There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

—Maya Angelou
(Left by Sierra McVeigh, who’ll be a famous writer one day)

Chapter 12

The morning after our swim near Firefly Island, I woke with the dreadful realization of what I’d done.

I, Mallory Hale Everson, had broken my own sacred oath.

I had joined the social media revolution.

In my rush of ridiculous Zen and overwhelming personal epiphany after the evening by the lakeshore, I had come home and looked up the password for the blog Kaylyn and Josh had created for me. When I opened it, there were the photos of the ranch around the edges, and up top, the picture of me with my cartoon Annie Oakley cowgirl body had been replaced with a photo of me standing near the old homestead where I centered my mouse-release program. The image was lopsided and snapped from a funky angle, so that I looked like the Jolly Green Giant of mouse control. Nick had taken it.

In the quiet of midnight, with Daniel and Nick sound asleep, I’d started writing about the cataclysmic shift of the soul I had experienced along the shores of Moses Lake. I wrote about the sound of water stroking earth, the rustle of the evening breeze, the slow darkening of the day, the kids laughing, the unexpected splash from the bucket, the scramble to rescue dispossessed fish, including the one in my shirt. I wrote about the first stars twinkling to life above Chinquapin peaks, a fingernail moon rising, a gentle breeze breathing perfection into the air, the sky, and the night.

In those moments, I’d known that something new was being formed in me, too, created so gently that I hadn’t even realized it until that evening by the shore. I was becoming Nick’s mom in every possible way.

I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother—a process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile.

When I closed the laptop and trundled off to bed at two in the morning, I was filled with catharsis, heady with it, even. I felt as if I had created something beautiful, experienced a breakthrough, shared myself in a completely new way.

In the cold light of morning, I wanted to shoot myself in the head. I had become one of those people—the sort who poured their lives onto an electronic page for the entire world to see.

I hurried to the computer to erase the whole thing, but in my state of euphoria the night before, I’d sent out email invitations to my sisters, who were on the east coast and by this time already active on their computers. Kaylyn and Josh had been automatically notified of the activity on the blog site, and last night via iPhone, they’d shared the news with the Gymies, one of whom had worked on The Hill with me. She’d shared the link around various Congressional offices. Word was spreading like wildfire.

A strange thing happened over the next few days as I contemplated tossing myself off the cliffs and into the lake. People actually liked what I wrote. They sent notes and left comments on the blog, and when they did, the feeling of connection was heady and satisfying. Like an addict looking for a fix, I found myself checking the page several times a day. In the comments, I learned things I’d never known about old friends and former coworkers. Many had experienced similar life epiphanies in situations alike and different from my own.

I was not alone in the human condition.

And then, on the third day in the dark of midnight, I did it again.

I blogged about taking Nick to help little McKenna and her dad bottle-feed an orphaned foal they were keeping in their backyard. I wrote about the interdependence we all share, how none of us are meant to go along the path alone. I wrote about the vulnerability of the little spindle-legged colt, about how he’d been found standing in a ranch pasture alongside his dead mother. A middle-aged couple from Dallas, city folk on their way to a bed-and-breakfast down in the Hill Country, had seen him. They’d taken the time to turn around and make sure everything was all right. They’d saved his life with a short detour and less than an hour of their time. How often, I wondered at the end of the story, do we pass by a need, a life that could be changed with the smallest bit of effort? And it’s not that we don’t care but that we’re driving so fast, all we see are the fence posts flashing by on the side of the highway?

Maybe the first step in changing the world is in slowing down and looking through the fences.

People liked the story of the orphaned foal. I’d added photos, and people loved those. Nick, McKenna, and Mugsy the foal were cute together, the giant milk bottle extended between them. Oddly enough, I had some talent for photography. I loved working with the lighting and the angles. I had started carrying the camera everywhere I went, looking for shots.

Later that week, when Jack West reappeared at the ranch and life turned upside-down again, photography and the blog became my lifeline. Kaylyn and Josh added new photos to the background and beefed up The Frontier Woman headline with fancy scrolling that looked like something from the Old West. More followers signed on. Former coworkers who were still slogging away in dank, cave-like basement offices enjoyed reading about the wild life. Suddenly the world that had been small and isolated was large again, filled with people who wondered about what might happen when a former apartment-dwelling city girl was dropped in the middle of ten thousand acres without a superhighway or a Starbucks in sight.

