I went into the house again, this time searching in a more concentrated fashion. The kitchen, which looked as though it might date to the pioneer era, had cupboards that stretched to the ceiling. I found a ladder, climbed up, discovered old glass dishes, a stash of gasoline rations from the Second World War, and what looked like a complete set of antique Delft, all thickly coated with dust.

Deep bins at the floor level might have been designed for flour when the house was built. Doris had stored boots and windbreakers in them, along with empty egg cartons. I spent an hour looking in drawers, even going to the basement, which had a dirt floor and a few snakes that were keeping warm on the hot-water heater. They stirred and lifted their heads, tongues flickering, when I turned on the lights. My guidebook to Kansas had assured me that benign snakes outnumber the venomous five to one; the book told me to look for elliptical pupils, but I didn’t want to get that close. If Doris let them live in her basement, they were surely benign, but it still took an effort to walk past them.

I finally gave up on it. I could spend weeks exploring the house and the grounds and still wonder if I was overlooking a hiding place in the outbuildings or in the fields themselves. Daylight would hold for only another hour, and I needed to look at the chunk of Doris’s old land that Sea-2-Sea was farming.

I drove over to the silo, scanning the skies for surveillance drones. Twice I spotted something circling, and twice, when I pulled out my binoculars, it was a hawk riding the air currents.

I wished I had a drone myself that could survey the field to see if any of Doris’s diggings remained. Instead I parked outside the silo gates and started walking through the field on Doris’s side of the fence. She seemed to have been a methodical thinker: if she wanted to test for radiation levels, she would have dug up some of her own soil for comparison.

Out in the open fields, nothing blocked the north wind. My ears began to throb, and my hands turned numb, even though I jammed them deep into my jeans pockets. Periodically a burst of rain would sweep through, hitting my jacket like buckshot, but fortunately it never lingered long. My teeth chattered from cold; it was hard to conjure the hot August day when Lucinda Ferring had discovered Cady tucked under a sleeping bag in her mother’s tent.