Chapter 39 The Story of the Chilblain Baroness of Hot Springs

"On a February night," Miss Leroy used to say, "every drunk driver is a god of fortune." Every couple hoping to save their marriage with a second honeymoon.A person falling asleep in the driver's seat.Anyone who turned off the highway for a drink was a customer that Miss Leroy might persuade them to rent a room.Talking is also half of her business.Ask the customer to buy another glass of wine, then another, and finally have to stay. Of course, sometimes you get stuck.Sometimes, Miss Leroy will tell you that the result may be the rest of your life. Most people think that the rooms in the "hotel" will be better.The iron bed frame wobbled and the bed rails were worn where they joined the floor.The latches and screws are loose.Upstairs, all the mattresses are sunken hills, but the pillows are flat, the sheets are clean, but the water from the local well is hard, as long as anything has been washed in that water , all the cloth feels rough like sandpaper due to mineral effects and smells like sulfur.

Worst of all, you have to share the bathroom at the end of the corridor with others, and most people don't have bathrobes when they go out, which means that even if it's just to pee, you have to get dressed.In the morning, after waking up, the only thing to do is to take a bath in a white cast iron bathtub with four claw-like feet, which is full of sulphurous smell. It was her pleasure to drive these February strangers into corners like sheep.First, she turns off the music.Even an hour before she started talking, the volume was turned down, every ten minutes until Glenn Kemper's singing died away.After there were no more vehicles on the road outside, she turned down the heater.One by one, she pulled the rope switch to turn off one neon beer advertisement on the window.If there was a fire in the grate, Miss Leroy would let the wood run out. (①Glen Campbell, a famous American western country song star, was a smash hit in the 1960s and 1970s and won numerous awards.)

During this time, she was "herding the sheep" and asking these people what plans they had.In February in Baihe, there is simply nothing to do.Maybe go snowshoeing to see the snow.Maybe skiing if you bring your own sled.Miss Leroy got some of the guests to bring that up.Everyone would suggest the same. If they hadn't mentioned it, she would have mentioned the Hot Spring. She stands at a crossroads and lets her audience follow the map of her story.First she showed them pictures of her from long ago.In the summer when I was 20 years old, I just graduated from school and drove up the campervan along the Baihe River to find a summer job.Back then it was everyone's dream job: running the bar in a "hotel".

It was hard to imagine that Miss Leroy was very thin, she was very slender, with white teeth, before her gums receded.It was not like now, when the brown roots of each tooth were exposed, like carrots that had been planted too closely and squeezed the soil out of each other.It's also hard to imagine her voting Democrat, or even liking someone else.Miss Leroy back then had no black hair on her lips.It's also hard to imagine any college student queuing up for an hour to have sex with her. It made her seem sincere, to say such funny and pathetic things about herself. This will make everyone pay attention to what she has to say.

If you held her now, said Miss Leroy, you would only feel the sharp wires of her bra. She said that to find "Hot Spring" is to find a group of young people who get together and climb up the cliff side of the Baihe River.Bring your own beer and whiskey and find a hot spring waterhole.Temperatures at most of the pools are between 150 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit, year-round.At this high altitude, water boils at 198 degrees Fahrenheit.Even in winter, at the bottom of an ice valley, these pools are hot enough to cook you alive. No, it's not bears that are dangerous here, there aren't any.No wolves or coyotes or bobcats to be seen either.It's downriver, yes, just one jump on your car's odometer, and if you're driving on the highway while listening to the radio, it's about the distance you go to listen to a song, and the motels there have to turn it on at night. Their trash cans are locked with chains.There, the snow was covered with paw prints.The sound of wolves howling at the moon at night was terrifying.But here, the snow here is flat and smooth.Even the full moon night is very quiet.

Go further upriver at the Inn, and the only thing you have to worry about is getting scalded to death.The kids from the city, who took a leave of absence from college, would spend two years here.They would have a way of telling those who came after which hot springs and pools were safe and where they could be found.There is nowhere to go, there is only a thin layer of limestone or chalk springs ②.It looks like a rock, but it will let you fall into a hot hole hidden in the bottom to cook. (②sinter, the crust formed by the salt deposition on the edge of the mineral spring.) Those scary stories have also been passed down.A hundred years ago, a Mrs. Ritter Banneker came here from Crystal Falls, Pennsylvania.She stopped to wipe the steam off her glasses, the wind turned suddenly, blowing heat into her eyes, one wrong step, she walked off the path, another wrong step, she lost her balance, fell backwards, sat in In the scalding water, she tried to stand up and rushed forward, but fell face down in the water, screaming, and some unknown people pulled her out.

