Lis had been seven years old when her four-year-old sister Janey disappeared. One minute the two girls had been playing outside. Now stay in the yard. Lis supposedly watching Janey and resenting it. Be a good girl and do what Lissie tells you. Wondering why her brothers Davey or Sam or Michael never got saddled with babysitting. How come you always get to be the mommy? Bedding their doll babies in shoe boxes under their picnic-table house.

A black-and-white puppy with floppy ears had scampered through the yard. Lis took off after it into the patch of woods behind the house until she lost sight of the white tip of its tail down by the creek. There she waded into the shallow water, turning over rocks, looking for frogs and yellow-spotted salamanders. She remembered thinking: Doll babies need pets.

She’d tried to catch fish in her shoe but the water leaked out. Butterflies flitted past her grasp. When she returned with her arms loaded with forget-me-nots and Spanish moss to line their shoe box doll cribs, Lis assumed Janey had gone into the house, taking her doll with her. That meant precious minutes ticked by without anyone raising the alarm.

Hope of finding out what happened to Janey had long ago faded, and yet still the shadow of her absence hung over the house, though the only physical reminders were photographs and Janey’s unaltered bedroom, with a single electric Christmas candle perpetually switched on in its front window.

Miss Sorrel and Lis’s father, Wayne Woodham, whom everyone called Woody, had taken great pains to assure Lis that Janey’s disappearance was not her fault. But even then, Lis knew better. And if she had the power to lose Janey, then surely she had the power to bring her back. She used to stand in the upstairs hall with her hand on the doorknob to Janey’s room, imagining that it was a displaced magic bedknob from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. They had a videotape of the movie, and Lis would play and replay the bit where Angela Lansbury’s character casts a spell. Lis tried to repeat the syllables that sounded like gibberish: hell born hen bane, a-go-night.

She’d hold on to the doorknob. Imagine it getting warm and glowing pink, her sister’s favorite color. Then she’d push open the door and there Janey would be, safe and sound, asleep in her bed.

Even now, the incantation flew through her head whenever she was about to go into the room that would always and forever be Janey’s room.