The Passage by Justin Cronin Page A

girl eyed her skeptically. “What kind?”
    “I call it secrets. It’s easy to play. I tell you a secret, and then you tell me one. Do you see? A trade , my secret for your secret. How does that sound?”
    The girl shrugged. “Okay.”
    “All right then. I’ll start. Here is my secret. One time, when I was very young, like you, I ran away from home. This was in Sierra Leone, where I come from. I was very cross at my mother, because she wouldn’t let me go to see a carnival without doing my lessons first. I was very excited about this carnival, because I had heard they did tricks with horses, and I was crazy about horses. I bet you like horses too, don’t you, Amy?”
    The girl nodded. “I guess.”
    “Every girl like horses. But me—I was in love with them! To show her how mad I was, I refused to do my lessons, and she sent me to my room for the night. Oh, I was so angry! I stamped around the room like a crazy person. Then I thought, If I run away, she’ll be sorry she has treated me this way. She’ll let me do what I like from now on. I was very foolish, but that is what I believed. So that night, after my parents and my sisters were asleep, I left the house. I didn’t know where to go, so I hid in the fields behind our yard. It was cold and very dark. I wanted to stay there all night, and then in the morning I would be able to hear my mother crying my name when she woke up and found I wasn’t there. But I couldn’t do this. I stayed in the field a little while, but eventually I was too cold and frightened. I went back home and got into bed, and nobody ever knew I was gone.” She looked at the girl, who was watching her closely, and did her best to smile. “There—I’ve never told anyone that story, not until now. You are the first person I’ve told in my life. What do you think of that?”
    The girl was watching Lacey attentively now. “You just … went home?”
    Lacey nodded. “You see, I wasn’t so angry anymore. And in the morning, it all seemed like a dream I’d had. I wasn’t even sure it had actually happened, though now, many years later, I know that it did.” She patted Amy’s hand encouragingly. “Now it is your turn. Do you have a secret to tell me, Amy?”
    The girl lowered her face and said nothing.
    “Even a little one?”
    “I don’t think she’s coming back,” said Amy.
    The police officers who took the call, a man and a woman, got nowhere either. The female officer, a heavyset white woman with a cropped haircut like a man’s, spoke to the girl in the kitchen, while the other officer, a handsome black man with a smooth, narrow face, took a description of the mother from Lacey. Did she seem nervous? he asked her. Was she drunk, on drugs? What was she wearing? Did Lacey see the car? On and on he went, but Lacey could tell he was asking only because he had to; he didn’t think the girl’s mother would turn up, either. He recorded her answers with a tiny pencil on a pad of paper that, as soon as she’d finished, he returned to the breast pocket of his uniform. In the kitchen, a flash of light: the woman officer had taken Amy’s picture.
    “Do you want to call Child Protection, or should we do it?” the policeman asked Lacey. “Because, seeing as how you are who you are, it might make sense if we waited. No use putting her into the system right away, especially over the weekend, if you don’t mind keeping her here. We can put out a description of the woman and see if we get anywhere. We’ll also put the girl in the missing child database. The mother might come back, too, though if she does, you should keep the girl here and call us.”
    It was a little past noon; the other sisters were all due back at one o’clock from the Community Pantry, where they’d passed the morning stocking shelves and dispensing boxes of canned goods and cereal, spaghetti sauce, and diapers. They did this every Tuesday and Friday. But Lacey had been nursing a head cold all week—even after