Tilly lifted a floorboard under her mother’s nightstand and pulled out a purple sock. Her mother’s money was still there: $800. She remembered her mother hiding money from her father, probably so she and Tilly and Johnny could one day escape.

Tilly sat on her parents’ bed frame and cried like she hadn’t cried in years. After she pulled herself together, she brought the bag outside, took a deep breath, and went searching for what she didn’t want to find but knew she needed to find.

She crawled under the house. It was moldy and smelled like a sewage. The house had tilted, so one part was open to more daylight than the other. She saw nothing there. She headed to their crumbling red barn. She climbed up to the hayloft and peeked around, then she explored their weathered outbuilding and saw nothing except tools and her father’s old lawnmower.

Tilly knew that the house, barn, and outbuilding had been searched by the police after Johnny accused their father of killing their mother during his trial. When she read the trial transcripts, her brother had never mentioned a door in the ground. Why would he? He didn’t know about it. She had remembered the door only recently, when she’d started thinking more and more about how her mother disappeared. The door that skipped through her mind was ominous, dirty, so scary she blocked it out for years.

But Tilly remembered one time, before her mother died, when she had followed her father. She held her pink teddy bear in one arm and a bag of popcorn in another. Her mother had made her the popcorn, her face bruised, her hand clutching her stomach, before she went to bed. It was the middle of the afternoon, but her mother said she was tired.

Tilly was bored and Johnny was at school. Her father zoomed up their driveway in his black truck, then drove into the back part of their property, up the hill, down the hill, and behind a rim of trees near the stream. Her father had warned her never to go over there, ever, but she went anyhow. She would be a detective! She had read a book about a girl detective.

Tilly ran and skipped and jumped, up the hill, down the hill, and hid behind the rim of trees near the stream until she could see her father. He seemed to disappear near the rim of trees, to the right of a large rock. She scampered closer and saw him with a long package in his arms, wrapped in black plastic. Then he disappeared below the ground!