I expected to be punished as soon as I got home. But Samuel was still missing—and had been for two long hours—so finding him came first.

“No sign of him,” my mother said, and I could tell that she was scared. “We hoped he was with you.”

She and Esther were standing in the yard much as I’d left them, except now they looked grim and panicky.

“I said I’d send him home if I saw him.” I could feel them blaming me again for something I hadn’t done. It felt like horsehair inside my clothes.

But then I realized that this was about more than one kind of blame.

Esther looked like she wanted to claw me. “Why did you do that?” she hissed. “Why did you put a snake in with Father?”

I stood up as tall as I could. “I knew it would make you scream.”

“Mercy,” my mother said. “You really have lost your mind.”

“Why would you want me to scream?” Esther said.

I couldn’t remember the last time she had smiled at me, but I was sure that she smiled at our father every night before she went to bed, though he couldn’t see her. “You think Daddy wouldn’t do everything he could to help you if he heard that?”

I had decided I wouldn’t cry, no matter what sort of punishment waited for me, but this kind of talk made me so sad that I struggled to keep my voice from shaking. “If anything is going to wake him up, don’t you think his Esther, screaming, might?”

My mother and sister both stared at me with less fury than before, but not much more of anything good or kind.

“I’ll deal with you later,” my mother said. “Go find Samuel now, and be quick about it.”

But as I turned away, she stopped me again. “Where are the eggs? You were gone long enough to lay some yourself.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Then where’s the fish?” Esther said. “And where were you, if you weren’t at the Andersons’ for eggs?”

“I was . . . looking for Samuel, up-mountain. And a dog ate the fish,” I said, which was the truth. Or part of it.

My mother frowned at me. “That mutt?”

“What mutt?” Esther asked.

“I saw a mutt on the path,” I said.

“And he took the fish?”

From my hand, yes. He had eaten eagerly, the fish steaming in the cool air. And I might have said something like that. I might have said, Yes, he took it from me, and told half the truth that way. But I wouldn’t blame the dog for something I had done. So I said, “I gave it to him.”