Even the Binding Through Books ladies found me, while thumbing through Moses Lake Google searches. Cindy, Paula, and Alice were back in Moses Lake for their annual sisters’ vacation. They were scheduled for a photo shoot with a photographer from Woman’s Day magazine, doing a story about their Binding Through Books club. Since I hadn’t been able to persuade my own sisters to do a long-distance book club with me, they offered to let me come watch the photo shoot. I took them up on it, because I thought it would be a great story. It wasn’t every day a major magazine sent someone to Moses Lake.

I stayed up all night reading the Binding Through Books sisters’ latest book selection, then I went to Alice’s well-weathered cottage on the other side of the lake. Somehow, I ended up making it into a few of the photographer’s shots, and two days later, I was on the magazine’s Web site, along with a little blurb about my blog and how I’d come to be The Frontier Woman.

The blog had several hundred new followers almost instantly. Josh and Kaylyn were amazed.

“The Frontier Woman’s got a ton of hits for a site that’s only been active a few weeks. I’m not surprised, though. It’s like you’re writing about a whole different world,” Kaylyn told me on the phone as she and Josh lingered over lunch in their office, reading about my photo shoot with the Binding Through Books sisters and yesterday’s cattle roundup at the main ranch headquarters.

An amazing thing had happened to me in my first weeks of blogging. Because I was writing about adventures, I started not only to seek them out, but to see them all around me. In seeing the adventure of this place, I’d begun to truly live my life, rather than hiding from it and complaining about it. “The cattle roundup was really western, like in-the-movies western,” I told Kaylyn. “And, hey, did you see the pictures of the wild turkey nest outside the back gate? Nick and I found it on our walk down to the creek a couple days ago. She has eggs now. I asked our neighbor, Al Beckenbauer, and she said gestation on a wild turkey egg is about a month. Nick and I started a calendar, so we could mark off the days.” Among other things, I’d finally made that call to Cowgirl Al and admitted that my mouse and vermin eradication program was not working. I needed help. We’d purchased supplies at the hardware store and started working on the closets.

“I saw the picture of the nest,” Kaylyn answered. “That’s so awesome. Josh says to tell you he ordered a turkey sandwich in your honor today.”

I heard Josh in the background adding, “Subway Fresh Fit, baby. Tell her I’m eating healthy so I can get on a horse and round up some doggies whenever I get a chance to come down there.”

“I heard him,” I told Kaylyn. “Tell him he’s welcome anytime. Now that Al’s helping me fix the closets, houseguests might not wake up to the Wild Kingdom. Al says the only thing to do is line the closets with paneling, then caulk everything and paint it all to seal out the smell. And seal around the doors, windows, and plumbing really well. We redid Nick’s closet and the hall closet last week. This week, the master. I passed the information on to Alice, for her lake house, and now I’m the book sisters’ hero. They found a scorpion in the bathtub right before the photographer came.”

“I sense another how-to story coming on,” Kaylyn laughed. “You’re, like, the home handywoman anymore. Nice job on the tile around the bathroom sink, by the way.”

“Can you come do my bathroom?” Josh chimed in, and all of a sudden he was louder. Kaylyn had put me on speaker. “Hey, look, the cattle roundup has sixty-nine comments already. The turkey might lose the top spot. And there’s nineteen new followers. Who are these people?”

I’d wondered that, too. Who were all these people, and why were they so interested in life here? “Al showed me how to do the tile. She says as long as I don’t—and I quote—‘Point that dadgum camera at her and try to put her on the blog,’ she’ll help me. I’m telling you, that woman knows how to do everything.” I’d become enamored with Al Beckenbauer, in a strange sort of way. She was amazingly competent, and for whatever reason, she’d decided to take me under her wing. It was hard to say why, because we were as different as night and day. I like to talk; Al preferred to work in silence. My refrigerator was filled with prepackaged convenience foods; Al churned her own butter and grew her own pesticide-free vegetables. I knew nothing about animals; Al surrounded herself with them. In addition to a half-dozen mismatched dogs and countless cats, she had a pet pig and miniature horse that, as far as I could gather, wandered in and out of her house, pretty much at will.

“So, did I tell you we’re making goat’s milk soap in the next few days?” I asked. “I might even learn to milk a goat.”

“Uh-oh,” Kaylyn quipped. “I feel a future YouTube sensation coming on.”

“Jerry Springer moment. Goats unplugged,” Josh added.

The three of us laughed together, and I felt strangely euphoric, my emotions taking an upsweep, like a roller-coaster car whipping over a hill and around a curve. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“It wasn’t that funny,” Josh observed.

“I n-n-n-know,” I giggled out. “Stuff just—” giggle-giggle-snort “—hits me . . . some . . . some . . . sometimes . . . lately. I’m s-s-s-sorry.”

