Finding five dollars wasn’t news for long.
Other things happened.
Big things.
Three girls were killed. Right here, in our city. Rochester, New York. They were put into the ground, those girls. Buried under flat stone over at Mount Hope, lying silent beneath the red earth and wild violets of Holy Sepulchre. Something terrible happened to them. Something my mother spoke of with hands over her mouth.
“They were from the city,” was all she’d say, “from the city, poor, and Catholic.”
Like us.
She never said it, but it was there.
Each had first and last names starting with the same letter. Wanda Walkowicz. Carmen Colon. Michelle Maenza. The man on the news said they were found with half-digested cheeseburgers in their bellies.
Why had those girls let him feed them?
The mystery of their trust plagued me more than the mystery of their deaths. Here’s what I decided: I wouldn’t eat a thing if he came for me. I knew my letters, could spell out my name, and my mother had told me twice already that my initials were not doubled, so there was that to hold on to. “There’s nothing to worry about,” my mother said and tried to sound sure of things, but I knew by the way she told us to stay by her side that she was scared too.
One of the girls had lived close to us. Michelle was in the third grade with my brother one day and the next, his classroom had an extra desk.
Lucky for me my initials were mismatched. Good thing my mother mixed things up. And the girls he took were nine or ten, while I was not yet six. Still, he might have run out of double-initialed girls or changed his mind about the age he wanted. I thought of such things, but most of all, I worried about my hunger, that he might sense it in me, that I might forget myself and eat whatever he offered.
So if he came for me, I knew just what to do. I’d decided on the exact cupboard to ball myself into. And if he found me there, I knew how to protect myself. I’d keep my mouth closed, and no matter what—even if he pried it open with big angry hands—I would let nothing pass.