She turns, descending a few more steps. When she looks back, he’s gone. She can’t help feeling that it doesn’t say much for the likelihood of her finding a little girl if she can’t keep track of a dog who was there mere seconds ago. “Jasper, you’d make a terrible sidekick,” she says to the air.
Back to the task, Jane weaves through the lilac ladies in the receiving hall and goes to the side table where she saw the girl leave something. Next to a family photo of Kiran, Ravi, Octavian, and a blond, youngish-looking lady who’s probably Charlotte is a strange object, itself shaped like a small table. It’s a pedestal, with an oak base and a circular mirror top. There’s a tiny hole in the center of the mirror. Altogether, it doesn’t look particularly significant.
One of the lilac ladies appears beside her. “That’s just the sort of stand I need,” she says with satisfaction, setting a squat vase of lilacs atop the pedestal.
All right, then. Whatever its purpose was before, it’s now a platform for lilacs.
Did the girl leave the pedestal on the table, or the Thrash family photo?
And where did she go after that?
Jane crosses into the Venetian courtyard but has no idea which direction to choose next. She’s seen some of the rooms to the left—the ballroom, the banquet hall, the kitchen. Curiosity pulls Jane to the right, through the east arcade, then into a room she’s never seen before, with old-fashioned, floral green wallpaper, brocaded settees, a fussy green carpet, and no little girl.
Crossing that room, Jane opens a door in the opposite wall and enters another world—for she’s found the bowling alley. Not that it’s like any bowling alley she’s ever seen or imagined; the walls are made of rough stone reinforced with broad wooden beams and the light is low and moody, like something one might find in a cave under a mountain. Two bowling lanes stretch before her, burnished expanses of maple and pine. Pins gleam palely at the end of each lane. This is where the Pied Piper goes bowling, she thinks, by himself, after he’s entombed all the children.
Obscurely concerned now for the missing child, Jane walks straight down the left-hand bowling lane, the only route to a door set in the wall at its end. It feels wrong to her, immoral somehow—surely bowling lanes are not for walking on.
When she opens the door, her world changes again. Heat, light, lapping noises, and the smell of chlorine: the indoor swimming pool. The wall across from her is taken up by an enormous, long fish tank. A fluorescent green eel nestles against the glass, leering at her, and a bull shark—a species of shark known to attack humans—swims lazily from one side to the other.
Uneasily, Jane eyes the water of the pool. No drowned little girl. There’s a door in the fish tank though, a normal, wooden door with a brass knob. Jane finds this so peculiar that she opens it, imagining the water, the eel, the bull shark, pouring through the doorway. Instead she discovers a short, dark passage stretching before her, leading through the tank to another door. Opening that door, she finds herself stepping into a patch of crocuses.
Wind whips against stone. Jane can hear the sound of crashing waves somewhere below. It takes her a moment to orient herself: She’s at the back of the house.
To the left, some distance along the vast wall, the little girl sits on the ground, nestled against the side of a terrace. She’s tucked herself against the house with her arms wrapped around her legs, making herself small.
Jane approaches her stealthily. The girl is crying and shivering. Her hair is short and crooked, a dark shade of blond, her eyes swollen. Her sparkly purple sneakers and her blue jeans are splotchy from the wet grass.
The little girl jumps up as Jane gets closer, glares at Jane, and crouches like a runner about to take off. Jane freezes in her tracks and raises her hands. “It’s okay,” she says, not certain what she’s mollifying the girl about, but doing so instinctively.
“Who are you?” the girl demands.
“I’m Janie.”
“Are you with,” the girl begins, then spits out a few words in French that sound awfully well-pronounced.
“With who?” says Jane.
“Never mind,” says the girl. “Why are you here?”
“Did you say ‘espions sans frontières’?”
“No,” says the girl. “Why are you here?”
“Doesn’t that mean ‘spies without borders’?”
“I don’t speak French,” says the girl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are you here?”
She’s not the world’s best liar, this little girl. “Because I saw you in the receiving hall and wanted to see where you went,” says Jane.
“No.” Her tone is shrill. “Why are you in the house? What’s your affiliation?”
Jane finds herself speaking in soothing tones. “My friend Kiran invited me to visit. Kiran’s dad owns the house.”
“Seriously?” says the girl. “You’re just a person?”
“Of course. What else would I be?”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Grace?” says Jane. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not Grace,” says the girl quickly. “My name is Dorothy.”
“Okay,” says Jane, trying to sound like she believes this. “Nice to meet you, Dorothy. Do you live in the house?”
“I’m related to Mrs. Vanders,” says Dorothy. “I’m her great-niece. I’m visiting.”
“It’s funny, because you look an awful lot like Grace Panzavecchia.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“She’s in the news,” says Jane.
“A lot of things are in the news,” says Dorothy, wiping her bangs out of her eyes with a damp hand. “A lady got bitten by a bear at a zoo in France. It’s raining frogs in Seattle for a record fourteen days in a row. A guy in New York died of smallpox.”
“Grace Panzavecchia is a little girl whose parents tried to rob a bank in Manhattan,” says Jane. “Then the entire Panzavecchia family disappeared.”
“That’s preposterous,” says Dorothy. “What about their dog?”
“Their dog?” Jane responds in confusion. “What dog?”
“I mean, did they have a dog?”
“Actually,” says Jane, remembering something about a dog, spoken by a news anchor who’d looked a little like a St. Bernard (which is why it had stuck in Jane’s mind), “it’s funny you ask that. I do remember a dog. A German shepherd? The police found it in the Panzavecchias’ house after they all disappeared.”
“What else?” the girl says.
“About the dog?”
“Yes!” she says. “Who’s taking care of the dog?”
“I don’t know,” says Jane. “The news people aren’t talking about the dog. They’re talking about the Mafia being involved and the kids disappearing, and the baby being sick with smallpox.”
“Smallpox!” the girl says. “The baby doesn’t have smallpox!”
“What? No,” Jane says, realizing she’s misspoken. “Sorry. You’re right. You mentioned the guy in New York who died of smallpox and I got mixed up. They’re saying the baby has spots, like maybe it’s chicken pox or something.”
“Smallpox could be used as a biological weapon again,” the girl says, “like what the British did to Native Americans at Fort Pitt during the French and Indian War. Did you know that?”
“I—never really thought about it,” Jane says. “You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Smallpox is supposed to be one of those diseases no one gets anymore,” the girl says. “There’s supposed to be a stock of it in a lab in Atlanta and one in Russia, just for posterity. But that’s only what they say. Microbiologists could alter smallpox so it could be used for modern warfare.”
“Okay,” says Jane. “They announced on the news a few days ago that the guy who got smallpox had some sort of freak accident. They said he broke into the labs of the CDC in Atlanta and got into something he shouldn’t.”
“Yeah,” says the girl, jutting her jaw with obvious scorn. “That’s a likely story.”