The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates

most of his customers; but he could not say with certainty if she had been in his store on Thursday, with or without her daughter. “There are so many customers. And so many of them, they look like one another especially if they are blond.”
    Detectives queried teenagers, most of them from Skatskill High, and some no longer in school, who hung out at the mini-mall. Most of them stiffened at the approach of police officers and hurriedly shook their heads no, they had not seen the littleblond girl who was missing, or anyway could not remember seeing her. A striking girl with electric blue hair and a glittering pin in her left eyebrow frowned at the photo and said finally yeah she’d maybe seen Marissa “like with her mother? But when, like maybe it wasn’t yesterday because I don’t think I was here yesterday, might’ve been last week? I don’t know.”
    Skatskill Day School was in a stage of siege. TV crews on the front walk, reporters and press photographers at all the entrances. Crisis counselors met with children in small groups through the day following Marissa’s disappearance and there was an air in all the classrooms of shock, as if in the wake of a single violent tremor of the earth. A number of parents had kept their children home from school, but this was not advised by school authorities: “There is no risk at Skatskill Day. Whatever happened to Marissa did not happen on school grounds, and would never have happened on school grounds.” It was announced that school security had been immediately strengthened, and new security measures would begin on Monday. In Marissa Bantry’s sixth grade class children were subdued, uneasy. After the counselor spoke, and asked if anyone had a question, the class sat silent until a boy raised his hand to ask if there would be a search party “like on TV, people going through woods and fields until they find the body?”
    Not after a counselor spoke with eighth graders, but later in the day, an eighth grade girl named Anita Helder came forward hesitantly to speak with her teacher. Anita was a heavyset girl with a low C average who rarely spoke in class, and often askedto be excused for mysterious health reasons. She was a suspected drug-taker, but had never been caught. In class, she exuded a sulky, defiant manner if called upon by her teacher. Yet now she was saying, in an anxious, faltering voice, that maybe she had seen Marissa Bantry the previous day, on Fifteenth Street and Trinity, climbing into a minivan after school.
    “ . . . I didn’t know it was her then for sure, I don’t know Marissa Bantry at all but I guess now it must’ve been her. Oh God I feel so bad I didn’t try to stop her! I was like close enough to call out to her, ‘Don’t get in!’ What I could see, the driver was leaning over and sort of pulling Marissa inside. It was a man, he had real dark hair kind of long on the sides but I couldn’t see his face. The minivan was like silver-blue, the license plate was something like TZ 6 . . . Beyond that, I can’t remember.”
    Anita’s eyes welled with tears. She was visibly trembling, the memory so upset her.
    By this time Skatskill detectives had questioned everyone on the school staff except for Mikal Zallman, thirty-one years old, computer consultant and part-time employee, who wasn’t at the Skatskill Day School on Fridays.
    F EEDING M Y R AT
    It was an ugly expression. It was macho-ugly, the worst kind of ugly. It made him smile.
    Feeding my rat. Alone.
    I N C USTODY
    Alone he’d driven out of Skatskill on Thursday afternoon immediately following his final class of the week. Alone driving north in his trim Honda minivan along the Hudson River where the river landscape so mesmerizes the eye, you wonder why you’d ever given a damn for all that’s petty, inconsequential. Wondering why you’d ever given a damn for the power of others to hurt you. Or to accuse you with tearful eyes of hurting them.
    He’d tossed a valise, his backpack, a