I was still trying to catch my breath as we signed off. Even with my newfound interest in being The Frontier Woman, I wondered if I really was a basket case. Maybe I was becoming like one of those miners who’d stayed too long in a shack in the gold fields, all alone. For the most part, now that Jack had returned and once again clamped his iron fist over the ranch, my days were just Nick and me. Daniel was tied up with Jack and still trying to establish what his job was here. So far, they’d spent time doing everything from driving to San Antonio to look at farm equipment, to picking peaches from a ragged tree near a tumbledown homestead. Jack wanted the peaches to become peach pie. Right now a whole bucketful of them was slowly going bad in my refrigerator.

The thought of the peaches dulled my euphoria as I set the cordless phone in its cradle. Daniel and I had tumbled into a fight over the bucket of fruit. He’d come home in a foul mood the night he brought it in. I’d wanted to tell him about the blog, and all Daniel wanted to talk about was me whipping up peach pies to mollify Jack.

The War of the Peaches had been ongoing for three days, but I was in too good a mood for it right now. I had it in mind to end the fight by actually attempting a peach pie, even though I didn’t know pie crust from Pop-Tarts. I’d talked myself into it by deciding that I would photograph the entire process and use it as a blog. I was going to call it Pie-Making for Dummies. Somehow, the idea of domesticity seemed less old-fashioned when you were sharing your efforts in cyberspace.

I knew I needed help, though, and the plethora of fancy pie recipes on the Internet were too hard to sort out. The month before, while Daniel and I were moving the stuffed dead animals to the garage building for storage, I’d noticed a dusty red-and-white-checked Betty Crocker cookbook, exactly like the one my mother had. It was just sitting on top of a box of rusty pans in the corner. The sight of it had filled me with nostalgia. Clearly, whoever had left it there wasn’t coming back for it, but I couldn’t imagine what use I would have for a cookbook, so I’d left it where it was. Now it seemed like the perfect answer to the peach pie problem. My mother swore by the recipes in Betty Crocker.

I put on gloves and Daniel’s rubber boots before heading out to the garage. The long, narrow building was a scary place, littered with cast-off belongings from former ranch residents, as well as bits of rope and chain, ancient garden tools, and broken yard-mowing equipment from days gone by. Huge iron meat hooks hung from the rafters overhead, along with a single light bulb, which didn’t provide much illumination. It looked like a place where snakes, bats, and . . . who knew what else might hide.

When I stepped inside, something was scratching and gnawing in the far corner of the room. I didn’t investigate, but crept across the uneven concrete (as much as it’s possible to creep in oversized rubber boots) and snatched the cookbook off the stack of pans. A cross-stitched apron was lying underneath. I held it up with morbid fascination, letting the dingy window light shine through the moth-eaten fabric. Had it belonged to Jack’s wife? Had the woman who’d disappeared worn this very apron?

Dropping it, I rushed across the room, stepped into the yard, and slammed the door. In the overgrown gardens of the little house, the concrete angel watched me from a patch of sunlight. A yellow swallowtail butterfly sat on her outstretched hand, slowly fanning its wings. Shuddering, I turned away and hurried back to the house, then dusted off the cookbook before taking it inside.

The peach pie recipe was easy to find. The page was turned down, and there was a note in the margin. For Cynthia’s wedding.

Cynthia. Was that the name of Jack’s second wife? Or had she written those words herself? Could this cookbook have been hers?

A chill slid over me, tickling like the stroke of a feather.

“Okay. All right. Stop it already.” A shudder rattled my shoulders, and I grabbed my phone from my purse, then quickly made a list of the ingredients required for peach pie. A trip to the Walmart in Gnadenfeld would give me time to gain some perspective, I reasoned.

The cookbook probably wasn’t even hers, anyway. I was letting my imagination run completely amuck.

But even as the reassurances cycled in my head, I made it a point not to look toward the little house as I gathered Nick and proceeded toward the car.

The drive along the rural highway was peaceful, as always—a chance to compose my thoughts and enjoy peek-a-boo views of the river. Near town, the roadsides were graced with stately old farms surrounded by picture-perfect green fields, tall hip-roofed barns, and large stone houses. The town itself was a study in contrasts. I’d read a newspaper article about how various Mennonite families had formed the community in the fifties when they were forced out of their valley by the Corps of Engineers’ plan to dam up the river and build Moses Lake. Now Gnadenfeld was home to many thriving Mennonite-owned dairies, as well as other businesses catering to tourists in search of a day trip into a simpler time.

