"What's in the bag?" he said, and nodded at the white paper sack she was holding against her chest.
"It's mine."
"Okay. What's in it?"
"Cough drops." She said it too fast. "It's—they're cough drops."
"Can I see?"
"It's mine," she said again. "I didn't take it. I paid for it. It's not—you can't—" She stopped and pressed her lips together and he saw her chin start to go and saw her stop it, and he thought, with a part of his mind that he did not entirely like, that she was good at that, at stopping it, that she had practice.
"Delphine," he said. "I'm going to be straight with you, because I think you're a smart kid and I think you'd rather I was straight with you. There's been a lot of stuff going missing out of this room. Some of it's been Mrs. Dunning's food. She's eighty-one years old. Somebody took her groceries three weeks in a row. You know that?"
Something moved in the girl's face, something violent and quickly smothered. "I know," she said.
"How do you know?"
She shook her head.