She stood, cinching her housecoat around her. There was no reason for a child to be on the property, much less in the doghouse. There weren’t any neighbors nearby, nobody but old Tobias in his shack at the bottom of the hill, decrepitly tending his long-haired goats. The nearest school was a twenty-minute drive and it was summer besides.
She hunched down, hoping her eyes had played a trick on her. But there they were again: a pair of muddied knees encircled by plump child-arms, and below that, two small pale feet.
Nora’s heart was thundering. For a moment, she thought it might not be a child at all but some deformed and naked night-thing, an unearthly being she didn’t even believe existed and yet suddenly feared. The dog nosed at her elbow.
“Hello?” she managed. “Who’s in there?”
The child began to cry — a soft, pitiful sound. The dog began barking again, with such alarm that Nora finally took hold of its scruff and dragged it into the house. There she buttered a slice of bread with a shaking hand and as an afterthought, sprinkled it with sugar.
Back outside, she knelt a few feet from the doghouse.
“Are you hungry? I’ve brought some bread. There’s water in the house — do you want me to get some water?”
She waited, but no answer came. She heard shuffling from within the doghouse, and a set of palms appeared on the plywood.
It was a girl — three or four years old, if Nora had to guess, potbellied and chubby-cheeked, naked except for a pair of dingy white underwear. Her hair was tangled, and on her knees there were streaks of something brown that Nora later would recognize as dried blood. The child crouched just outside the doghouse, rubbing one eye with a dirty fist.
Slowly, Nora extended the bread.
The child’s eyes were big and turned down at the edges in a way that might’ve looked merry when she smiled but now gave her an appearance of sad wisdom. She glanced left and right, presumably in search of the dog, and seeing it gone she bolted straight across the dry patch of ground, right through the outstretched bread and into the warm center of Nora’s body.
Nora gasped. She tried to hold her at arm’s length, and to remind her of the bread, which was now smashed between them, butter on the girl’s neck and in her hair. “Now, now,” Nora said, “stop that — let’s not — you mustn’t—” But the child clung with fierce hands, gripping and pinching and climbing until her legs were wrapped tight around Nora’s waist. It was all Nora could do to regain her feet.
“My God,” she said, hoisting the child with her forearms. “My God in heaven.”
She hurried toward the field, where her father’s tractor was making its way along the east fence. He saw her coming and shut the engine off. For once there was no wind.
Anita Dewey was the girl’s name. She lived two miles south, on a rambling property covered in scrub oak. Her family didn’t farm — her father was a welder, and their acreage was strewn with car parts and metal structures that stuck up out of the weeds like dinosaur bones. You couldn’t see their house from the county road unless you knew just where to look.
Anita had gone missing, along with her brother Gerald, from a summer barbecue the day before. It was somebody’s birthday and people had gathered to celebrate in the Dewey family’s backyard. Smoke drifted from a charcoal grill fashioned by Mr. Dewey himself. Men in flannel shirts hunkered around a card game, drinking beer, while women shuttled food to a large and shrieking group of children. They were climbing up and rolling down a hill at the edge of the yard, dry grass clinging to their hair. Country music blared from the house — loud when the door opened, muffled when it slammed.
It was late afternoon when Mrs. Dewey noticed her kids were gone. She stood in the middle of the yard looking all around. She wasn’t worried yet — they were at their own house, after all, and there were plenty of older cousins to look after the little ones. Surely they were around here somewhere.
That’s when a little girl tugged her arm. She said she’d seen Anita and Gerald leaving with an older boy.
“What older boy?”
A big one, she said. Carrying a green bag over his shoulder. She pointed in the direction he’d gone, down a trail through the tall weeds and over a big log that bridged the creek. He’d had Gerald on one hip, while Anita had walked alongside him, holding his hand.
As it turned out, the mother of the older boy was sitting nearby. Her name was Linda LeDivic, and when she heard that her son — who owned an army rucksack, and had it with him that day — had gone off with the Dewey children, she stood so abruptly she overturned her plate. Her soda fizzed away into the grass. She was a shy woman with a soft voice people often strained to hear, but that day she spoke up loud so there could be no mistake.
“We’d better find them quick,” she said.
All this, Nora learned later.
She learned the children’s names from the postmistress and heard the rucksack described by the man who helped her father with the farm equipment. She found out about Mrs. LeDivic from a teacher at the school where she worked that summer as a substitute. And she was told the contents of the rucksack (a crushed pack of Pall Malls, a notebook filled with strange drawings, and a noose made from thick rope) from her fiancé, Ron, who’d been called not long after the children disappeared to join the search party. It took the sheriff more than an hour to get there, and by that time half the men in the county had gone vigilante.
In pairs and groups of three, they fanned out from the Dewey place, shouting the children’s names. But after an hour or two they settled into a grim silence, each man fearing what he might find. Meanwhile, the LeDivic boy’s mother was collapsed on the Dewey’s couch in a fit of hysteria, with a couple of neighbor women trying to help her breathe — behavior that comforted nobody.
They found the boy’s shirt first, about half a mile from the Dewey’s backyard: small and blue, hanging in the high weeds. The boy was lying a short distance away. Naked in the yellow evening light, he looked so much like a corpse that Mr. Dewey dropped to his knees like he’d been shot. The noose was still thick around the child’s neck, and scattered nearby were bits of bark and splintered wood from the limb that had snapped above him by the grace of God. He was bruised and cold, but he was alive, and there was a great bustle of activity to get him home to his mother, and then on to the hospital in town.
But as darkness gathered, Anita was still missing. Her father and the other men walked the fields and forests, calling her name. The police were also searching by then, but Mr. Dewey kept apart from them, running ahead, unable to bear their stern and pitying faces, which seemed to say already how it would end, how it always ended. He wanted to be the one to find her, to cover her up, to shield her from their eyes.
“I still don’t know why you didn’t call me that night,” Nora complained to Ron, a week after she found the girl. “There was a missing child, not to mention a madman on the loose, and you couldn’t be bothered to pick up the telephone?”
Ron shrugged. They were in the backseat of his old Plymouth, Nora lying with her head in his lap while he sipped from a bottle of bourbon. He had one elbow out the window, which let in the cool evening air, and there were crickets singing in the weeds along the edge of the road.
“Aren’t too many telephones out behind the Dewey place,” he said. “And like I said, I didn’t get home till half past two.”
“Well, you could’ve called anyway. You might’ve saved me a lot of worry.”
“That I doubt.”
Nora sighed. “I just keep thinking of what a long night it must’ve been for that little girl. I can’t even bring myself to imagine it.”