Later, Anouk wrote about the Mennonite farm in her notebook. She wrote about the closed gate at the top of the road, and how she had to get out of the car and use the entire weight of her body to open it. She wrote about the barn with a green roof, and the horse buggy in front of the barn with no horse. She wrote about the garden, the beefsteak tomatoes hanging heavy on the vine, and the purple, blooming cabbages.

She wrote: Me and Dad stood at the bottom of the porch steps and there was not a single sound on that farm. No chickens or horses or wind. The world just stopped. I said Dad there’s no one here but Dad walked up the steps anyway and knocked on the front door.

She wrote about what she knew of Mennonites, what she’d seen. Horse buggies on the road. Men in neat black suits and hats and ties. Women in bonnets, no make-up, blue collars all the way up to their chins. About this, she wrote: When we’re stuck behind them in our cars we’re like horseflies near their heads. They’ll ignore us unless we get too close.

She wrote about how she walked up on to the porch with her dad and stuck her nose against the screen door and smelled wood oil, and baking, and the wax of a candle recently blown out. This was the moment she decided that she would write about the Mennonite farm. It was those smells coming on a breeze from somewhere deep inside the house and the subsequent thoughts of sepia faces in old photographs. Women’s tiny hands peeping out of puffy sleeves. Buckles and lace and men with sculpted facial hair. With her nose pressed against the screen door, Anouk touched time.

Red gave up. And when they turned around to go back to the car, there was a ghost. Anouk wrote about this too, a ghost standing at the bottom of the porch steps. She wore a cap over her hair, and the back of her cap was tied with ribbon. She wore a cotton dress down to her ankles, black leather boots and a blue apron with pockets.

The girl, not a ghost, led Anouk and Red around the side of the house to a pantry at the back, and Anouk wrote about the jars of peaches and pickles and jams, and she wrote about how the girl’s leather boots scuffed on the soft, wooden floorboards. She wrote about the goosebumps that rose on her arms when she heard the sound of leather boots scuffing on soft, wooden floorboards.

The eggs cost two dollars for a dozen. Red didn’t have any money and Anouk also wrote about this, about having to go back to the car and get money from her mom, who was sitting with the car door open, her leg stretched out and her bare heel in the dirt, and Bruce Springsteen playing on the car radio. She wrote about how, when the girl came around from the back of the house, Bruce Springsteen noise was being pitched about like the silver ball in a pinball machine. It pinged against the side of the barn, and against the front of the house. It pinged against the horse buggy with its horse bits resting in the dirt. It pinged against the tomatoes and the cabbages. And then Nora couldn’t find any money in her pockets, so Red dove into the car and fumbled across her lap to look in the glove compartment, and Nora said oh for fuck’s sake when Red yelled eureka and backed out of the car waving a two-dollar bill all over the place.