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“Ah. The dark underbelly of children’s entertainment,” Rhonda said.

“Exactly,” Warren said. “And I’ve gotta admit, when I heard it was a rabbit who took this girl, it sounded right up my alley. I thought that maybe, I dunno, when it’s over, when Ernie comes out okay, I could do a little movie about it. You know…interview people and stuff. It’s a helluva story, don’t you think? I mean, this could be way bigger than what happened to that girl in Virginia.”

THEY CLIMBED UPonto the tiny Astroturf-covered porch, ducking the bird feeders that hung along the edge of the overhang. Warren tapped at a set of parrot wind chimes while Rhonda knocked on the screen door.

“If you’re the goddamn press, I don’t have anything to say!” came a voice from the depths of the trailer.

“Laura Lee! It’s Rhonda Farr!”

“Ronnie? Goddamn! Come on in.”

Laura Lee greeted them in the kitchen, which was done in
white and turquoise and looked as though it hadn’t been either remodeled or cleaned since sometime in the sixties.

Laura Lee had giant red curls that must have taken hours to put in and were up so high and stiff above her head that Rhonda wondered how the poor woman kept her balance. Her eyes were painted silver and blue (nearly matching the kitchen décor) and she had two circles of rouge on her cheeks. Her lips were hot pink. She wore bright yellow stirrup pants and a T-shirt with a sequined parrot on the front. In one hand, she held a highball glass of pink wine with an orange slice, in the other, a thin cigarette.

“I thought you were from the papers.” Laura Lee swayed toward them as she spoke, then jerked herself back so fast she stumbled. “Reporters came by earlier. They’ve been calling all day. I finally took the goddamn phone off the hook. Are you going to introduce me to your adorable boyfriend, or not?” Laura Lee touched Warren on the cheek. “God, you’re a looker!”

“Laura Lee, this is Warren. He worked with me today at the volunteer center.”

“Volunteer center? What are you, out collecting for charity? AIDS? Those bums, whatayacall’em now, homeless? Ha! Orphans, maybe? Oh, whatever it is, I’ll throw in a buck. Why not?” She turned and found her purse on the kitchen table and began fumbling to undo the clasp.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Rhonda said. “Pat set up a center at the Mini Mart for volunteers to help find Ernestine Florucci. We answered phones. Made posters. That kind of thing.”

Laura Lee scowled at her. “Good for you, sweetie. Good. For. You. Is that why you’re here? To see if I’ve got the little dove tucked away under my bed? Well, you don’t have to bother. The police already checked.”

“No! No, Laura Lee. That’s not it at all. I was just hoping you could tell us about your car.”

“My car? Everyone wants to know about the goddamn car. The police took it,impounded it. They insist it was used in the kidnapping. Said they found some kinda evidence. Ha! I don’t know a thing about it. I take it out once, maybe twice a week. I haven’t driven my goddamn car since last Thursday! It’s been sitting in the driveway the whole time. The police had me down at the station all morning taking down my whole life history. Hell of a way to get your biography written, huh?”

“So you didn’t notice if it was missing?” Rhonda asked.

“Sweetie, I was here with my Lifetime movies. All the fans were blasting. I had a few goddamn glasses of sangria—I think I’ve earned that much, don’t you? I wouldn’t have noticed if the devil himself came prancing up from Hades and took my car. I can’t see the driveway through the living room windows, and the shades were drawn anyway to keep the heat out. I didn’t hear a goddamn thing. I got this telephone call around ten after three. Some lady from my credit card company wanting to offer insurance at a reduced rate because I’msuch a good customer or some such bull crapola. Ha! The police tracked her down and that proved to them that I was home. As if I were really going to dress up like the goddamn Easter Bunny from hell and steal a little girl! Absurd! Don’t they know who I am?”

Rhonda gave Laura Lee a weak smile and glanced over at Warren to see how he was taking all this. He seemed to be eating it up. He was smiling away at the crazy woman, and before Rhonda could keep the conversation on track, he went and blew it.