Despite its humble roots and charming Mennonite bakeries, Gnadenfeld was also the home of a large Proxica Foods production facility that was squarely on Al’s environmental enemies list, right beside Jack West. Last winter a huge scandal about Proxica’s chemical contamination had broken wide open, and the cleanup was still ongoing. According to Al, even though Proxica had been forced to pay massive damages, nothing could eclipse what they’d done. Al had been active in helping Gnadenfeld recover from the impact of the bad publicity, so that the tourists would return. The town was one of Al’s pet projects.

My interest in Gnadenfeld was much less noble than Al’s. The town had a Walmart, and when you’re living so far from everything that is familiar, stepping into a Walmart feels pretty much like heaven. Unlike my day-to-day shopping in Moses Lake, where baitfish, live worms, milk, and soda pop were stored in disturbingly close proximity, in Walmart, the live fish were all the way on the opposite end of the store from the groceries. Call me fussy, but it seemed like it should be that way.

For his part, Nick was a good shopper. We talked about the colors of T-shirts, the pictures on CD covers, the letters on product labels.

Nick watched commercials and liked to repeat them. “There a Pine-Sol!” he said and pointed to the shelf, then raised a brow and added disdainfully, “Oh, and they got that baw-gin bwand pine cleaner. It leaves diwt behind.” I was fairly certain Nick was the smartest kid on the face of the earth.

In the baking section, we ran into a familiar face. Nick remembered Keren Zimmer immediately and asked her where all the summer enrichment kids were. “They’ve gone home for the day.” Keren smiled and tousled Nick’s hair. “I came over here to get some fertilizer for our garden that we all planted together. Did you know we had a garden? It’s right there in town, in the little courtyard beside Books and Java. All the kids worked on it together, and tomorrow we’re going to pick green beans, cook them at the church, and see how good they are to eat.”

“Awesome!” Nick cheered. “I wike beans!”

I laughed and patted Nick on the back. What a great kid. I was fairly certain he hadn’t seen a real live green bean. Not on my watch. Getting away from the prepackaged convenience foods and learning to make something real was on my to-do list. Al had been after me about it. Anything that came in a box, bag, or Styrofoam container, she was strictly against, especially for developing humans, like Nick.

“You all can come and help us with the garden, whenever you have the time,” Keren reiterated her invitation from weeks ago, turning to me with a smile that was welcoming and a little timid, as if she felt more comfortable relating to children than adults. “We water the garden every day, but on Tuesdays and Fridays we do our science lesson there. We pull weeds, add compost from our compost bin, and pick the vegetables if they’re ready. The garden is a new thing I’m trying to get started. I’m hoping I can carry it into the school year. The kids up in Chinquapin Peaks live with such rampant food insecurity. Many of the homes don’t have enough groceries in them, especially at certain times of the month, and what they do have is usually high fat and low nutrition. The kids don’t know how to eat vegetables or how to cook them, and a lot of times, neither do their parents. But here’s what I’m finding with the garden—it’s different when kids grow it themselves. They want to eat it because they had a hand in making it. It’s like feed a man a fish or teach a man to fish. If we can get these families started growing food and show them how to preserve it, they’ll have healthy food and they’ll feel good about where it came from.”

“That sounds fantastic.” I was vaguely aware that I’d completely misjudged Keren—stereotyped her, really. The conservative clothes, the long hair bound into a bun. I’d imagined her to be unbelievably sweet, unrealistically naïve about the world, bland, and not someone I’d really want to cultivate a friendship with. Not hip enough. Not interested in anything I was interested in. In reality, she was a force to be reckoned with, a young woman determined to make a difference.

Her enthusiasm radiated like light from a supernova. “I think it will be, if I can just get the money we need and the cooperation of the parents. I’d love for every family in the school to have a supper garden. Growing up, all I ever saw were Mennonite homes. Everyone we knew grew vegetables in the summer, then put them up for the winter. We all had tomatoes ripening in our cellars until after Christmas. We hardly ever had to buy vegetables.”

“That’s amazing.” Keren made me want to run right out and plant a garden. I thought about my upcoming peach pie adventure. There was something earthy and primal about rendering sustenance from the most basic of components.

A strand of blond hair teased her cheek, and she pushed it away purposefully. She seemed to want something from me, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. “I never knew there were places like Chinquapin Peaks. I really didn’t. Not until I started teaching last year.”

“That must be really hard to deal with sometimes.” I thought of the story of the foal, of what I’d written at the end of it. Sometimes, changing a life wasn’t as easy as taking an hour out of your trip to a bed and breakfast. Sometimes, it required much more work than that.

