All the Beautiful Girls. Elizabeth J Church

legs, whirling skirts that flew up to show dancers’ underpants and elicited the occasional “Shameful!” from Aunt Tate.

      But, oh, the best part was the dancing! Maracas and mambos and cha-cha-cha, handsome men lifting Dinah in the air and carrying her around the stage, her smile never faltering. The dancers’ hips swaying, feet moving in rococo patterns. It was a world mercifully far removed from the martyred, blood-red edges of Aunt Tate ’s Bible, her thick support hose, and Uncle Miles’ weight on the edge of Lily’s bed, the way he pulled down the covers, a prelude.

      LILY FIRST RAN away when she was nine, the summer after third grade. She climbed up on a chair and pulled her suitcase from its shelf high in her bedroom closet. It was made of cheap, pressed cardboard painted in pastel shades, with a lamb that had a yellow bow perched gaily in the curls of each ear. Lily flipped the latches so that the case opened to its pink-and-white-checked interior, and then she looked around to decide what to pack. She put in Black Beauty and two of her Nancy Drew mysteries, followed by the miniature porcelain elephant her father had won at the state fair. She filled the rest of the space with plain white Carter’s panties and undershirts, a nightie decorated with daisies, a comb, and a cylinder of scented talcum powder that had belonged to her mother.

      The last thing Lily included was her mother’s big black palmistry book with the line drawings of hands, the mounts of Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, and Venus. Mama used to run a ruby-red, manicured nail along the lines of Lily’s palm, pointing out the differences between what she’d been born with and what she would do with whatever the Fates sent her way. Lily had loved her mother’s touch, the way she prodded the pads of Lily’s fingers. “You have psychic hands, too, my Valentine’s Day child,” Mama had said, noting Lily’s long, tapered fingers and holding her own hand up for comparison. “Now, your sister Dawn, she’s a Leo—her hands are square, like your daddy’s. Practical, no nonsense. You’re the one, baby girl. The one like me.”

      Lily got as far as the Petersons’ house, two streets away, before Uncle Miles happened by on his way to the drugstore for rolling papers and beef jerky.

      “Get in,” he said, pulling over and pushing open the passenger door to his pickup truck. Lily hesitated, holding the hard plastic handle of her suitcase with both hands, already weary with the weight of it. She looked around, hoping someone would see her there, marooned in the shimmering summer heat. “Now,” her uncle commanded. Slowly, Lily climbed in, set the suitcase at her feet, and pulled the door shut behind her. “Don’t try that again.” He squeezed her upper arm until she cried out. “It’d be the death of your Aunt Tate.”

      As he pulled away from the curb, Lily curled in on herself, trying not to smell Uncle Miles’ body next to hers. She glanced at his hands on the steering wheel, his thumbs like stubby, rounded clubs. When he said, “Stay put or else” and left her sitting in the truck while he went into the drugstore, she pulled out her mother’s book. Uncle Miles had what palmists called a clubbed hand. Such people, the book said, lacked willpower and were prone to criminal behavior.

      She closed the volume when she saw her uncle lumbering back across the parking lot. He sat heavily behind the wheel and turned toward her, smiling so that his canines showed long and sharp. “You’re so sexy,” he said, using his husky, nighttime voice. “You make me lose control.” He scanned the parking lot and then crept his hand across the front seat toward her. Lily scooted so that her back was pressed against the passenger door. Surreptitiously, she tried to find the handle. “You’re not going anywhere,” Uncles Miles said as he started the truck. “You hear me?” He looked straight ahead through the windshield splattered with dead insects. When Lily failed to answer him, he slapped the seat between them, making dust rise. “Hear me? I said ‘NOWHERE.’ ”

      “Yes,” Lily said, her voice small.

      “Sir!”

      “Sir,” she squeaked.

      “Or else!”

      “Or else,” Lily confirmed.

      On the way back to the house, Uncle Miles took a detour. “Got something to show you,” he said as if he were giving her a gift. He drove until they reached a neighborhood of homes with big, welcoming front porches and shadowy green lawns. Uncle Miles slowed the truck, looking at house numbers. Finally, he stopped in front of a pale gray, two-story house with elaborate white trim. He let the engine idle and pointed.

      “See that one?”

      Lily nodded. It had broad flower beds with lilies, roses, and Mama’s favorite—peonies.

      “That’s where he lives. The man who killed your family.”

      Lily stared at the contrasting charcoal-gray front door with its inset diamond panes of leaded glass. She saw a lush fern hanging from the porch ceiling and two white wicker chairs angled toward each other, as if they were friends. Everything she saw from the window of Uncle Miles’ truck only deepened her curiosity about the man who’d collided with Lily’s family on that June night when dry lightning raked the horizon.

      “You listening? I’m telling you that a murderer lives in that fancy house. These air force pilots think they can come to our town and lord it over the rest of us. You just remember,” Uncle Miles said as he took the truck out of neutral and slowly pulled away from the curb, “when you hear those sonic booms it’s probably that aviator, flying over you. The man who killed your family.”

      Lily looked back at the Aviator’s house for as long as she could. She wanted for him to come out of the front door, to see her. She wanted to sit on his front steps and ask him things like Why? and How come? She wanted to beg Save me.

      SHE HAD FEW memories of the night that broke her life into Before and After. She remembered that her allergies had been so severe that her nose bled, and so Mama made Lily lie down in the backseat, wrapped in a blanket patterned with stars and moons. As Lily drifted off to sleep, she watched Dawn stand, reach over the front seat, and begin to braid their mother’s hair.

      Lily remembered waking up on the side of the road, curled into the arms of a stranger and seeing the Aviator standing near his car—the one with taillights set in wildly exaggerated fins that looked like some beast’s red, wicked eyes. She remembered her family’s motionless car, sparks of insects flashing in the headlight beams. Redwing blackbirds rising from fields of summer wheat, panicked by the commotion. The hiss of whitewall tires as they sighed last breaths; a violent whoosh of steam erupting from the radiator.

      The Aviator had knelt beside Lily, holding a handkerchief to the top of his head. A thick shock of black hair hid his eyes. Lines of blood painted the contours of his face and ran into his mouth.

      “What have you got there?” he had asked Lily—just as if he ’d met her on the street outside Hutchinson’s Ice Cream Store in downtown Salina.

      Lily handed him her bouquet of four crayons, the ones she ’d held on to, tight, when the stranger lifted her from the car’s wreckage. “These ones are my favorites,” she said. Periwinkle, Carnation Pink, Cornflower, and Pine Green.

      Mostly, Lily remembered that the Aviator hadn’t felt like a bad man. He felt like a sad one.

      THERE WERE INTERMITTENT pools of rainwater relief, times when Lily smiled. Those times came when the parcels arrived in the mail, wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, and addressed in bold black ink to Miss Lily Decker. The first was Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles. It was an old book from 1904, with a battered cover and fine engravings of trees, cattails, birds, and clouds. Before beginning the novel, Lily hoisted herself onto the kitchen counter and sneaked exactly ten saltines from Aunt Tate’s larder. Then, she propped herself up on her bed with the book, eating the saltines as slowly as possible. As she sucked the salt from each cracker, she knew she was just like Freckles—crippled and unlovable. Still, she felt a little less lonely.

      The mysterious books smelled of time, somehow held the breath of another reader, someone before Lily. The secrecy surrounding the identity of the book-giver made Lily feel special, somehow deserving. The books also let her travel far from