The sheriff who had rushed her to town took all the olive oil from the Inn.The woman was covered in oil, wrapped in a clean sheet, and died in the hospital after screaming for three days. Most recently, three years ago, a young guy from Pinpine, Wyoming parked his pickup truck when his German Shepherd jumped out of it.The dog jumped into the middle of the hot spring and died half way through the dog crawl, screaming.Other tourists bit their knuckles and told the guy, no.But he jumped. He floated up only once, his hot eyes turned white, his eyes widened but he couldn't see anything, he rolled blindly, no one could catch him in time, and then he disappeared.

Over the next year, they netted him bit by bit, like leaves and worms out of a swimming pool.Also like you get the oil slick off a pot of stew. In the bar at the Inn, Miss Leroy would stop and let her guests picture the situation in their heads.He rolled in the scalding water all summer in pieces, and some fine pieces boiled to light brown. Miss Leroy was smoking a cigarette. Then, as if on a sudden thought, he said, "Olson Reed." And she laughed out loud.It seemed like it was something she didn't think about every second of her waking hours.Miss Leroy would say, "You should have known Olson Reed sooner."

Big, fat, good guy Olson Reed who never committed a crime. Olson used to be a cook at the Inn.He was fat, pale, and his lips were too thick, red because of congestion, lining his face as white as glutinous rice, like a piece of sushi.He stared at the hot springs, and he knelt by them all day, staring at the brown, bubbling water, hot as sulfuric acid. One wrong step, one slip in the wind and snow, and the scalding water will cook you like Olsen cooks. Boiled salmon, stewed chicken with dumplings, and boiled eggs. In the kitchen of the Inn, Olson used to sing hymns so loudly that you could hear them in the dining room.Chubby Olsen wore a white apron with a knotted belt that sunk deep into his fat waist.Sitting in the bar, reading his Bible in near darkness.The dark red carpet smelled of beer and cigarettes.He would hang his head on his chest and mumble a prayer over his sausage sandwich while everyone ate in the staff break room.

His favorite word is "friendship". Olsen went into the storage room one night and found Miss Leroy kissing a waiter, an NYU art dropout, and Olson Reed told them that kissing is the first time the devil lures you into adultery. step.Olsen told everyone with his red rubber lips that he was going to die for his marriage, but he couldn't. For Olsen, the White River was his Garden of Eden, a testament to the perfect work of his God. Olson looked at the hot springs, those steaming, spitting puddles, the way every Christian loves the idea of ​​hell, and he looked at the scalding water steaming and spitting, like he never Like spying on the waitresses in the restaurant at the order window.

