Prologue

They were barefoot when they were sent home, their dripping feet leaving prints that evaporated almost instantly, as if they had never been there at all. Had it been possible to retrace their literal steps, as so many would try to do in the days that followed, the trail would have led from the wading pool area, where the party tables had been staked out with aqua Mylar balloons, past the snack bar, up the stairs, and to the edge of the parking lot. And each print would have been smaller than the last -- losing first the toes, then the narrow connector along the arch, the heels and, finally, the baby-fat balls of their feet -- until there was nothing left.

At the curb, they sat to put on their shoes -- sneakers for Ronnie, brand-new jellies for Alice, who used whatever money came her way to stay current with the fifth-grade fashion trends at St. William of York. Jellies were the thing to have that summer, on July 17th, seven years ago.

The parking lot's macadam shone black, reminding Alice of a bubbling, boiling sea in a fairy tale, of a landscape that could vaporize upon touch.

"It's like the desert in Oz," she said, thinking of the books she had read, the hand-me-down ones rescued from her mother's youth.

"There's no desert in Oz," Ronnie said.

"Yes, there is, later, in the other books, there's this desert that burns you up --"

"It's not a book," Ronnie said. "It's a movie."

Alice decided not to contradict her, although Ronnie usually ceded to Alice when it came to matters of books and facts and school. These were the things that Alice thought of as knowledge, a word that she saw in blazing blue letters, for it had stared at her all year from the bulletin board in their fifth-grade classroom. "A wise man is strong; yea, a man of knowledge increases strength." The "A" papers of the week were posted beneath that proverb, and Alice had grieved, privately, any week she failed to make the board. Ronnie almost never made it, and always said she didn't care.

But Ronnie was in one of her dark moods today, long past the point where anyone could tell her anything.

"I should call your mothers," Maddy's mom had fretted, even as she banished them from the party, from the pool. "You shouldn't cross Edmondson Avenue alone."

"I'm allowed," Ronnie said. "I have an aunt on Stamford, I go to her house when my parents are working. She's this side of Edmondson."

Then, with a defiant look around at the other girls, their faces still stricken and shocked, Ronnie added: "My aunt has double-stuff Oreos and Rice Krispie treats and all the cable channels, and I can watch anything I want, even if it's higher than PG-13."

Ronnie did have an aunt somewhere nearby, Alice knew, although Stamford didn't sound right. Neither did the Oreos and Rice Krispies -- there was never anything that good to eat in the Fuller house. There was all the soda you could drink, because Mr. Fuller drove a truck for Coca-cola. And Ronnie was telling the truth about what she watched. The Fullers didn't seem to care what Ronnie saw. Or did, or said. The only thing that seemed to bother Mr. Fuller was the noise from the television, because the only thing he ever said to Ronnie and her three older brothers was Turn it Down, Turn it Down. Or, for good measure: Turn it down for Christ's sake. Just last week, on a rainy afternoon, Ronnie had been watching one of those movies in which teen-agers kept getting killed in ever-more interesting ways, their screams echoing forever. Alice had buried her head beneath the sofa cushions, indifferent to the stale smells, the crumbs and litter pressing into her cheek. For once, she was almost glad when Mr. Fuller came through the door at the end of his shift. "Jesus, Ronnie," he had said on a grunt. "Turn it down. I swear there's just no living with you."

"You're blocking the set, dad," was Ronnie's only reply. But she must have found the remote, for the screams faded away a few seconds later, and Alice popped her head out again.

Maddy's mother didn't believe the story about Ronnie's aunt. Alice could see the skepticism in her parted lips, painted a glossy pink, and in her squinty, tired eyes. Maddy's mother seemed torn between wanting to challenge Ronnie's lie, and wanting to get away from Ronnie -- away from them, although Alice had done nothing, nothing at all, except get a ride to the party from Ronnie's brother.

Maddy's mother licked her lips once, twice, removing some of the pink and most of the gloss, and finally said: "Very well." Later she told everyone Ronnie had lied to her, that she never would have let two little girls leave if she had known they were going to be unsupervised, if she had known they were going to cross Edmondson Avenue alone. That was the worst thing anyone in Southwest Baltimore could imagine at 2 p.m., on July 17th, seven years ago -- crossing Edmondson Avenue alone.

