Blobs of dark color flashed across her vision. She heard something scurry through the trees, and suddenly the thought of standing still panicked her, and she needed to move, but without the flashlight she couldn’t see her way forward so she clicked it back on and the trees and pine needles on the ground materialized in front of her again.

She moved fast, flashlight pointed down, looking for a little girl’s leg clad in denim sticking out from behind a pine tree. Mixed in with the sound of her breath and her heartbeat and her pulse she heard things groaning in the trees all around her; any minute a big hand would settle on the back of her neck. Her pounding heart pulled her forward.

She should turn around and go home. She was nothing but a tiny speck in the forest. She was a fool to think she’d somehow stumble across Destiny Taylor this way, and what was she going to say when she saw James Harris? Was she going to knock him over the head with her little flashlight? She needed to go back.

Then the trees stopped and she stepped onto a dirt road. It wasn’t very wide but the sandy soil was loose and she realized someone must be building something nearby because of the big tread marks pressed into its surface. She flashed the light in one direction and saw the little road disappearing into a dark tunnel of trees. She flashed the light in the other direction and saw the chrome grille of James Harris’s white van.

She snapped off her light and stepped back into the pines, stumbling over a stump. He could’ve seen her. She’d snapped her light off in time, but she realized that he could’ve seen her beam bobbing through the trees as she approached, and then she’d stood there like a dummy looking the other way before shining her light at the van. She wanted to run but made herself hold still instead. The van didn’t move.

It wasn’t fifty feet away. She could walk over and touch it. She needed to walk over and touch it. She needed to know if he was inside.

She walked toward it, her shoes sinking into the sand, making no sound, her stomach churning. She waited for the headlights to scream on and pin her down, the engine to roar to life and run her over. The van’s grille and windshield swam from side to side in her vision, bouncing up and down, getting closer, and then she was there. She realized that inside was darker than outside so she ducked down, knees popping, to make sure he didn’t see her head outlined through his windshield against the night sky.

She put out one hand to steady herself. The curve of the hood felt cool. She wondered if the police were at Wanda’s trailer yet. She wanted to go back. Didn’t drug dealers have guns, and knives, and all kinds of weapons? She imagined Blue in the back of the van and knew she had to look. Destiny Taylor wasn’t her child but she was still a child.

Patricia slowly rose, knees cracking, and leaned forward until the edges of her hands touched the cold windshield, and she cupped them around her eyes and peered inside. Beyond the thin crescent rim of the steering wheel it was pitch-dark. She narrowed her eyes until the muscles in them ached, but she couldn’t see a thing.

Then she realized he wasn’t in the van. He was still in the woods with Destiny, or he’d finished with her and was on his way back. Before he got there she could look inside quickly and see if there were any clues, any clothes from that other child, anything that belonged to Francine. She had seconds.

She walked to the back of the van, wrapped her hand around the door handle, and pulled. Then she raised her flashlight and turned it on.

A man’s back bent over something on the floor, his rear end and the soles of his work boots turned toward her, and then his back reared up, and he turned into the flashlight’s beam and she saw James Harris. But there was something wrong with the lower half of his face. Something black, shiny, and chitinous like a cockroach’s leg, stuck several inches out of his mouth. His jaws hung open, stupefied, as he blinked blearily in the light, but otherwise his body didn’t move as this long insectoid appendage slowly withdrew into his mouth, and when it had retreated fully, he closed his lips and she saw that his chin and cheeks and the tip of his nose were coated in slick, wet blood.

Beneath him, a young black girl lay sprawled on the floor, long orange T-shirt pushed up to her stomach, legs akimbo, an ugly dark purple mark on the inside of one thigh, oily with fluids.

James Harris slapped the palm of one hand against the metal side of the van and the vehicle shook from side to side as he hauled himself to his feet. He squinted and Patricia realized her flashlight had blinded him. He took an unsteady, lurching step toward her. She froze, not knowing what to do, and then he took another step, rocking the van more, and she realized there was only three feet between them. The little girl moaned and squirmed like she was asleep, whimpering like Ragtag in his dreams.

The van rocked as James Harris took another step. There were maybe two feet between them now and she had to do something to get that little girl out of there, and he still squinted into the flashlight beam. He reached for it slowly, fingers outstretched, inches from her face. Patricia ran.

The second the flashlight beam was off his face she heard his feet clang once on the van’s floor and then hit the sand behind her. She ran into the woods, flashlight on, beam dancing crazily over stumps and trunks and leaves and bushes, and she shoved her way past branches that slapped her face and tree trunks that bruised her shoulders and vines that lashed her ankles. She didn’t hear him behind her but she ran. She didn’t know for how long, but she knew it was long enough for her flashlight’s batteries to dim. She thought these woods would never end, and then the woods spat her out beside a chain-link fence and she knew she was back on one of the roads leading into Six Mile.

She shined her light around but it only made the shadows loom larger and dance crazily. She searched for something familiar and then everything exploded into bright white light and she saw a car coming her way slowly, jouncing up and down the bumpy road, and she cringed against a fence and it stopped, and a police officer’s voice said, “Ma’am, do you know who called 911?”

She got in the back and had never been so grateful to hear anything as she was to hear the door slam shut behind her. The air conditioning instantly dried her sweat and left her skin gritty. She saw that the officer had a gun on his hip, and his partner in the passenger seat turned around and asked, “Can you show us the house where the child went missing?” They had a shotgun in a rack between them, and all of it made Patricia feel safe.

“He’s got her right now,” Patricia said. “He’s doing something to her. I saw them in the woods.”

The partner said something into a handset and they turned on their flashing lights but not their siren, and the car flew down the narrow road. Patricia saw the Mt. Zion A.M.E. church ahead of them.

“Where did you see them?” the officer asked.

“There’s a road,” Patricia said as the police car bounced into Six Mile. “A construction road back in the woods behind here.”

“Over there,” the officer in the passenger seat said, lowering the radio handset, pointing across the car.

The driver turned hard, and mobile homes reeled to the right in their headlights. Then the police car surged forward between two small homes and they left Six Mile behind. Trees surrounded them and the officer driving turned the wheel to the right and Patricia felt its tires slide on sand, heavy and slow, and then they were on the road she’d found.

“This is it,” Patricia said. “He’s in a white van up ahead.”

They slowed, and the officer in the passenger seat used a handle to steer a spotlight mounted outside the car to shine into the woods on both sides of the road, panning across the trees. It was thousands of times brighter than Patricia’s little flashlight. They rolled down their windows to listen for a little girl’s cries.

Before they knew it, they’d reached the end of the road, coming to where it ran into the state road.

“Maybe we missed him?” one of the officers said.

Patricia didn’t look at her watch but she felt like they drove up and down that soft, sandy road for an hour.

“Let’s try the house,” the driver said.

She directed them back to Six Mile and they parked outside Wanda’s trailer. The partner let Patricia out of the back and she ran up the rickety front porch and banged on the door. Wanda practically threw herself outside.

“She hasn’t come back,” she said. “She’s still out there.”

“We need to see the child’s room,” one police officer said. “We have to see the last place you saw her.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Patricia said. “His name is James Harris. He lives near me. He might have taken her back to his house. I can show you.”