“Several of my kids come to school so hungry on Mondays. I have to feed them before I can teach them.” She looked at Nick, probably thinking what I was thinking—that Nick would never know what it felt like to show up for school with an empty stomach. “Anyway, I’m boring you. I’m sorry.”

“No . . . no, it’s interesting.” Right now, I wanted to go over to the gardening department, whip out the credit card, and buy Keren whatever she needed. Then I realized that when Nick started school—next year for preschool or the following year for kindergarten—he would be walking through the doors with the kids who came from those houses Keren was describing. I didn’t want him to learn about that reality.

Having been given an upper-crust education all my life, I’d never had to contend with such things. I couldn’t imagine placing Nick, with his sweet nature and open, innocent personality, in such a situation. He would be exposed to bad language, bad behavior, a myriad of grown-up information shared by kids who’d already seen too much of life.

I wondered if there was a private school anywhere within commuting distance, where we could enroll Nick. Where he would be protected.

I blushed, imagining that Keren could see the questions scrolling through my brain.

Almost without thinking about it, I found myself leading the conversation to more comfortable things—away from hungry kids and supper gardens, to peach pie. Keren, having no idea of the war of conscience inside me, happily shared tips on how to easily peel peaches by dipping them in boiling water, then in ice water. She showed me where to buy refrigerated piecrust—much easier than making your own and almost as good, she assured me. By the time we parted ways, I felt competent to bake a peach pie, if not to save the world. I’d almost managed to scoot supper gardens and hungry kids completely out of my mind.

On the way back home, Nick was so preoccupied with a new Pez dispenser that he’d already forgotten about Keren’s invitation to help with the summer enrichment garden. We’d bought some green beans in the produce department, though I wasn’t sure what I’d do with them. Eventually Nick fell asleep clutching them in his car seat, along with the Pez dispenser.

When we pulled into the ranch, he was wide-awake and ready to play. While he and Pecos went to work digging in the sand pile, Betty Crocker and I got busy in the kitchen. I discovered two things: Number one, Betty has a talent for making things look easier than they are. Number two, I would probably never make a living baking pies. Eons had passed by the time I’d skinned the peaches and soaked the tags off the blue glass pie pans I’d received as a wedding gift. After that, I pitted, sliced, sugared, and struggled through sealing the crust, all the while taking pictures and thinking of what I would say about a non-pie-baking girl’s afternoon with Pillsbury and Betty Crocker. The story was starting to hum in my head, making me laugh, despite the fact that my lopsided pies weren’t likely to grace the cover of Woman’s Day anytime soon.

“Thank you, Betty,” I said and picked up the cookbook before preparing to commit my creations to the oven. Something white and rectangular slid from the pages and fluttered to the floor. An envelope. I stood looking at it before picking it up and turning it over. The flap was open, a letter on faded yellow paper inside.

Something tightened the muscles in my neck as I read the three lines of text, hastily scrawled on the paper, the writing seeming rushed and uneven.

Will meet you on the old dock at eleven tomorrow night. Please, please don’t say anything to anyone. Still so unsure, and must think of the children. So very afraid now . . .

My stomach clenched, and a sick feeling gurgled up my throat. Who had written that note? When? Was it her? Had she written it? Was she running away from Jack West? Was she afraid of him? Had she sensed that something terrible was coming?

But she mentioned children. Jack’s second wife only had one son. Could she have been expecting another? Was she pregnant when she died?

Or was this letter completely unrelated to Jack? Could it have been written by someone else who lived on the ranch . . . perhaps a woman meeting a lover on the lakeshore?

There was no way to know.

Outside, a peacock called, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t heard a peep out of Nick in forever. How long, exactly? I wasn’t even sure. I’d left him in the yard with Pecos when I’d started the pies. . . .

But that was . . . I glanced at the clock. Over two hours had passed.

I had the moment of panic that comes from realizing you’ve zoned out in a potentially dangerous way. Normally I kept track of Nick’s whereabouts by listening for the sound of his chats with Pecos, the high whine of tricycle wheels on the back porch, or the rattle and crash of Lego avalanches in the bedroom. Even with my limited parenting experience, I’d learned that boys are easy to track via sound. Daniel and I had made sure to put things like cleaners and paint thinners on a high shelf, so that Nick could have the run of the place.

But I’d been so preoccupied with the idea of baking the perfect pie and sharing my adventure with the world that I hadn’t been listening. I hadn’t even looked out the window.

“Nick?” I called, thinking maybe he was in his room, reading or coloring. “Ni-i-ick?”

No answer. No sound.

“Nick?” I held my breath, strained into the silence. Nothing. I had the eerie feeling of being utterly alone in the house, a terrible sixth sense I didn’t want.

