"Well," he said after a while. "That's about right, isn't it. She's the one that got lost."
On the far end of the workbench, she saw now, there was a plastic bag from the Highline, double-bagged, with three boxes in it. Starlight Kingdom. Yellow, blue, red-haired with a bow.
"You haven't taken them yet," she said.
"County closet's only open weekdays. Ten to two. I was going this morning." He glanced at the dolls on the bench and then at her. "I can go tomorrow."
Cassia looked at the bag for a long moment. Then she picked up the one-armed yellow doll from the workbench and put her back in her pocket, head up, so she could see out.
"No," she said. "Go now. I'll follow you."
The Pueblo County Department of Human Services was a long tan building on Court Street with a flagpole and a row of junipers that needed what her father would have called an orderly trim. She parked her Corolla beside his motorcycle in the visitor lot and watched him take off his gloves and put them in the saddlebag beside the coffee can, and touch the lid, and buckle it.
The woman at the front desk was in her fifties, with reading glasses on a cord and a cardigan with cats on it, and she looked up when the door opened and said, "Mr. Caskey. Right on schedule," as if he were a train. Then she saw Cassia behind him and her eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch and came back down, professionally.
"This is Cassia," Elam said. He did not say anything else about who she was, and Cassia was grateful.
"Nice to meet you, Cassia." The woman came around the desk with a ring of keys. "You want to see the closet? People always want to see the closet."
It was a real closet, a deep one off the hallway behind the front desk, with metal shelves on three sides and a single bulb in a cage. There were stacks of new pajamas in plastic sleeves, sorted by size. There were toothbrushes and small tubes of toothpaste and combs and hair ties. There were fleece blankets, folded. There were backpacks with the tags still on. And on the top shelf on the left, behind a hand-lettered sign taped to the edge that said THESE GO OUT IN THREES - DO NOT SPLIT, there was a row of princess dolls in their boxes. Six of them. Two sets.
"Those are from last year," the woman said, following her eyes. "We had a quiet summer, thank God. Some years they're all gone by March." She took the bag from Elam and began to set the new boxes on the shelf, the yellow, the blue, the red-haired one, side