On his days off, he would carry his Bible through the woods, through the brimstone fumes, singing "Amazing Grace" and "Closer to My God."But it's only the fifth or sixth verse, which sounds weird and foreign to you, and you think he made it up.He walked on springs, on that layer of calcium crystals like ice on a river, and Olson would leave the boarded walk and kneel by the side of the spouting pool that stinks of sulfur On his knees, he prayed loudly for Miss Leroy and the waiter.He prayed to his Lord, our Almighty God, Maker of heaven and earth.He counted aloud the crimes of each hotel maid.Olsen's voice rose with the heat, and he prayed for Nona, because she folded her skirt so high and would blowjob any client who would pay twenty dollars.The tourists who came to play with the whole family stood in the back, very safe on the boarded walkway behind him.Olson asked the Lord to forgive the diner waiters, Ivan and Leo De, for their obscene sodomy in the men's dormitory every night.Olson cried and said aloud that Dewey and Buddy had been smoking superglue out of a brown paper bag while they were doing the dishes. Olson at the gates of his hell, complaining to the woods and the sky, reporting to God, Olson, after the night shift, accusing your crimes to the bright stars in the sky, praying for you God's mercy. True, nobody likes Olson Reed.Regardless of age, no one likes to hear the truth. They've all heard of the woman with olive oil all over her body.The guy who made soup with his dog.And Olsen listens to the old stuff with eyes like candy, and that's the proof he's most interested in, and it couldn't be more true, proof that you can't hide from God what you've done, there's no other way .We'll all be waking up in hell, but in so much pain that we wish we could die.We will suffer forever, in that part of the world where no one would trade with us. At this point, Miss Leroy will stop, light another cigarette, and pour you a glass of draft beer. Some stories, she said, the more you tell them, the faster they will be exhausted.This kind of story, the drama is gone, and each version sounds more stupid and flat.There is another kind of story that wears you down.The more you speak, the stronger the story becomes.Stories like that just remind you of how stupid you were, are, and will be. Miss Leroy said: Telling these stories is like committing suicide. Here, she tries to keep the story as boring as possible, saying that water as hot as 158 degrees Fahrenheit can cause third-degree burns in a second. The most typical hot spring along the White River is a vent with a water pool below it, and the surrounding edges are covered with a field of mineral crystals. The average temperature of these hot springs along the White River is 205 degrees Fahrenheit. One second in this hot water, taking off your socks will take off your feet.The cooked skin of your hands clings to anything you touch, intact as a pair of leather gloves. Your body will save itself by diverting body water to the burnt area, thereby reducing the heat.You'll sweat and get dehydrated faster than severe diarrhea, because the loss of so much water will spike your blood pressure, sending you into shock and your major organs failing in quick succession, one by one. Burns are divided into first, second, third and fourth degrees.Burns can be superficial, partial moderate, or full depth.In the case of superficial or first-degree burns, the skin is reddened without blistering.It's like a sunburn, and then there's the peeling that follows—the skin that's dead and can be peeled off.A full depth 3rd degree burn is like taking a cake out of the oven and your finger touches the side or top of the oven and you get a dry, hard crust there.Fourth degree burns.It's not just skin damage. Medical examiners will use the "nine-nine rule" to determine the degree of burns and scalds. The head is nine percent of the body's skin.Each arm is nine percent, and each leg is eighteen percent.The front and back of the body are each eighteen percent.Plus the neck is one percent, and the total adds up to one hundred percent. Just a sip of such hot water can cause throat edema and death by suffocation.Your throat swells and closes, suffocating you. Miss Leroy's eloquence is so true and poetic.Turning into a skeleton, shedding skin, hypokalemia.These words made everyone in the bar feel ashamed, far inferior to her.This is a small pause in her story before she faces the worst. You can spend your whole life putting up a wall of facts between you and anything real. It was on a February night like this, before most of her life, that Miss Leroy and Olsen, the cook, were the only ones who remained at the Inn that night.There was three feet of fresh snow the day before, and the snow plow hadn't cleared it yet. Like every night, Olson Reed stepped out into the snow with the Bible in one fat hand.At the time, they had coyotes to worry about, as well as leopards and bobcats.Olsen sang "Amazing Grace" for a mile, and the words were never repeated.Along the way, the white figure walked on the white snow. The two-lane lanes of Highway 17 disappeared under the snow, and the neon sign of "The Inn" in green letters hung high on a steel pipe fixed in cement, and there was a low brick building. Low base.The outside world, like every night, is black and white in the moonlight, and the forest is just a stretch of dark pine-shaped shadows. Miss Leroy, young and slender, never gave a thought to Olson Reed, and had no idea how long he had been away, until she heard wolves howling.She had been looking at her teeth earlier, with a butter