“You’re an actress, aren’t you, Miss Clark?” he asked.

“Why, yes I am! Have you seen my work?”

“Warren’s a film student,” Rhonda said. “He makes documentaries.”

This news produced a warm glow in Laura Lee.

“You sure do look familiar,” Warren told her. “What have you been in?”

“Oh, far too many pictures to name, young man. Hundreds. Why, I bet if we were to turn on the TV right now, one of my pictures would be showing”—and before they could talk her out of it, Laura Lee was headed into the living room and reaching for the remote.

“Sit, sit.” She gestured toward a faded love seat covered in a crocheted afghan. “Don’t mind the African,” she said. Warren gave Rhonda a startled look. “I put it there to hide a hole in the sofa. Goddamn cigarettes!”

“It’s lovely,” Rhonda said, touching the gaudy afghan and biting her lip to keep from laughing. “Did you make it yourself?”

“Hell no! Yard sale,” Laura Lee said, then turned her attention back to the television. “Here we go:Earthquake . I do a great scream in this film. God, I hope we haven’t missed my part! Chuck Heston was just adream to work with. And I don’t care what kind of goddamn right-wing gun-nut wacko he is, either!” She held up a hand to silence any argument from Rhonda or Warren. “Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was a total bitch.”

“You must have had quite a career,” Warren said. Rhonda reached over and pinched him, her hand well hidden by the bunched up “African.”

“There’s nothing like a career in the cinema. Rhonda, honey, I have to say I was always a little disappointed that you didn’t choose a life in the footlights.”

“Me?” Rhonda asked.

“I mean, I know you were only children when you put on those plays in the woods, but you had goddamntalent . I know it when I see it. You hada gift .” She turned to Warren. “You should have seen her. She was magnificent. In her last role, she was Wendy fromPeter Pan . She had mein tears . And what were you, dear, ten, eleven years old?”

Rhonda nodded.

“I never understood why you kids tore down that stage. You
got yourselves all banged up. Probably could have been killed. And what for?”

Rhonda shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I can’t remember.” She reached up and brushed back her bangs, feeling for the thin scar above her left eyebrow.

“Goddamnedest thing!” Laura Lee told Warren. “She and Peter were both cut in the same place when the back wall came down. They both needed stitches. They have theexact same scar . Show him, honey. Show the young man your scar!”

Rhonda pulled her bangs back down protectively, shook her head.

“You ask Peter to show you his,” Laura Lee said. “It’s the craziest thing. The scars couldn’t be more alike.”

Warren looked at Rhonda, waiting. Rhonda stared at the television. A huge dam was cracking. She wasn’t big on seventies disaster movies, or any movie made in the seventies, for that matter—they were all so meandering, overloaded with characters. It occurred to her that this might be a topic of conversation with Warren.

“Laura Lee,” Rhonda said, “can you tell me who else had keys to your car?”

Laura Lee sighed dramatically.

“Back to the goddamn car. That’s easy, dear. Only two people: Tock and Peter.”

Not the answer she’d been hoping for.

“No one else?” Rhonda asked.

Laura Lee thought a minute. “I’ve had this car since 1979. Can you believe it? And I bought it used! These things go forever. Of course, I keep it garaged in the winter and I don’t do much driving—where’s an old lady like me going to go? Ha! No, dear. No one else has keys. Except…”

“Except?”

“Nothing. It was a hundred years ago. And it doesn’t matter
now.” Laura Lee reached for her glass of sangria and stared into it with concern, like there was a tiny drowning man among the ice cubes.

“What?” asked Rhonda.

“Daniel. I used to let Daniel borrow my car. He always had a key.”

She calls his car a submarine and this pleases him. He mimes putting up a periscope, looking around. Lets her have a peek.

“No sharks,” she tells him.

He nods to show they are safe. She will always be safe when she is with him.

He takes her to their secret place. It’s private. Cool and shaded. They won’t be found here.

Rabbit Island, she calls it.

He chases her in a friendly game of tag. She’s zigzagging through the trees and stones, laughing.

