It made the girls feel sleepy and safe. Shouldn’t have, but it did. The car had left the main road an hour or so ago. Since then they had been curving through mountains, and now, as they jounced down a long unpaved driveway, the headlights carved out of the darkness a neat log cabin. A fairy-tale cabin. Midnight on the nose, according to the dashboard: the witching hour, the pumpkin hour. He cut the engine, and all went dark—car, cabin, woods, mountains. Still they were not afraid. They slid across vinyl seats and tumbled stiff-legged from the car, shuffled across soft pine needles in the direction of the little house they could no longer see. The sky was moonless, starless. Perhaps they could have run, but they did not think of running. The two girls, pretty as princesses—one dark and one fair—were neither deprived of food nor cast into a dungeon. The kidnapper prepared hot chocolate on the old stove while they perched on the edges of their chairs at the long wooden kitchen table, legs swinging.
