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“Anything suspicious,” Detective Rogers repeats

Then they’re gone, and Caroline and Minna are left standing together in the greenhouse, surrounded by dead and rotting things

I’ Sandra to make an idiotic comment but instead she si into the walls, into the wood shavings, snable, as she always does when she’s in a bad mood

The ghost, the new ghost, is still shaking

“Vivian?” I whisper “Is that you?”

But she doesn’t make a sound

The search party for Annie Hayes was organized two days after her parents first noticed she’d gone ossip, from Dick Harte, who ran a dairy farm in Depew and delivered the inning to thaw from the latest assault: fissures appeared on the blue-veined rivers, still slickly coated with ice; the ground was patchy and raw, the trees had their hackles raised to the wind On so under the kettle, I even ar cube There was a war on, and at horit between our teeth

Dick Harte had a truck embossed with a cow and the name of the farm, but for most of the winter he h, hitched to two of his horses I reh the day he told me about Annie Hayes and the search party, because he co snoas so slushy and full of muck he’d practically had to turn around; and the horses stood there, breath steaht of how cold Annie must be, wherever she was

We were to meet at noon in front of the church in Coral River, a walk of just over four antic, fleecy eyebrow

All this has stuck with me

I don’t re instructions, or the early part of the search I don’t reh he e that I shouldn’t have noticed, since soout across a field and it had begun to rain Black expanses of ain and had called Annie’s name so often my throat was raw

Hoful, I was thinking How unbearably awful to lose a child

I got separated froe of the trees; I was sure it was Annie, scared, hiding in the shadows The rain was rattling hard through the branches, and I could hardly see, ers were swollen to uselessness

A few feet into the woods, ray ice, down into a pit of mud and pulpy leaves—some kind of animal hole I pitched forward onto my hands and knees Immediately I knew I’d twisted or sprained my ankle, and the pain clearedsome animal, a fox or a deer There was no child out here, in these woods If there were, she was no longer alive

I tried to stand, and suddenly there was a hand guiding me firmly to my feet

“Are you all right?”

Glasses, beaded with rain; a beard, not too closely triht nose, with a bead offrom its end

Those were my first impressions of Thomas