Free Good Girls by Glen Hirshberg

those freezing fingers, then up at the person attached to them. The fingers stayed on his chest.
    â€œThat girl,” said the boy who’d stopped him, from underneath his sombrero. “Tell me about her.”
    Not a boy, Oscar decided, but slowly; his thoughts felt glacial, as though clogged with ice. This guy was thin like a boy, and taller than Oscar, but his voice was older—old, really—despite the eagerness in it. Also, his mouth looked too round, too dark under the shadow of that sombrero, like an open manhole. The eyes stayed completely hidden in the shadow of the hat, which wasn’t even a sombrero, really. Machine-made American approximation.
    â€œYou know her,” said the man. He wasn’t asking. “Is she as … I mean, of course she is. Right?” And then, to Oscar’s astonishment, the man whistled. The whistle melted into a tune, a cumbia, of all things. Oscar knew it but couldn’t place it, though he remembered some of the words, or one word, anyway.
    Jacarandosa. Person of grace.
    His response was instinctive, powered less by protectiveness of Rebecca than longing for his daughter, grief for his wife, and it almost came quickly enough to be convincing. “ No habla Ingles. ”
    The whistling man whistled to the end of the chorus, and when he reached that last, long note, he trilled it like an ocarina player, or a bird. The sound sizzled straight into Oscar’s veins.
    Then the man smiled, tilting back his head so Oscar could see his eyes. “Come on, now,” he said. “You poor, lonely man. You’ll see. It’s so much better when you share.”
    And Oscar knew—even before his killer knew—that he was going to die.

 
    7
    In another hour, Rebecca figured, she could head for Halfmoon House. Her shift there didn’t officially start until noon. But maybe Amanda would allow an exemption to the ban on overnight stays for former residents—part of the Amanda Plan for Orphan Self-Sufficiency—and let her sack out on the cot downstairs in the “guest” room. That room, after all, had been a staple of Rebecca’s chore-list for years, and was always kept hospital-clean and freshly flowered in case a long-lost or newly rehabilitated relative of one of the current residents showed up to visit. And Rebecca wouldn’t technically be staying overnight, anyway, just … taking a nap. Recovering.
    Even if Amanda refused to lift the ban, she’d almost certainly let Rebecca take up her familiar seat at the end of the grooved, warping wooden worktable in the kitchen to fold sheets and sip homegrown peppermint tea while Amanda washed and cooked and folded and scrubbed counters and ignored her. Sooner or later, Joel would finish his morning outside-chores, wander in for his coffee, smile at her or stick out a tongue at his wife’s rigid back, and wink. Then he’d head off to the stairs to yell his daily wake-up absurdity to Trudi and Danni, his current not-quite-daughters. There’s a hole in Nantucket, dear Danni, dear Trudi. Or, Freight train, gone so fast. Ate my spaniel, kicked my …
    Just remember, Amanda would say after that, maybe not right away but at some point, perhaps in the middle of a conversation later in the morning, the chill in her voice like an ice cube dropped down Rebecca’s back, Halfmoon House is not your home. It never was. It’s a path to the home you’ll make on your own, one day. Hers would be a less kind but more bracing awakening than the one Joel offered . And that was exactly the sort of awakening she needed today, because the voice in her head—her caller’s voice—kept threading through her thoughts. It wasn’t even his words, just his voice, lilting and smooth, sticky as a spiderweb.
    In the meantime, here she was at Halfmoon Lake. She’d barely noticed leaving campus or cutting through the forest. She had hoped, vaguely, that