My mind rushed ahead, the pie story giving way to horrific scenarios. What if he’d discovered some dangerous chemical tucked in the back of a closet that I’d failed to check? What if he’d gotten into something? What if he’d put a Lego or another small toy in his mouth and silently choked on it? Or somehow gotten the mini-blind cords loose and accidentally tangled one around his neck, or . . .

What if he’d figured out how to open the gates, then left the safety of the yard? There were all sorts of potential dangers out there. Horses in the barn, cattle in the pasture, wild animals hiding in the woods, coyotes that howled at night, rattlesnakes curled up in the shade beneath prickly pear cacti . . .

“Nick?” My voice cracked the silence, high, sharp, demanding. “Nick, if you can hear me, answer right now! Where are you?” Wiping flour on my shorts, I ran to the back door, pushed open the screen, yelled into the yard, listened, threatened, and listened again. Nick had never hidden from me before—not unless we were playing our little games of hide-and-seek. Surely he could tell from my voice that I wasn’t playing now.

Panic swelled as the echo of my voice died. The yard was sun-filled, incredibly still. Nick’s little collection of toys sat basking in the golden light, a tiny yellow bulldozer with a mound of sand piled in front of it, poised for action, a miniature stack of tree bark ready to be used in the building of a fence or a house. Nick seemed to have abandoned his game in midstream.

Letting the door fall closed, I hurried through the house, checking every place I could think of, yelling Nick’s name. Tears blurred my eyes and my heart hammered, the sound beating faster, faster, faster. When I’d gone through the house again, I checked the yard inch by inch, every bush, flower bed, and hidden space. There was no sign of Nick anywhere.

Fear like I had never experienced seized me as I raced back to the house, stumbled through the door, and grabbed the phone. I tried Daniel’s cell. No answer. My hands trembled as I searched for the West Research lab number in the yellowed Rolodex Jack had given us.

“Please, please, please . . .” Moments seemed to stretch painfully as I waited for Daniel to pick up. He’d told me he would be in the lab all day, since Jack was gone to some sort of business meetings in Dallas.

One ring, another, another. What was I going to say? I’ve lost Nick? I don’t know where he is? I forgot about him while I was trying to bake those stupid peach pies to keep Jack West happy?

“No, no . . .” The click of the answering machine left me desperately alone. “Please, God. Please let him be all right . . .” There was water all around us—the shallow creek behind the barn and the lakeshore across the pasture. Could Nick walk that far? Would he? Could he have set out for the lake on his own? He didn’t even know how to swim without his floaties. . . .

I imagined Nick slowly walking into the water, the waves sweeping over him. No. No, he couldn’t be by the water. The yard gates were all closed. The latches were too heavy for Nick. Where could he have gone?

Was it possible that someone had taken him from the yard? Who? No one ever came here but the UPS man and the ranch hands. None of them would have let Nick out of the yard without telling me. The dog was gone, too. Pecos never left Nick’s side. During our weeks at the ranch, they’d become so tightly bonded that Pecos slept on the ground outside Nick’s window at night.

I called the lab again, got the answering machine. “Daniel, I need you. I can’t find Nick!” I slammed the phone into the cradle, paced the kitchen, trying to think. Should I get in the car and drive down to the lake, look for Nick there? What if he was still somewhere around the house? What if he came back, and I was gone? I needed help. I needed somebody. Who could I call? Al didn’t carry a cell phone, and she wouldn’t be in the house this time of the day. The sheriff’s department was miles away. Town was miles away. Did we have a phone book for the area?

“Stupid. Stupid.” This was my fault. I hadn’t even bothered to gather up emergency numbers and keep them by the phone.

I ran to the bedroom and dumped my purse out onto the bed, dug through the mess for the sticky note with Chrissy’s work number on the back. By the time she picked up the phone at the pharmacy, I was in tears on the other end. I blurted out the story between sobs and moans of regret. A voice in the back of my head admonished, See? See? What made you think you could be someone’s mother? Meanwhile, Chrissy repeated details to the pharmacist, her voice taking on a breathless sense of drama that heightened my fear and reinforced the idea that I wasn’t panicking over nothing.

Before Chrissy and the pharmacist could decide whether it would be better to relay information to the county sheriff’s department or round up some volunteers to search for Nick, a silver BMW convertible melted out of the heat waves on the driveway. The low undercarriage scraped the grassy hump in the center of the road, sending up a silty cloud of caliche dust that overtook the car. Wandering peafowl scattered in all directions as the incongruous vehicle whipped into a parking spot beside Jack’s ranch truck. Jack was in the passenger seat, the driver a distinguished-looking man in a suit. The two of them were engaged in what looked like a business conversation.