The hill to Edmondson was long and gradual. Alice did not know if there were really ten hills in this neighborhood called Ten Hills, but there were enough slopes to punish short legs. The two girls did not have cover-ups, so they knotted their towels high on their bodies, at the spot where breasts were supposed to hold them. They also had no breasts, only puffy bumps, which they had started keeping in bras just this year. So the towels kept slipping to the ground, tangling at their ankles. Ronnie's was a plain, no-longer-white bath towel, and she cursed it every time it fell until, finally, after tripping over it for the fourth time, she slung it around her neck, not caring if people saw her body. Alice could never walk down the street like that, and she wore a one-piece. Ronnie had a red-and-white bikini, yet she was so thin that the skimpy bottoms seemed to bag on her. The only curve on Ronnie's body was her stomach, which bowed out slightly. "Like a Biafran baby," Alice's mother, Helen, had said. "Oops -- I'm dating myself." Alice had no idea what she was talking about, whether it was good or bad, or how someone went about dating herself. She just knew that her mother never said Alice looked like a Biafran baby.

Alice's navy one-piece had a cut-out of a daisy on her belly. Ronnie told her this was queer, and had said this every time she saw Alice in the suit this summer, which was exactly three times -- a day-trip to Sandy Point, another poolside birthday party and today. "Who wants to see a brown daisy on your fat white belly?" she had said when Alice's mom dropped her this morning at the Fullers' house before going to work.

"Vintage," Alice's mother had said. "It's vintage."

Ronnie didn't know what that meant, so she had to shut up. Ronnie liked Alice's mother and tried to be at her best when she was around. Alice didn't know what vintage meant, either, but she knew it was good. Her mother had a whole vocabulary of good words that Alice didn't quite understand. Vintage. Classic. Retro. New-Vo. When all else failed, when Alice was balking at wearing something because the other girls might tease her, Helen Manning would meet her eyes in the mirror and say: "Well, I think it's exquisite." This was the word that ended everything, her mom's way of saying, in her gentle way, Not-Another-Word, I'm-At-The- End-of-My-Patience. Ex-qui-site. The one time Alice had tried to use it, Ronnie had said: "Who wants zits?"

Yet it was Helen Manning who insisted that Alice play with Ronnie. Ronnie was a summertime-only friend, an in-the-neighborhood friend, the only other didn't-go-to-camp, didn't-have-a-pool-membership girl. During the school year, Alice had better friends, friends more like her, who read books and kept their hair neat and tried to wear the right things. Come fall, she was so happy for school to start because it meant a reunion with these real friends.

Only not this fall. Now that it was time for middle school, a lot of the girls in their class were going to private places. "Real private school," Wendy had said -- not meanly, but a little carelessly, forgetting that Alice wasn't going with them. Alice thought St. William of York was a real private school. It was real enough that Alice's mother couldn't afford it anymore. Next year, Alice would have to go to West Baltimore Middle. Ronnie would, too. Alice's mother said it wasn't about the money, that Alice needed to meet All Kinds of People, to be exposed to New Experiences and, besides, if she stayed in Catholic school much longer, she Might Become a Catholic, God Forbid.

But Alice knew: It was about the money. In the end, everything was about money -- in her house, in the Fuller house, even in the rich kids' houses. Parents just had different vocabulary words for it -- some fancy, some plain -- and different ways of talking about it. Or not talking about it, as the case may be.

In the Fuller family, they screamed and yelled about money, even stole from each other. Earlier this summer, Ronnie had caught her youngest-older brother going into her bank and tried to bite him. He had just pushed her down, then taken a hammer and smashed the bank, a Belle from Beauty and the Beast, even though she had a little plug beneath her feet. He didn't have to break her to get what was inside. And even when the money was freed -- mostly pennies and nickels but also quarters, a few of those dollar coins, from when they put the woman on the coin and nobody wanted her -- Patrick had kept pounding and pounding on Belle until she was nothing but blue powder.

Alice and her mother did not fight about money, did not even speak about it directly, not even when her grandparents visited from Connecticut and said things like: "Well, this is the life you made for yourself." Once, Alice's Grandfather Opie, as she called him, had given her a five dollar bill when she told him she didn't have the kind of scrunchie that all the other girls had. It was the only time her mother had ever spanked Alice, and they both cried afterwards, and agreed it would never happen again. Her mother would not spank and Alice would not make up stories to get money from Opie.

That had been back in the third grade, though, when neon scrunchies were important, and Alice hadn't yet learned to be good. Now the thing to have were jellies, which is why Alice saved her allowance and bought her own, at Target. She had showed them to her school-year-best-friend Wendy, when it was time to open the presents, and Wendy must have approved, for she made room for Alice on the bench she was sharing with two other girls from their class.