knife in her hand that had been polished so she could see how straight and white her teeth were.She was used to Olsen yelling every night.His voice called her name, and then a crime, real or imaginary, came from the woods.She smokes, Olsen cried, and she slow dances.Olsen cries out to God for her. She tells the story now and makes you ask about the rest of it.Why is she trapped here, her soul is between heaven and hell.People who come to the "Inn" don't think they will spend the rest of their lives here.Damn it, said Miss Leroy, there are worse things than dying. Some are even worse than a car accident and get you in trouble.Worse than a broken axle.When you're young, stuck running a bar in a place where no eggs are born, the rest of your life. Before most of her life, Miss Leroy had heard wolves howling and coyotes howling, and she had heard Olsen screaming, not calling her name or any crime, but just screaming.She got to the side door of the restaurant, she went outside, leaned over the snow, turned her head to the side, and listened. She smelled Olsen before she saw him, it was breakfast air, the smell of frying bacon permeated the cold air, bacon or pork, thickly sliced, fried on itself Fry until crispy in hot oil. Whenever she got to this point in her story, the electric heater on the wall would turn on, at that very moment, at that very moment when the room was freezing cold.Miss Leroy knew that moment, and could feel the hairs on her lips stand on end.She knew when to pause for a second, to leave a moment of silence, and then—boom—a burst of heat burst out of the electric heater.The fan blades let out a low moan, first in the distance, and then from the side.Miss Leroy must have darkened the bar by now.The electric heater was turned on, and there was a low moan, and everyone looked up.They could only see their own shadow reflected in the window.Unrecognizable face, looking at them like a pale mask full of black holes.The mouth is an open black hole.Their own eyes, two black holes close together and wide open, stared into the night behind them. The car parked just outside looked like it was a hundred miles away in the cold.Even the parking lot looked like it was too far to walk in the darkness. When she found Olsen Reed, his face was still intact.His neck and head, the last ten percent of him are still intact.Compared with the rest of his magic, which has been peeled and cooked, it is even beautiful. He still kept screaming, as if the stars in the sky would care.The remnants of Olson scrambled along the edge of the White River, stumbling, knees weak, shambling and breaking apart. Parts of Olsen are missing.His two legs have been shattered on the cracked ice from the knee down, falling off bit by bit, first the skin, then the bone, the blood in the body has been boiled until nothing can flow out, and behind him there is only a line of his own Oil, his body heat melted deep marks in the snow. That lad from Pinpine, Wyoming, the one who jumped to save the dog.People say that when they pulled him out, his arms broke off, joint by joint, but he was still alive, his scalp was peeling off his white skull, but he was still conscious. On the surface of the boiling water, puffs of steam, and bright iridescence from the oil in the lad's body, which floated on the surface. The boy's dog had been boiled down to a dog-shaped fur coat intact, and the bones had been boiled clean and sank to the center of the world.The last thing the guy said was, "I screwed up, I can't fix it, right?" It was just like that when Miss Leroy found Olson Reed that night, only worse. The snow behind him, the fresh snow that just fell surrounded him, and there were lines of saliva on it. All around him screaming, and scattered behind him, Miss Leroy could see a mass of yellow eyes, and the paw prints of coyotes frozen into the snow.Four-toed footprints with wolf claws.Floating around him were the long, thin, skeletal faces of wild dogs, panting behind the white smoke they exhaled, their black lips turned up from either side of their noses, and their sharp teeth clenched together so tightly that they tugged at Olsen. Torn white trousers, with steam still radiating from the boiled meat in the torn trouser legs. The next instant, those yellow eyes were gone, and all that was left was the remains of Olsen, snowflakes kicked up by the coyote's hind legs still flashing in the air. The two of them were in a warm smell of bacon.Olsen, steaming hot, sank deep into the snow around her like a giant baked potato.His skin was cracked now, curled and rough like fried chicken, but loose and slippery over the muscles underneath, cooked and curled around the hot bones within. His hands gripped her tightly, gripping Miss Leroy's fingers.She tried to pull away, and his skin peeled off.His cooked hands refused to let go, as if your lips were frozen on the flagpole of the playground in the cold winter.She wanted to pull her hand away, but his fingers were cracked to the bone, boiled bones, bones without any blood.And he screamed, grabbing Miss Leroy even tighter. His body was too heavy to drag, and sank in the snow. She was held immobile, and the side door was no more than twenty footprints in the snow from her.The door was still open, and the tables inside were all set with the cutlery for the next meal.Miss Leroy could see the mountain-like stone fireplace in the dining room, with firewood burning inside. She could see it, but she couldn't feel it from a distance. She put her feet on the ground and tried to drag Olsen, but the snow was too heavy. deep. Unable to move, she