I dropped the phone and ran outside, throwing open the gate before they were out of the car. If I’d previously been intimidated by Jack West, in that moment I wouldn’t have cared if he were Attila the Hun. I wanted someone to help me find Nick. Alive and well and unharmed.

“Nick’s gone!” I blurted. “I can’t find him anywhere. I’ve checked the house and the yard, and . . . and I was in the kitchen . . . and then I realized I hadn’t heard him . . . and I don’t know how long . . .” The story tumbled out, almost unintelligible. I felt time ticking away, the possibility of this turning out to be an innocent, harmless incident growing thinner and thinner as the minutes passed.

Jack patted the air, his expression hard to read in the shadows of his cowboy hat, his voice matter-of-fact. “Kids wander off. Where’s the last place you saw the boy?”

I repeated the details again.

He turned to the man in the business suit, who was standing with his hands clasped, his face impassive, as if he were waiting for Jack to tell him what his reaction should be. “Jankowski, grab the radio in my truck, there, and see if any of the hands are around. Track down Daniel, too. Could be he came by and picked up the boy and didn’t check in.”

“Daniel would never do that,” I insisted. “He always lets me know if he’s taking Nick. We always tell each other. He wouldn’t . . .” I stopped mid-sentence. Jack was already walking away. I followed along as the man in the suit, Jankowski, crossed to Jack’s truck.

“Yard gates weren’t open?” Jack seemed strangely detached from the situation—as if the outcome didn’t worry him in the least.

“No, they were all closed. Nick can’t open the latches, and there’s no way he could climb over the fence. But he’s not in the yard. I just don’t . . .”

Jack held up a hand, silencing me. He scanned the area, seeming to listen for something. A peacock strolled by, dragging a folded fan of tail feathers, and he watched it pass. “You seen the dog lately?” In the past month, Pecos had gone from my dog to the dog, in Jack’s vernacular. “Dog wouldn’t just leave the yard without the boy.”

Inside, I was screaming, Stop standing here talking! We have to do something! Jack started toward the yard, toward the one place I was certain Nick wasn’t. “They’re not there. I looked. I searched everywhere.” My mind flashed a picture of Nick wandering into the surf. We didn’t have time to waste looking where I’d already searched.

“You check in the garage buildin’?”

“I said I’ve been everywhere. They’re not in the yard.”

Right now, Jack looked as though he didn’t care whether Nick lived or died. What kind of man was he?

“I can’t raise anyone on this thing,” Jankowski yelled, and even he seemed more concerned than Jack.

My stomach fell. The world spun. I felt like I was going to be sick. We needed help, and we needed it now. “We have to call the sheriff, or somebody, before any more time goes by.”

Jack held up a hand to silence me again. I wasn’t inclined to obey this time. I whirled toward him, intent on taking control of the situation.

“You check in the little house?” he asked.

“What . . . no, it’s . . . the doors are locked.” If Nick had somehow managed to let himself into Jack’s house, surely he would have heard me when I was running around the yard calling his name.

A slow heel turn swiveled Jack toward the gate, and he strode through, dismissing me in midsentence. Left with little other choice, I followed to the little house, again protesting the waste of time. His glance was dismissive as he took a skeleton key from the porch light and turned the old-fashioned lock. The door creaked open, and he paused to replace the key, his countenance still annoyingly calm.

A soft sound jingled in the silent air, barely audible. I listened again and heard nothing except the fall of Jack’s boots against the hollow floors, his passage quieted by seventies-vintage linoleum in an avocado-green print. The kitchen décor seemed to be of the same era, the wallpaper covered in sprays of tiny sunflowers. The L-shaped row of cabinets looked to be a deep shade of olive green, now gray with dust. A saucepan sat on the stove next to a china canister that read Oatmeal, and a dust-covered metal spoon struggled to reflect the weak afternoon light filtered through partially disintegrated lace curtains.

A child’s cereal bowl and mug waited on a cream-colored breakfast table by the window. The chair was pulled out slightly, as if someone had left to grab the milk from the refrigerator and forgotten to come back. Without wanting to, I slid my gaze over the breakfast set. Fruity Pebbles ran in multicolored letters along the rim. Nick’s favorite cereal.

Where was the boy who’d owned that bowl? Why would it have been left on the table if he’d gone to Mexico with his mother for a long-term trip? Why did it look more like someone had been here making his breakfast, and then suddenly disappeared?

