Then he was reaching into the back pocket of his jeans, slowly, and taking out a wallet, an old brown leather wallet on a chain, the leather so worn it had gone soft and pale at the folds. He opened it. He took out four twenties. And then, for a reason she would not understand until much later, and that she suspected he did not understand at the time either, he did not close the wallet. He held it open on the counter, the bills in his other hand, and he turned it a little toward her, and he said, "This is her."
Behind a scratched plastic window, where most people kept a driver's license, there was a photograph.
It was small and square, the colors gone orange and soft the way photographs went if they had been printed at a drugstore a long time ago and then carried against a body for years. A little girl, maybe three, sat on the gas tank of a black motorcycle in what looked like a garage, with a pegboard of tools behind her and a calendar on the wall. She was wearing a paper crown from a fast-food restaurant, gold, with fake jewels printed on it, and it had slipped down over one eyebrow. She was laughing with her whole face, with her mouth open so wide you could see she was missing nothing and had every one of her small teeth. She was holding up a doll in each hand, a yellow one and a blue one, high, as if she were showing them to the camera. And around her waist, holding her steady on the tank, was a man's arm. A big arm, in a gray sleeve pushed to the elbow, and on the forearm, sharp and new in the photograph the way it was not anymore on the arm in front of her, a bluebird with its wings half open, holding a banner, and on the banner, in curly letters, the name RAELYNN.
Cassia had seen this photograph before.
She had seen it a hundred times. She had seen it on the fourth page of a book with a padded blue cover, under a sheet of plastic that crackled when you turned it, in a bedroom on Lakeview Avenue with glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. Except in that book, the photograph was not square. In that book, someone had cut it with scissors, a careful straight line down the right side and a careful straight line across the top, so that the man was gone. All that was left was the little girl, laughing, with her two dolls, and the paper crown. And across her middle, the arm. You could not cut out the arm without cutting through the child, so whoever had done it had left the arm, the forearm and the hand and a piece of the gray sleeve, and on it the tail feathers of a bird and the last three letters of a word. Y-N-N.