The sound again. Bigger than a rodent and more methodical. Something was working with deliberate intent, moving items about, sorting. Just then, the rotted remains of a pencil rolled from behind the roll-top desk. An alabaster hand reached out and drew it back.

"Raja?" Marc asked.

Marc smirked and put his hand to his face. No, you moron, it’s Santy Claus. He rounded the desk and knelt at the albino girl’s side. Her petite, pallid face was chalked with dust and what might have been grease. Her unshoed socks were black. And around that frail white neck and dangling over that tattered nightshirt, was an aged, bejeweled rosary, she wore like a necklace, glittered in the dark. In one hand she held a relic of a plastic doll, naked and soiled, its long white hair reduced to a few random clumps. With the other hand she turned the pages of a financial journal from 1948, flipping through it as any other child might peruse a comic book. She looked up at Marc, turning her eyes more than her head so that her red pupils were hardly exposed, and blinked with only a glimmer of interest.

Marc brushed a spot of the floor clean, or mostly clean, of dirt and debris and sat down. His legs folded and his hands came to rest on them.

"What are you doing?"

Raja shrugged her shoulders. She turned a page and gave some unimportant answer, like "looking" and went back to doing just that.

"Aren’t you afraid to be down here in the dark?"

"Nuh-uh." She shrugged again.

"We should get you upstairs now. Your mother is worried..." He paused unintentionally, and found himself rephrasing. "Your mother is looking for you."

To this, the little girl gave no response. She bent over in a position unachievable by most anybody over the age of nine and rested her elbows between her knees. Seemingly at random, she erased numbers from the book the best she could with a hard, cracked eraser. Thick black smudges replaced the numbers. Then she inserted numbers of her own, in their place or in the margin. Numbers of seemingly no mathematical sense.

"You don’t talk much, do you?" The slowly building annoyance lowered his tone as he picked absently at the what-not’s in front of him: paper clips, pencil sharpeners, old photographs too yellowed to make out. A desk drawer was overturned next to the girl. Marc was about to pick the child up by her dainty little arms and lug her upstairs when softly she spoke.

"I don’t have no pig mints."

"Excuse me?"

"I don’t have no pig mints. Mommy Ghaliya says I don’t have any pig mint tayshun, that’s why I’m so white."

He nodded in comprehension, and wondered exactly what she thought a "pig mint" was. Lightly taking his arm, like a feather against his skin, she put hers next to it and continued.

"See, you’re brown. Not as brown as Mommy Ghaliya, but more browner than goddamn Mrs. Lingerfelt—" she said these words mockingly in a deeper voice, as children are prone to do when imitating people— "who lives across the street. But I’m white, see? White like rice. That’s ‘cause you got pig mints and I don’t."

She looked up at Marc and sighed. He obviously didn’t get the point and this seemed to frazzle her. The page turned, and she scribbled wearily.

"That’s why I’m not ‘fraid. I can see better in the dark, Mommy Ghaliya says, ‘cause I don’t have pig mint tayshun in my eyes. But you can see better outside ‘cause you got it in your eyes."

"Gotcha." He smiled a little, mostly at himself. He was amazed to hear her speak, as she had most likely never done in all the time he knew her. Her voice was surprisingly sweet and expressive. She carried a strange but somehow lovely accent, not of nationality, as she was born in the states, but that of a person unused to speaking and placing the tones and emphasis of language in the most peculiar places.

"Why do you never talk?" he asked, but she didn’t answer. Just as well. He knew what she would have said if she had. It was the same answer he himself gave so often to girlfriends and family and most especially to Ghaliya: because I don’t have anything to say. He also knew it wasn’t true. Marc drew his feet under him in a crouch.

"Okay, Encyclopedia Brown. Time to go upstairs."

"Am I retarded?" she asked.

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