“I see a huge rock. Flat. Like how a rock would look if you sliced it in half, but it’s on a mountain. It goes way up in the sky. There are pine trees and a river way below, and the river looks like a snake. All three of the boys are down by the river where there’s an island in the middle of it.”

“That sounds like the south side of Bald Peek,” Aurelia said, her hand still on Hansen’s head, squished into the carpet. “Off the Mahoney Trail.”

Hansen screeched a prayer of punishment and penance.

Calls were made. A search in a whole new direction began. The kids were helicoptered out and at a hospital within the hour. Two of them were suffering from hypothermia. The one who had fallen had broken both legs. They probably would have died that night had they not been rescued. All three stayed in the hospital for days but would be as good as new soon.

Betsy was not as good as new. As soon as Aurelia and the lieutenant left, her father tore her pants down, leaned her over his lap, and hit her with his belt while her mother cowered.

Another time, when she was fifteen, Betsy pounded a rock into Mr. Zeiber’s sliding glass door until it shattered, and she crawled in only a minute after he had a heart attack in the kitchen. In her premonition she had seen him struggling for air, arching his back, clutching his chest. She had taken particular note of his clothes, as she had learned to do: gray sweater with red trim on the cuffs, blue jeans with a hole on the left knee, black tennis shoes.

She called for an ambulance as Mr. Zeiber, only forty-five years old, gasped for breath on the floor, then she held his hand. Mr. Zeiber lived. Her parents were alerted to where their daughter was only when the police brought her home. The police explained that Betsy had told them that she had “heard” Mr. Zeiber’s cries for help and that’s why she broke the sliding glass door. Mr. Zeiber did not remember screaming, but he figured that he had and knew that Betsy had saved his life.

“Your daughter is a hero,” the police said.

When the police left, Betsy’s enraged father tossed her in the basement closet with the Bible, where she crumpled to the floor. He did not let her out for twelve hours, though she had saved a life. He gave her a can to pee in.