What if Jack’s wife and her little boy had never gone to Mexico at all? What if they’d never left the ranch?

I turned and watched Jack moving through the room, emotionless, not looking left or right. Had something unthinkable happened here? Had he done something unthinkable . . . and then left this place as . . . as what? A shrine? A trophy? A strange act of denial?

Behind me, the other man, Jankowski, stopped in the doorway. I didn’t blame him. This tiny house was filled with the presence of the woman and child who had been here—Jack’s wife and her young son.

I wanted to turn and run out the door, but I couldn’t. If Nick was in here, I had to find him, but how could he possibly be? The back door was locked. The other doors were, too.

Jack stepped through a darkened passageway into another room. Taking a breath of mildew and stillness, I followed him into the shadows, then emerged in a tiny living room with two sofas, a console television, and various antique end tables. The shades were pulled over bay windows at the opposite end, casting pallor over everything.

A beautiful painting hung over the sofa—a little blond-haired boy squatting in the grass, picking flowers. Rain lilies, like the ones that had bloomed in our yard. A lump rose in my throat as I followed Jack through another doorway into a hall that was narrow by modern standards, the striped wallpaper making the walls seem to close in. Jack traversed the distance in three long strides and crossed through another doorway into a sunlit bedroom. He stopped just inside the door, and I stopped just outside it.

Moving a few inches closer, I studied the interior with both foreboding and fascination. It was a child’s room, a boy’s, the bed constructed of miniature wagon wheels, the dresser fronts decorated with wood-burned cattle brands, the toy box and the shelves beside the closet door stocked with tiny trucks and tractors from a mixture of eras—some even old enough that they might have belonged to Jack.

Clothes hung in the closet. T-shirts, jeans, a suede jacket with fringe. A boy’s clothes. There was a photo beside the closet door. A woman with long blond hair, kneeling by the lakeshore with a little boy, both of them smiling at the camera. Firefly Island lay behind them, across the water. I knew exactly where the picture had been taken. I’d been there not long ago with Chrissy and Tag.

My head swam. I reached for the doorframe, steadied myself, felt a wave of grief mixed with the rush of desperation and adrenaline inside me.

Jack motioned toward the floor. I pulled my gaze downward, unwillingly grazing over another picture frame on the corner of the desk. A smiling little face underneath a cowboy hat. He couldn’t have been much older than Nick then . . .

I glanced downward still, past the legs of the desk, across the round rag rug that covered the wooden floor, and then, near the footboard of the bed, I saw them—Nick and Pecos, sound asleep on the floor, surrounded by an assortment of toys.

They’d been in here . . . playing?

“Looks like that answers your question,” Jack said, and Pecos opened his eyes. He rolled upright and surveyed the room, seeming surprised and slightly embarrassed to find himself here. Noticing Jack, he ducked his head and tucked his ears.

“Must’ve climbed in through the doggy door on the side of the house.” Jack turned to leave the room, and for an instant, there was emotion on his face. Grief? Pain? Regret? I couldn’t tell. As quickly as it came, it was gone, but suddenly I understood that there was a reason he’d known to look inside the little house even though the doors were locked. Nick wasn’t the first child to come in that way.

“I’ll get him.” I moved past Jack, stubbed my toe against a little red tractor, and watched it skitter across the room. Nick had trespassed where he shouldn’t have, touched things that had been closeted away for years. “I’m sorry.” My voice choked with a mixture of feelings I couldn’t even begin to sort out. “I . . . I had no idea he could . . . get in here.” Threading through the toys, I tried to decide whether to pick them up or leave them. The photo of the little boy and his mother pulled at me again. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to touch anything. I just wanted to grab Nick, get him out of this place, explain to him why he should never come here again.

Jack didn’t answer, but walked back through the house without a word. I picked up Nick and followed, passing down the hall and across the living room, not looking at the painting above the sofa. The dog followed quietly behind me, as if even he knew we were treading on memorial ground.

Outside on the back steps, I finally caught a breath as Nick yawned, stretched, and blinked, slowly coming to life. Smacking his lips, he took in the yard, his face a mask of confusion as Jack locked the little house again and put the key away.

The sounds of a car door closing and another vehicle rumbling up the driveway echoed against the buildings as we walked back around the corner. When I stepped onto the path, Chrissy was hurrying toward the yard, her eyes wide, her red curls flying in the wind. “Oh my gosh, you found him!” Leaving the gate hanging, she ran to meet us. “Thank God! I’ve been callin’ everyone I could think of to come help you search.”

From the looks of things, she had. Two vehicles were racing up our driveway already, and a third had just turned in the gate. The posse had arrived.