Fiona Loomis back home. A girl with sharp eyes and a knob in her nose, a girl who told stories that no person would ever believe, unless that person was Alistair. When she went missing, the police canvassed the neighborhood, asking people when they last saw her. Mrs. Carmine, who lived across the street from the Loomis family, told them that on the morning of Saturday, November 4, 1989, sometime around three a.m., she was having trouble sleeping, so she made herself a snack of potato chips and cottage cheese and sat next to her living room window to watch the snow.
“Fiona was standing in the street,” Mrs. Carmine said. “All alone. Snow whippin’ around her. Two, maybe three minutes she’s there. Watching. Or thinking. Nowadays I don’t know about these girls and what they think. All I know is she turned to go home.”
But she didn’t go home, for this was the last reported sighting of Fiona Loomis. She ran away, or she was kidnapped; everyone was convinced of it. Everyone except Alistair. He feared it at first, and when the evidence became undeniable, he knew it for sure. There was only one place she could have gone.
Through the portal in her basement. Through the cylinder of water behind the boiler, to another dimension, a land she visited often, a world from which she always returned, until, of course, the Riverman found her, and took her, and trapped her … in Aquavania.