The Glass Harmonica by Russell Wangersky

naked as if whoever had driven away had peeled up a patch of asphalt and taken it with them in the trunk as well.
    There were moths circling in the glow of the street lights, hapless and confused, an amateur Aeroflot always on the near edge of a midair collision. And he was caught again on the knife-edge of trust and terror. Heather would be furious if she knew his fears, if she guessed that he was questioning whether she knew how to take care of herself. And yet, if something was wrong, he’d be losing valuable, irreplaceable time.
    Heather with a rectangle of silver duct tape across her mouth, her arms pinned behind her back, caught between two faceless men on the bench seat of a speeding pickup truck.
    Heather and Claire being thrown around in the pitch black of the trunk of a car, the trunk lid closing over their struggling bodies.
    He heard a car stereo, loud enough that the Doppler of its bass shook warnings in the window glass of houses it hadn’t even gotten to yet.
    And then Kevin woke up, still on the couch, and it was daylight.
    Outside, he could hear people shouting—two voices measured, the third high and frightened. He went outside without even stopping to put on his shoes, realizing it only when he felt the rough prickle of the concrete on the bottoms of his feet.
    Mrs. Purchase was half in and half out of a small Toyota, the car muscled in tight to the curb, close enough that he noticed that the side walls of its tires were scuffed black from contact with the cement. Both her hands were still outside the car, turned backwards and with the fingers splayed flat against the roof so the couple holding her couldn’t close the back door of the car without closing it on her hands.
    â€œCome on, Mom,” the woman was saying. “Come on. We’re just going to look. You don’t have to stay—we just want to see if you’ll like the place. They have gardens, too. You’ll see.”
    Mrs. Purchase batted ineffectually at the woman’s hands with one of her own, not relinquishing her grip with the other hand, and Kevin thought of the powdery wings of a moth batting uselessly at the hot glass of the street light.
    The woman who was holding Mrs. Purchase’s wrists was someone whom Kevin could not remember having seen before.
    â€œI don’t know you,” Mrs. Purchase was saying quietly, urgently. “I don’t know you.”
    She looked up as Kevin let the screen door slam behind him, walking towards the trio. Mrs. Purchase’s pupils pulled into sharp focus as she recognized him.
    â€œI told you,” Mrs. Purchase hissed plaintively at Kevin, her eyes wide. “I told you what can happen. You just don’t know. I saw her in the front seat. I did. I told them. I told them years and years ago. And I never saw her again.”

104
McKay Street
    ALBERT CARTER
    NOVEMBER 15, 2002
    T HE LETTER was on the kitchen table, the envelope beside it. Three and a half years before Mrs. Purchase told Kevin about the girl, Albert Carter had already written it all down. But what he’d seen was buried, lost, mixed in with everything else. Carter picked the letter up, meaning to fold it and seal it in the envelope. He picked it up over and over again, but always put it back down on the table again, the pages still smooth, the typed letters sharply black against the white paper.
    He had crossed out some words, filled in others, but he tried to keep it as neat as he could, the changes between the lines in fine, careful script, black ink, the letters in each word looping up so that every letter was at exactly the same height, as if they’d been written between two ruled lines. The Jesuits, Albert thought grimly, they’d done their job with him. They’d been perfectionists about everything. Disciplined—severe even—not like the way things were now.
    He spread the letter out flat on the kitchen table, the morning light streaming in behind him from the