Now You See Me... by Rochelle Krich

thinking, what if I’d told my parents about the IM. . . .”
    “Don’t.” I took her hand. “If Dassie was determined to meet this man, she would have figured out a way, even if your parents had kept a watch on her.”
    “You really think so?”
    I nodded.
    Aliza left the room in search of luggage. I took advantage of her absence to poke through the trash can at the side of Hadassah’s bed. Underneath crumpled papers, a handful of used unbent staples that poked my fingers, soiled cotton balls, and tissues stained with dark red lipstick, I discovered tags from Forever XXI, a trendy store. That was interesting. So was the stack of magazines under the bed:
In Style, Us,
Teen Ink, Seventeen.
Maybe typical reading for a Torat Tzion girl, but it didn’t fit with the girl who kept a basin and laver at her bedside so that she could perform the ritual morning hand-washing.
    I pushed the magazines back under the bed, but kept the tags.

Chapter 8
    Rabbi Bailor was in the dining room where I had left him, reading from a large text to the young boy on his lap.
    “This is Yonatan,” the rabbi told me. “Say hello to Mrs. Abrams, Yonatan. I was her teacher many years ago.”
    “Hello,” the boy said shyly. He was blond and blue-eyed, like his mother.
    “Yonatan is seven, but he gets to stay up late on Thursdays so that we can learn Torah. And tonight he asked a question I couldn’t answer. Right, Yonatan?”
    The boy grinned, producing dimples and revealing a gap where his two bottom front teeth should have been.
    “I’m going to talk to Mrs. Abrams, Yonatan. Get ready for bed, and I’ll come up and say
Sh’ma
with you.”
    Rabbi Bailor kissed the top of his son’s head and eased him off his lap. He watched him leave the room, then faced me.
    “You talked to Aliza? She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?”
    “Very.” I considered telling him his daughter was worried about her weight, but it wasn’t my business. “She told me you had a psychologist talk to the students.”
    “Dr. McIntyre. He came to counsel students after the Weinberg girl died, and this year he’s teaching a class for us. Batya’s death was the third tragedy in that class. Aliza told you? It was a terrible time, terrible.” The rabbi sighed deeply. “How do you explain the deaths of children to children? You talk about
Olam Habah.”
The afterlife. “You tell them
Hashem
is a loving Father, that He has a plan we can’t begin to fathom, that these souls have fulfilled their missions on this earth. But how can you expect them to understand when you don’t?”
    I have only recently begun to work through my feelings about God and Aggie’s murder, so I had no answer for that.
    “Did Hadassah talk to Dr. McIntyre?” I asked.
    “Many times. She took Batya’s death hard. Dassie’s still seeing him. In fact, Dr. McIntyre is the first person I turned to when Dassie ran away. She’s not answering our calls, but I thought maybe she would take his.” The rabbi rubbed his palms against the edge of the table. “Dr. McIntyre said he can’t initiate the communication. Dassie has his number. She would have to contact him.”
    “I’d like to talk to him. What about Hadassah’s teachers? Maybe one of them can give us a lead.”
    Rabbi Bailor frowned. “I thought my brother-in-law explained, Molly. We don’t want this getting out.”
    “I’m not planning to advertise your daughter’s disappearance in the
Jewish Journal.”
I blushed. “I’m sorry. That was
chutzpadik.”
    “Yes, it was,” he said quietly. “But you’re right. You have to ask questions.” The look he gave me was filled with sadness.
    I would have preferred anger. “About her teachers?”
    “Dassie likes most of them.”
    “Anyone in particular?” I prodded, curbing my impatience.
    “She admired her history teacher, but he’s not at Torat Tzion this year.” Rabbi Bailor shut the text. “So did you learn anything from Aliza?”
    I fingered the tags in my jacket