And all of it? A joke. A prank. All just because they felt like it. Because they wanted attention. Because they could.

For a few months, they were famous, at least in Southern Indiana. Poor, neglected small-town girls. Misha’s and Cora’s moms went on local TV, and just before Kaycee ran away, there was even talk of interviews with big-time media. Someone from the Chicago Tribune was trying to link the sickness to other examples of corporate pollution. When the girls came out as liars, though, the story fizzled quickly, and no one seemed to blame them, at least not for long. They just wanted a little attention. That’s how the newspapers spun it.

But I believed them. And there’s a part of me that never stopped believing the sickness was real—that found myself again and again tugged to questions of environment and conservation, that brought the initial complaint to the agency’s attention, cleaving to it with the small but painful, nagging intensity of a hangnail.

When I moved to Chicago, I tossed all my old clothes as soon as I could afford to replace them. I traded in my style, such as it was, for whatever was draped on the mannequins on Magnificent Mile. I ran my accent over a blade, sharpening out the long Midwest vowels, and told people I came from a suburb of New York. I slept off my hangover on Sundays, and never prayed unless it was to clear the traffic. And I stopped calling home.

I did my best to shake Barrens off.

But the more I tried, the more I felt the subtle tug of some half-dead memory, the insistence of something I’d failed to do or see. A message I’d failed to decipher.

Sometimes, coming home after one glass too many—or maybe too few—I’d return to old memories of Kaycee, back to afternoons spent target-shooting rocks at the huge mushrooms in the woods, back to my dog, Chestnut, and back to the convulsions of a town felled by sickness.

Maybe I wanted to believe there was some answer, some reason, for why she did what she did.

Maybe I just wanted to believe her, because after all this time I couldn’t understand how she had suckered me so badly.

No matter how many times I swore I would stop, I found myself coming back to the same questions. Why? I could shake free of almost everything, but I couldn’t shake free of that question. Why? Kaycee, Misha, the hoax. Why? Sometimes a month or two would go by. Other times, it was every few weeks. I’d lose hours searching Optimal, combing through the pitiful threads of what in Barrens counted for news. Mostly Optimal PR—new housing, a new community center, a new scholarship fund. All that searching over the years, and it never turned up anything of use.

Until, six months ago, it did.

—

Wyatt Gallagher’s three hundred acres are enclosed entirely by a sagging post-and-beam fence. The drought’s been bad here; the green has gone brown, and dust obscures my windshield. As I turn up the gravel drive, several chained-up hound dogs bark in the distance. I knew the CEAW was renting out temporary space for the legal team, but I had no idea we’d be moving onto Gallagher’s farm—not that it’s surprising, given that Gallagher is the one who first complained about the reservoir.