stopped, wished he would die, and prayed to God to kill Olson Reed before she froze.The wolves stood guard at the edge of the dark wood, staring with their yellow eyes, and the black shadows of the pines rose into the dark night sky.The stars above the treetops seem to be bleeding together. That night Olson Reed told him a story, his own personal ghost story. It is stories like this that are still on our lips when we die.These are stories we only tell strangers.In the middle of the night, in a secret little room.These are important stories that we've been turning over in our heads for years, but never telling.These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the underworld.Just for a moment, come back and take a look.Every story is a ghost, and this story is Olson's ghost. Miss Leroy melted the snow in her mouth and spit the water into Olson's fat red lips, his face the only part of his body she could touch without sticking.She knelt beside him.The first step the devil made to seduce you into adultery, that kiss, that moment Olsen kept his body in check. For most of her life, she never told anyone what he called.It is a heavy burden to keep these in mind.Now she tells everyone, but it doesn't necessarily make her feel better. The poor boiled fellow by the White River screamed, "Why did you do that?" He screamed, "What did I do?" "Wolf," said Miss Leroy, laughing loudly.We don't have these troubles now, not here, she said.Later they were all gone. Olsen's cause of death was called myosinosis.In severe burns, the injured muscle emits myoglobin, a protein that floods into the bloodstream and overwhelms the kidneys, failing them and flooding the body with toxins.Renal failure, muscle protein poisoning.Miss Leroy sounded like a magician when she said those words, they sounded like incantations, like prayers. Such a death would take all night. The next morning, when the snowplow finally cleared the area, the driver found them: Olson Reed dead and Miss Leroy asleep.Because she had melted snow in her mouth all night, which made her gums white and frostbitten.Li De's dead hands still gripped hers tightly, protecting her fingers like a pair of warm gloves.Over the next few weeks, the frozen skin around the base of each tooth gradually peeled off, softened, turned gray, and peeled away from the brown roots until her teeth looked what they are now.In the end she lost her lips. Necrotic tissue stripping.Another magical spell. Miss Leroy would tell everyone that there is nothing in the woods outside now, nothing bad, just a sad and lonely feeling.It's just that Olsen Reed still doesn't know what he did wrong.Don't know where he is.So terrible and lonely that even wolves and coyotes had left this side of the upper White River. A frightening story does just that, responding to long-ago fears, reviving long-forgotten horrors.Something we thought we had left behind.But that still makes us cry, and that's a wound you hope will heal. There are them scattered everywhere every night, those lonely ghosts who can't be saved but refuse to die, you can hear them screaming outside all night, right here on the cliff of the White River. On February nights, there was sometimes the smell of hot oil.Fried crispy bacon.Olson Reed was numb to his legs, but was still being dragged back, screaming, his fingers curled like claws digging into the snow, dragged back into the darkness by those little clenched teeth. According to Mrs. Clark, the average person burns sixty-five calories per hour while sleeping.During waking hours, seventy-seven calories are burned per hour.Walking slowly, you will burn 200 calories.Just to keep yourself alive, you need to eat 1,650 calories a day. Your body can only store about 1,200 calories of carbohydrates -- mostly in your liver.Just to be alive, you will use up all your stored calories in less than a day.After that, you burn fat, then muscle. By this time, your blood is flooded with ketones.Your blood levels soar, your breath starts to come short, and your sweat reeks of airplane glue. Your liver, spleen, and kidneys shrink and shrink.Your small intestine swells and fills with mucus from not being used.Ulcers open holes in the wall of your colon. When you're starving, your liver turns your muscles into glucose to keep your brain alive.After starving too much, the pain caused by hunger will disappear.After that, you just feel tired.You will become more and more confused, no longer pay attention to the world around you, and you will not pay attention to your own cleanliness. Once you burn 70 to 94 percent of your body fat and 20 percent of your muscle, you're dead. For most people, it's about sixty-one days. "My daughter, Cassandra," Mrs. Clarke said, "she never told me what happened." What we know about starvation, Mrs Clarke says, comes from observational studies of prisoners in Northern Ireland on hunger strikes. When hungry, your skin sometimes turns bluish white.Sometimes it turns dark brown.A third of people who starve become swollen - but only those with bluish skin. On the wall of the Gothic smoking room, Saint Gutless marked forty days in total.Forty lines were drawn with his pencil. Our story, our real-life epic of surviving relentlessly brutal torture, well, the royalties are only divided into thirteen parts now, because Miss America has bled to death. After the stove was fixed again by the ghost, most of us gave up trying to break it.Still, we didn't do the laundry.Some days, from turning the lights on to turning them off, we're just laying on our beds in the backstage powder room where we live, each telling our story to