Maddy's birthday party had been set up near the baby pool, not because they were babies, but because it was behind a fence, and they needed the fence to tie the balloons. Alice found herself counting the gifts. She was always counting. Steps on the stair, lines on the highway, the number of birds flying south for the winter. There were 14 presents on the table, but only 13 girls at the party. Did Maddy's mom bring a present, too? Or did one of the girls away at camp send a gift? 14 presents, 13 girls. Hers was one of the prettiest on the outside- Alice's mother had wrapped it in blue paper that shimmered -- but the shape gave it away. The present was a book, just a book, and Maddy was not the kind of girl who would be happy to get a book. Maddy wanted one of those new T-shirts, the kind that leave your belly showing, and rubber bracelets, and the nail polish you could peel right off. Maddy was the youngest girl in the class, but she knew the most about make-up. She was always sneaking gloss, and green mascara, until the nuns caught her and sent her to the bathroom to wash it off.

Alice had expected Maddy's mother to be pretty, too, just-so. Yet Maddy's mother was sort of plain -- thin enough to wear a two-piece, but tired-looking, as if being so thin and tanned had worn her out. Even her hair looked tired, like the "before" picture in a cream-rinse ad. There were mainly two kinds of mothers at St. William of York, mothers who worked and mothers who didn't. But Maddy's mom was the Mother Who Used to Work. That's how she had introduced herself to Alice's mom, when she called the other day to ask a few questions about Ronnie. Alice knew what was said, because she listened in on the extension. Just sometimes.

"I'm Maddy's mother. I used to work -- at Piper, Marbury?" Alice's mother made an "ah" sound, as if this were a good thing. She approved of Anything Creative, as she was always telling Alice. But Alice was surprised to find out that Maddy's mom was a piper. She thought she had been a lawyer. She imagined Maddy's mother in a green hat with a feather, leading the children out of Hamlin, along with the rats. No, the rats came first, the piper took the children later. Besides, Maddy's mother must have been a piper in an orchestra to draw such an "ah" sound from Helen, not someone who just played on the street, or in circuses. Still, a mother who made music must be fun.

But Maddy's Mother Who Used to Work had looked as if she had a headache from the moment the party started. Her forehead had four creases, like two equal signs, and there was a tiny set of parentheses at the bridge of her nose. These seemed to get deeper and deeper as the day wore on and, by the time it was time to open the presents, her face looked like a very hard math problem, maybe even algebra. St. William of York didn't have a gifted program, but Sister Elizabeth had started giving Alice extra-credit homework in math. This was a secret. Alice wasn't sure why. She thought it might be because she didn't have a lot of secrets from her mother, who always seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. Other times, she thought her mom would be disappointed in Alice for liking math, which wasn't creative and led to making money, which Helen Manning always said really was the root of all evil -- not making money, but caring about it, counting it. When she first heard about the Root of All Evil, Alice had asked: "Is that near Route 40?" And her mother had laughed until she cried, then hugged her and said: "It's not far, I'll grant you that." Later, Alice had tried to make her mother laugh that same way again, telling the same joke over and over, until Helen had said: "Don't be such a pleaser, Alice. You weren't put on this planet to make other people happy. Not even me. Especially me."

Ronnie's present was the next-to-last to be opened. The paper was red and there were creases in the wrong places, so every knew it had been taken off some other present, folded into a square and re-used. It wasn't obviously Christmas paper -- no Santas, no holly, no candy canes, just red -- but, still, everyone knew that, too. The girl next to Wendy whispered something, who turned to tell Alice. Wendy's mouth was tickling Alice's ear when the present emerged, and then everyone fell silent, so the secret was never shared.

"Isn't that nice," Maddy's mother said, as she had said 12 times already, with just the same inflection.

Ronnie's gift was a Barbie, and no one in the fifth grade at St. William of York had played with a Barbie, not in public, for at least a year. When they did play Barbie, they played Soap Opera Barbie, in which Ken gets Barbie pregnant and they then have lots of serious talks about what to do, and whether it was wrong to have so much sex, and how they would never do it again if God will just take the baby away. The whole point of Soap Opera Barbie was the beginning, where you put Ken on top of Barbie and had them make funny noises. But that was a secret game, played in twos. In public, the only proper response to a Barbie was polite boredom, as if you couldn't quite remember what she's for. As if you've never seen her under Ken, going Oh! Oh! Oh!

So a Barbie was bad enough. But this was a black Barbie, which was weird, because black Barbies are for black girls, they just are, and not because of prejudice, which the St. William of York girls knew was wrong. Maybe if a girl had, say, 10 Barbies, one of them would be black, because then a girl could really branch out, have an apartment house full of Barbies. Maddy, in fact, was just the kind of girl who might have her own Barbie town. Her parents were that rich. So, although she was too old and the Barbie was black, that wasn't the worst thing.

