.” Matter-of-fact Margaret. She and Molly, the Ms Lark coined them, have been Ruby’s ballast all these years.
    The day she walked up to the Jeep in that strip mall parking lot, finding bone-tired Ruby and a whimpering baby, Margaret had taken charge, in her comforting take-charge way. The room she rented out above her hair salon was vacant; it wasn’t much, but it was Ruby’s if she wanted it while she waited for the car to be fixed. One day turned into two, into a week. Margaret suggested Ruby work off the rent at the salon, keep Lark there with her.
    The salon receptionist job gave Ruby the flexibility she needed with Lark, and the “room” above was a light-filled homey studio that Molly had decorated with her own art. When Lark started first grade, Ruby enrolled at the cosmetology school out by the airport and earned her nail tech certificate, and Margaret added the manicure station to a corner of the salon. Lark grew up in that salon, and, well, Ruby guesses, she did, too. They made a family there. They made their life.
    A single sharp crack sounds from the kitchen behind her. She flinches, ducks, waits. When she looks up, the cutting board sits on the counter, mocking, after sliding from behind the paper towel roll, smacking onto the tile as it has done so many times before.
    And Margaret stares at her, with a combination of alarm and