It was only after they’d finished unpacking—when dusk fell and Miles put on the headlamp and started digging out back, the small grave for the fox corpse he claimed he’d found dead, claimed he hadn’t killed, and Hannah had nudged with her toe, looking at the fur, checking for wounds or blood, trying to prove him right or wrong and coming up empty—that she heard the faint chorus from the opposite side of her street, down the gully, near the creek, calling out one word over and over, a chant. Liza. Liza. Liza. Hannah thought, What a strange name for a dog. She left him to work in the low light and was about to call Mike and leave a message for the therapist.
Then, the text from her sister.
Because a six-year-old girl named Liza, who lived in the house across the street, the shrouded house with the weather vane and the couple on maybe their third marriage, had gone down to the creek to look for frogs and hadn’t come back.
Hannah’s hand went up to cover her face. Dear God. She’d already felt a vein of affection for that house, the dark greens and grays, the possibilities it held. Already the neighborhood had managed to change shape, to scare them, disappoint them.
In that suspended moment, as she breathed by the low light of her phone, a flash of recognition ran through her. She couldn’t see through the glossy leaves, but it was as if she saw that little girl. Another child drawn to animals, and animals had led her to something sinister. Hannah could picture the crayon drawings of frogs and deer and squirrels dotting their fridge, the animal books that lined their shelves. A girl who fearlessly nestled her rosy cheeks into the dusty fur of strangers’ dogs and begged her mother for a rabbit on top of their house.
She knew that kind of kid. She had that kind of kid.
Four
Eva
They found her bucket. That bothered me tremendously, that tidbit, whispered to me by Hillary as we stood together in a line outside the Harris family’s guest cottage, serving as search party headquarters, waiting for instructions. A symbol of innocence, wrenched from her tiny hands! I shuddered. I also nosed around the guest cottage, wondering if they had two lots and would ever spin it off as a separate property or even rent with the option to buy. (That’s what Margot had told me she was searching for.) Oh, I was becoming a regular Harriet the Realtor Spy instead of focusing on the tragedy at hand. Shame on you, Eva.
I’d pictured that bucket as red plastic, light and childlike, bobbing in the overflowing creek. All that rain, rushing by. Was she swept away? The news reports said the water in Tamsen Creek was nearly ten inches higher than normal; it had spread out in a monstrous pattern, it seemed to me, pouring over rocks and moss and spent leaves that usually provided picturesque natural margins. Now it was just wet grass along the sides and gray, churning water rushing through. Uglier than I’d ever seen it, a molten, throbbing slash.
As we got through the line and entered the mudroom of the guesthouse, which probably doubled as their pool house, given its proximity, I was surprised to find it quite orderly and large. There were cubbies and benches, a stacked washer and dryer, the kind I hated, and a tiled dog bath, replete with hanging collar, leash, and chew toys.
We were handed flyers with the girl’s photo and specific information about what little Liza was wearing and carrying and where she was headed. To the creek to catch frogs was what she’d told her mother. Something she did nearly every afternoon, like clockwork. The mother said she was shy and didn’t have many friends at school or in the neighborhood but loved to explore, so she’d let her. We work so hard as parents to keep kids to a schedule, and look how it comes back to haunt us. Why, anyone in the neighborhood could have known the girl had a pattern, as regular as a snack.
In the close-up photo, she was missing two teeth in the front, showing off her checkerboard smile proudly. The photo had an informal, silly quality to it that made me wonder why the family had chosen it. I couldn’t say for certain if it was the same girl I’d glimpsed the other night; that child had seemed a good deal younger than six, with longer, wilder-looking hair. On the flyer, it said she was carrying a house key on a white lanyard, a bucket, and possibly a mug. They’d found the bucket but not the lanyard or mug. It tore at me inexplicably, on another level, when I read that the bucket was white enamel, monogrammed, and oversize, used to fill the dog’s water bowl.
They wouldn’t ordinarily tell anyone this level of detail, I was certain, except they were also looking for a matching enamel mug. The scoop for the dog’s dry food. The child would use it, I supposed, to capture frogs and ferry them to the bucket. White enamel. Black monogram. I looked around. Perhaps in these tall cabinets, there were matching black-and-white monogrammed dog towels? (The girl herself was wearing green wellies, paisley leggings, and a pink pullover with a drawstring hood. That bothered me too, the drawstring.)
I cleared my throat, projected. “Is the monogram the dog’s initials?”
The friend or relative coordinating things, the man in dark-gray leggings and black half-zip—how I hate to see a man’s scrawny limbs in leggings, so emasculating—blinked hard at me instead of answering. His mouth opened slightly, as if he had to pull in oxygen to fuel an answer. I was certain that after a few seconds, he wished he’d ignored me and not looked right at me.
Because he didn’t just say a quick yes, or I don’t know, or for God’s sake even offer a laugh. The question hung in the air a long time, long enough for the rest of the group, numbering thirty or forty, to repeat it down the line.
“I don’t think that’s relevant,” he said.
I shrugged. “You just told us to notice everything, even if it seems random.”
“In the woods, I meant. As you fan out.”
“Oh. Okay.” I rolled my eyes at Hannah and Hillary, who whispered to me to behave. These were her neighbors, their neighbors now, and it wouldn’t do for an outsider to embarrass them. Never mind that I was technically a neighbor, too, lived so close I occasionally walked over here, cutting through the gulch of another neighborhood, or did until things got so damned slippery and wet with this September rain.
There were mostly women in the group, a few teenagers, only a couple of men. Morgan and Miles had begged to come, claimed other kids were doing it (which was correct, but they were seventeen and eighteen), and the girls, with a look of horror on their faces, had said absolutely not. Under no circumstances. And Morgan’s chorus of why not, we want to help, we can look, we’re brave was met with no excuses or reasons. As it should have been. God knows I didn’t always agree with their parenting advice—I was at odds with the way Hillary overscheduled Morgan’s summers, and don’t get me started on Miles’s hair, which Hannah and Mike never forced him to cut and which always fell in his face, like a sporty British girl. Like an unkempt Princess Di, he was with that hair—horrifying. As if the boy didn’t have enough to worry about, with his slender body and bookish ways. To add feminine hair on top of the equation struck me as madness. But keeping them home today? Absolutely.