No, the worst thing is that it was a Holiday Barbie. In July.

She wore a red gown and a fur-trimmed cape, and even Alice, who was sometimes slow to understand what other girls seemed born knowing, realized the doll was some Toys for Tots leftover. Ronnie's father was always bringing home stuff like this -- heart-shaped boxes of candy in late February, chocolate bunnies in May, new lawn furniture in October. Alice had heard her mother say Mr. Fuller's Coca-cola truck came home fuller than it went out. She wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but she had figured out it wasn't good, much less exquisite.

"Very pretty," Maddy's mother said, as if she meant it. "Say 'Thank you.'"

"Thank you, Ronnie." Maddy was the kind of girl who can make "That's a pretty dress" or "I like your hair that way," sound more evil than anything heard on an R-rated movie. In school, she had a habit of saying "Yes, sister," so it sounded like a curse word. Alice, who sometimes got in trouble for saying the right thing, had studied Maddy and tried to figure out how to get away with being so rude. It had to do with getting your mouth and your eyes not matching, so one -- the mouth -- looked pretty and right, and the other -- the eyes -- had this hard glitter, but nothing extra. No wink, no raised eyebrow. Ronnie, on the other hand, did it backwards. Her eyes were always wide and confused-looking, while her mouth was twisted and sneering.

Ronnie knew Maddy was making fun of her.

"It's a stupid nigger doll," Ronnie said, grabbing it from Maddy and throwing it into the baby pool. "My mom picked it out."

"Ronnie." Maddy's mom had to search for Ronnie's name, or so it seemed to Alice. "Please go get your gift out of the pool."

"I'm not going into the baby pool," Ronnie said. "There's so much pee in there it will take your toenails off."

Twelve little girls looked at their toenails beneath the table, for almost all of them had walked through the water at least once that day. Alice's toenails were robin's egg blue, which matched her blue jellies. Wendy had pink polish. Ronnie didn't wear polish, not since the time she had tried to paint her fingernails and come to school with red streaks all the way to her knuckles.

"Ronnie, please." Maddy's mother put a hand on Ronnie's wrist. Instinctively, Ronnie yanked her arm away and up, hard. Alice knew it was an accident, nothing more -- an accident that Ronnie's hand was clenched in a fist when she pulled away, an accident that the fist hit Maddy's mom on the underside of her chin.

But Maddy's mother cried out, louder than any kindergarten baby, as if the blow really stung, and the girls screamed as if they had just seen a car come crashing over the fence of the wading pool area.

"You hit my mom," Maddy said. "Ohmigod, she hit my mom."

"I'm sorry," Ronnie said. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to."

"You hit my mom. You hit a grown-up." The other girls' voices bubbled up, shrill and shocked, but a little excited, too. Something was happening.

When Maddy's mother spoke, it was in that quiet, scary tone that adults use so effectively: "I think we should call someone to take you home."

"I said I was sorry. I didn't mean to fight. It was an accident. You touched me first."

"You must be tired from all the sun and excitement. Is there someone at your house I can call to come get you?"

"I came with Alice," Ronnie said, grabbing her arm. "We have to go home together."

Alice was caught off-guard, unprepared to wiggle out of this. Yes, technically she was supposed to go home with Ronnie, but not if Ronnie misbehaved. Why should she have to leave just because Ronnie was bad? She hesitated, and that was when Ronnie told her lie, about the aunt and the Oreos and everything else.

"Very well," Maddy's mother said. "Actually, I feel better about two of you walking. Now you are going to your aunt's house, right? On this side of Edmondson? Good."

It's wasn't good and it wasn't well and it wasn't fair. Alice peeled herself away from the bench, grabbed her towel and checked the strap on her shoes. Wendy's sympathetic glance only made it worse. Ronnie walked into the pool and grabbed the doll, dropping it twice on the way back. Water had seeped through the cardboard. The doll's dress clung to her hard little body, drops of moisture beaded on her brown limbs. Alice wished she could dip her feet in the wading pool, rinsing them, because she knew what Ronnie said was only half-true. The little kids did pee in it, but that wouldn't take your toenails off. In fact, Alice's mom said pee was good for athlete's foot, and jellyfish stings.

And so they went, leaving those two sets of wet footprints, one slightly ahead of the other, together yet apart, linked by the sheer unfairness of things, the usual daily accidents. Up the stairs, across the vast black parking lot, up the long hill to Edmondson, where Ronnie beat on the silver button for the Walk sign, even though everyone knew it would change in its own good time and the button was just for show.

"I thought we were going to your aunt's house," Alice dared to say and Ronnie simply stared, her lie forgotten.

