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her.” While she talked, she sorted through the food she had brought from Mara’s. Assuming that Mara had stocked only what Sami could eat, she put a nipple on one of the bottles of formula. Her own hunger had faded. There didn’t seem room for food in her stomach, what with all the nervous jangles there.
    Sami drank every drop of the milk, looking up at her all the while. Buoyed by that, Paige mixed up a dish of cereal, sweetened it with peaches, and spooned it up, and again, Sami ate. Given how small and thin she was, Paige might have given her more had she not known the danger of pushing too much food into an untried stomach. So, after changing into a T-shirt and jeans, she bathed her, rubbed Mara’s baby lotion over her, diapered her, and dressed her in a pair of stretchy pink pajamas that Mara had bought. Then she held her up.
    “You look so pretty, sweetie.” Pretty and soft and sleepy. “Mara would be loving you to bits.”
    But Mara was no more. Paige felt a sharp pang of grief, followed by a sudden fierce fatigue. She drew Sami close and closed her eyes, but she had no sooner tucked her head against the baby’s dark hair when the phone rang.
    It was Deirdre Frechette, one of Paige’s Mount Court runners. “We need help,” she said in a broken voice. “We spent the whole of dinner talking about Dr. O’Neill. One of the guys says she OD’d on heroine. Is it true?”
    Paige’s fatigue faded. “Definitely not.”
    “Another one says she was done in by the Devil Brothers.”
    “Not Devil,” Paige corrected. “DeVille.” George and Harold DeVille had been the butt of local tales for years. Huge and menacing, they were mentally slow and harmless. “The DeVilles wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
    “Julie Engel says she killed herself. Julie’s mother did that three years ago, and now she’s going into all the details. She’s getting slightly hysterical. We all are.”
    Paige could picture it. Teenage minds were fertile, all the more so in a group. She shuddered to think of where, if unguided, the conversation would lead. Suicide had the potential for being a contagious disease when the proper preventive measures weren’t taken.
    If ever there was a time these teenagers needed their parents, it was now. But their parents weren’t around.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    “In MacKenzie Lounge.”
    “Stay there. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”
    It wasn’t until she hung up the phone that she remembered Sami, and for a split second she didn’t know what to do. But the second passed. The little girl was curled in her arms, fast asleep. One-handedly she sifted through the piles of baby paraphernalia and retrieved the baby carrier. A short time later she had the sleeping child strapped snugly to her chest.
    One of the most important pieces of equipment you can buy, she heard herself instructing parents at prenatal meetings, is a car seat. The baby should be secured in the seat and the seat secured in the car.
    “This is definitely not smart,” she hummed softly as she slid in behind the wheel with Sami hugging her chest, “but you’re tiny, and I drive safely, and I just think it’s more important that you snuggle up to a body you know than sit in that hard baby seat, which I doubt I could strap back in here again tonight anyway. So I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’
    The baby slept through the drive.
    MacKenzie was the largest of the girls’ dorms. Like the others, it was three floors’ worth of red brick, over which ivy had climbed unchecked for so long that large patches of the brick were obscured. Tall, multipaned windows were open in deference to the September warmth; electric fans whirred in many of them.
    There were eight girls in the lounge, eight shades of uniformly long hair, eight oversize T-shirts and shorts. Some of the girls were runners, some not, but Paige knew them all. So had Mara.
    They were subdued. Several looked as though they had been crying. Paige was glad she’d