He remembers the first Birdie, how they would play hide-and-seek all day. She was so good at hiding. She could find a tiny place and fold her body up, filling the space like a hermit crab. She’d wait so quietly, so patiently to be found.

The rabbit chases this new girl and he’s laughing too. Quietly laughing because at last, his long-lost Birdie is back. And he’s not going to let any harm come to her this time.

MAY 23, 1993

TAKE IT OUT,”he urged her.

Rhonda laughed.

“Really. It makes you talk funny. And it makes your lip stick out.”

She pushed the retainer forward with her tongue, pulled it out with her fingers, holding it like something extra delicate, exotic: a pink beetle with thin, silver legs.

“That’s better,” he told her.

They were hidden underground, buried together like secret treasure. The trapdoor on the stage floor was closed over their heads and they sat in the small hole, face-to-face, breathing in the damp smell of earth and roots.

She studied him in the dim light that came from the cracks in the trapdoor above their heads. They were sitting with their legs crossed under them, facing each other. He was wearing his Peter Pan costume. He smelled like leaves. And she was wearing the white Wendy nightgown, her hair tied back with a ribbon.

“So you want to know the truth?” he asked.

“Yes,” she told him.

“Are you sure you’re ready?”

She laughed.

“Then quit laughing. Just relax. I’ll tell you how it is: first, you start with a little kissing. Then the guy feels the girl up. You know, touches her boobs and stuff.”

Rhonda wrapped her arms around her chest, concealing her painfully obvious lack of boobs.

“Then he touches her between the legs to see if she’s ready,” he explained.

“Ready?”

“You know…ready for him.”

She nodded, but had no idea what he meant.

“For his penis,” Peter said.

“Oh,” Rhonda said matter-of-factly. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She swallowed hard.

“He puts it inside her and they move together so that it goes in and out.”

“Why?” Rhonda asked.

“Because it feels good, stupid!”

“Oh,” she said again.

She couldn’t wait to tell Lizzy all of this. But then, as if reading her mind, Peter put a stop to her plan.

“Rhonda,” Peter said just before opening the door so they could both head home for supper, “you can’t tell Lizzy I told you this stuff.”

“Why not?” Rhonda asked. Peter had never asked her to keep a secret from Lizzy before.

“Because she’d be weirded out. It has to be our secret. Okay?”

Rhonda nodded, slipping the retainer back into her mouth, smiling. She and Peter had a secret. A secret that made her feel all tingly and strange, like a walking lightning rod.

JUNE 7, 2006

SO ARE YOUgonna tell me about this Daniel guy, or what?” Warren asked. He’d quizzed her about Daniel when they left Laura Lee’s the day before, but she’d put him off, saying she needed time to think. Now here it was the next morning and they were working the phones at Pat’s. He was sucking down a large hot chocolate and Rhonda had a cup of French roast. Warren had shaved around his goatee and his hair was still damp from a shower.

“Not much to tell. He’s Peter’s father.”

“So is he the kind of guy who would take a little girl?” He cocked his head to the side, waiting for her answer.

“No. It’s impossible.”

“Why’s that?”

“He disappeared twelve years ago.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yeah. One night he was there, with all of us, and the next morning, he was gone. We all thought he’d show up eventually. That he’d gone off on a bender or left town to avoid paying back a gambling debt or something, but no one ever heard from him again.”

“Spooky.”

“His daughter Lizzy was my best friend. Peter’s sister. And, um, she disappeared three years later when we were freshmen in high school. Lizzy left for school one morning with just her book bag and was never seen again.”

“Wait a sec,” Warren said. “Peter’s sister disappeared?”

Rhonda nodded. “Her dad came back for her.”

“If it was Daniel, why didn’t he take Peter too?” Warren asked.

“No one knows,” Rhonda said. She picked up her cup of coffee and drained the last lukewarm sip. “Everyone wondered, but no one knows. The police looked but couldn’t find either of them. Lizzy was one of those faces you see on milk cartons and in Wal-Marts; one of those parental abductions. Her mom pretty much lost her mind after that.”