ourselves. If we still had the strength, we might borrow a knife from Killer Chef to cut off the hair next to the scalp.This is one of the humiliations Mr. Whittier inflicts on us.Another way to make the pictures of us after the fact scarier than the pictures of us before, which are probably all pinned to poles or printed on milk cartons by now. The atheist priest broke off a chair leg and stuck the piece of wood up his ass so the police could find some splinters there.This great idea came from Mrs. Clark's daughter Cassandra. After nightfall, we heard footsteps, the creaking of doors, the footsteps of ghosts here.Mr. Whittier, Mrs. Bum, Comrade Tough, and Miss America. Ever since that ghost did that to the Savage Duke, we've all locked our doors after lights out.If it wasn't for two or three people to act as witnesses for each other to ensure safety, no one would wander outside.Everyone carries a killer chef's knife with them. Mrs. Clark said her daughter hadn't gained much weight since she got home.Cassandra's nails grew back, but she never put on polish again.Her hair had grown back, too, but Cassandra had only washed and combed it, never curled, styled or dyed it.The teeth she lost certainly didn't grow back. She wears a size zero and has no ass and no boobs.Just knees, shoulders, and death-camp cheekbones.Cassandina has a lot of clothes to wear, but she only wears the same two or three gowns every day.No jewelry, no makeup.She was almost as if there was no such person, and all it took was a piece of rotten flesh to kill her.Or just mix a handful of sleeping pills into your cereal.If she can eat it. Mrs. Clark took him to the dentist, of course, and paid for a good set of dentures.She is also willing to pay for dental implants to replace missing teeth.There is also breast augmentation surgery for lifting and shrinking breasts.She also researched anorexia nervosa. Mrs. Clark lied to her that she looked beautiful and slim.Cassandra had never been outside long enough to keep her skin from being so pale and blue. That's right, Cassandra only goes to school, and no one at school talks to her.Everyone was talking about her, and as each semester passed, the stories of her torment grew more and more horrific, even the teachers let their horrific imaginations run wild.The neighbors in the neighborhood, everyone stopped Mrs. Clarke, patted her hand, and said how sad they were, as if the police had found Cassandra's body. All those who joined the action and searched with the dogs, they stopped asking for details.They were tired of hearing Mrs. Clarke say to them, "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know..." In her first year back at school, Cassandra's grades improved.She didn't go to the cheerleading audition, she didn't play basketball, she didn't play football.She does nothing but goes to class, reads, and then goes home.She watched the birds in the sky, and she watched her goldfish swim around. But despite Mrs. Clark's begging and threats—threats of self-harm—Cassandra refused to wear her dentures.Mrs. Clark could burn her own arm with a cigarette butt, and her daughter would just sit and watch and smell the smell. Cassandra just listened quietly.Mrs. Clark begged her, yelled at her, asked Cassandra to find a way to look better, make friends, talk to a therapist.Go back to your normal life, whatever.Cassandra just listened quietly. "My own daughter," Mrs. Clark said, "is like a bonsai to me." A robot who won't go to prom with all A's in his senior year of high school, doesn't date, doesn't have any girlfriends.Like a "Nightmare Box" ticking high on a shelf. "She sat there all day," Mrs. Clarke said, "it was like sitting in church." In silence, he straightened his back and opened his eyes wide.But she turned a blind eye and never revealed what was going on in her head.Cassandra just watched and listened.She was not the girl his mother had known, she was someone else.A statue overlooking everything from a niche.A statue carved in a cathedral in Europe a thousand years ago.A statue that I know is carved by Da Vinci, this is Cassandra in the eyes of others. Mrs. Clarke says now: "It's driving me nuts." Sometimes it's like living with a robot, or a bomb.Sometimes Mrs. Clark waited for some cult or madman to call and talk to Cassandra, and some nights Mrs. Clark went to bed with a knife under her pillow and locked her bedroom door. No one knows what will become of this silent girl.She has experienced things in her life that no one else could ever imagine.There were so many torments and horrors she didn't need to tell anyone about, she didn't need any drama, or pleasure or pain anymore. You can walk into the room, turn on the TV, eat a bag of popcorn, and only notice that she's sitting next to you on the couch. Really, she was just that scary.Cassandra is like that. At dinner one time, with the mother and daughter alone in the kitchen, Mrs. Clarke asked if Cassandra remembered the "Nightmare Box"?Had that night at the gallery had anything to do with her disappearance? "That made me want to be a writer," Cassandra said. Since then, Mrs. Clark has never been able to sleep again.She wanted her daughter to go quickly, go to college, go to the army, go to a convent, whatever.Just leave. Then, one day, Mrs. Clark called the police to say Cassandra was missing. Of course she searched the whole house.Mrs. Clarke knew that Cassandra could disappear into the wallpaper or the fibers of the sofa, but she was gone. Everyone still had faded yellow ribbons tied to their cars, those white flags of surrender.Cassandra Clark disappeared again.