"My aunt works," she said. "In the summer she works at the crab house on Route 40. Besides, she doesn't like me to come around. She and my dad are in a fight about something."

Crossing Edmondson was easy, as it turned out, the "Walk" sign staying white their entire way across the broad, busy street. Alice knew they were breaking a rule, but it was exhilarating, a reminder of the new things that would come with leaving St. William and going to middle school. Her mother had promised she could wear makeup -- well, lipstick -- and get her haircut at a salon, instead of trims in the kitchen. Even though school was a long way away, Alice began to think longingly of the trip to Office Depot to buy supplies. And clothes -- she would need clothes if she wasn't wearing a uniform every day.

Once safely across Edmondson, Alice had assumed they would walk west to the jagged leg of Nottingham, where they both lived. But Ronnie wanted to take what she called a short-cut, which was really more of a long-cut -- past the bigger houses, the ones that sat back on large, green lawns with little yellow signs, warning dogs and children to stay away because of the chemicals.

They were halfway down Hillside, the grandest of all the big-house streets, when Ronnie stopped. "Look," she said.

It was a stroller, sun sparking off its silver handles, perched at the top of the stairs.

"The metal must be hot, sitting in the sun like that."

She seemed to expect an answer, so Alice said: "And it's too close to the stairs. It could tumble right down."

"Just roll right down."

"Unless the brake is on," Alice pointed out.

"Even if the brake is on, that's not right," Ronnie said. "You're not supposed to leave a baby like that."

"Her mother is probably right inside."

Ronnie grabbed Alice's elbow and gave it a wrenching pinch on the tip. Alice glanced at the bruise from an earlier pinch, remembered the clink of Maddy's mother's teeth as Ronnie's fist struck her jaw. No, this was not a day to contradict Ronnie.

"Not even for a minute," Ronnie said. "Anything could happen. Someone has to look after that baby."

They crept up to the door. The screen was heavy metal mesh, so dense that it was hard to see much in the cool, dark house beyond. But they heard nothing. No footsteps, no voices. Did you call out? Later, they would be asked that question so many times, in so many ways. Did you knock, did you ring the bell? Sometimes Alice said yes, and sometimes she said no, and whatever she said was true at the moment she said it. In her mind, there were a dozen, hundred, thousand versions of that day. They called out. They rang the bell. They knocked. They tried the door and, finding it unlocked, marched inside and used the phone to call 911. The mother was so happy that she gave them 20 dollars and called the newspaper and the television stations, and they were the ones on TV.

Most of the time, Alice was sure of two things -- they knocked on the door, the screen door, with its mesh so tight and small that it was almost impossible to see anything in the shadowy house. It was a screen over the screen, an intricate metal design, like something on a castle. It ended in tall thin spikes, higher than their heads. They said: "Hello? Hello?" Maybe not very loudly, but they said it.

"This baby is alone," Ronnie said. "We have to take care of this baby."

"We're too little to baby-sit," said Alice, who had asked her mother about this at the beginning of summer, when she was trying to figure out a way to make enough money to buy her jellies and other things she wanted. "You have to be in high school."

Ronnie shook her head.

"We have to take care of this baby."

The baby in question was asleep, slumped sideways in her carriage, so her full cheeks were flat on one side, full and puffy on the other, like a water balloon whose weight had shifted. She wore a pink gingham jumper with matching pink socks, and a pink cap of the same gingham.

"Baby Gap," Alice said. She loved Baby Gap.

"We have to take care of this baby."

Later, alone with her mother and the woman with the spotted face -- exquizits, Alice finally got Ronnie's joke -- they would ask her again and again just how Ronnie said this. WE have to take care of this baby. We have to TAKE CARE of this baby. We have to take care of THIS BABY. But Alice could not, in good faith, remember any emphasis. Eight words, requiring no more than five seconds to utter. We have to take care of this baby. We have to take care of this baby. We have to take care of this baby. Wehavetotakecareofthisbaby. They were being good, they were being helpful. People like children who are good and helpful. That's what Alice kept explaining. They were trying to be good.

And what did Ronnie tell her grown-ups -- her parents, the handsome man with the shiny blond hair and the suit with the funny name? Seersucker, Alice's mom had said, looking at the blond man in the hallway. Seersucker. Alice knew, from her mother's tone, that this was a good thing, as good as classic or vintage, even exquisite. What did Ronnie tell Mr. Seersucker, what did he believe when it was all over?

But that was the one thing that Alice never knew, never could know, and still did not know almost seven years later when she was released by the State of Maryland for her part in the death of Olivia Barnes.

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