It was one of the last times she saw her mother alive.

They were in the camp only a few weeks when Clementine disappeared.

Certainly, she shouldn’t have gone off by herself. Particularly in the dark of night. But she couldn’t sleep, said Jonah, who had noticed her tossing and turning as he drifted in and out of consciousness. One moment she was there beside him and when next he opened his eyes, she was gone.

He hadn’t been immediately concerned; sometimes she grew restless at night and went out to look at the stars and think whatever nighttime thoughts came to her mind in the secret hours before dawn.

But when he woke again in the dark and she still wasn’t there, an ill foreboding filled him. He rose to find her. She wasn’t anywhere in the camp.

Jonah took a lantern and tried to imagine what would compel his wife to venture into the swamp at this time of night.

“Clementine?” he called out. He searched for the better part of an hour, nearly stumbling to his death tripping over angry roots, and when he found her, the first thing he saw wasn’t even his wife but the fox fire that had lured her out there.

It appeared as a pair of small glowing flames that hovered before Clementine’s beguiled face. She seemed hypnotized by the dancing light, for she did not acknowledge Jonah as he drew nearer, set down his lantern, and reached out to her.

But before he could take hold of his wife, he made the mistake of glancing into the water below, over which the fox fire floated.

Illuminated vaguely by the moonglow and the tiny flames and the lantern that sat perched on a small grassy knoll, he saw a figure reflected in the water that did not exist above it—and its eyes were two flames, the flames into which his wife was gazing with mad ecstasy, two flames perched within the sockets of a terrible ancient face, a face that was not a face, of a creature that appeared, in the reflection, to be hovering above the water and reaching one twisted arm like a gnarled tree branch toward Clementine, whose name Jonah cried out in horror, who turned to look at him with surprise, like a sleepwalker abruptly jolted awake.

But the look lasted only a moment.

In the next, Clementine was yanked by unseen hands into the water, which swallowed her whole.

Later, the others would gently suggest to Jonah that she had lost her footing. The mud here was treacherously slick. People slipped all the time.

Jonah did not hesitate to dive into the sludgy water. In a moment, he was enveloped by the cold black as he blindly fought his way down through the weeds. What he found when he got to the bottom, however, was not his wife; he found an underwater hole that opened up into some dark recess below.

Would he have happily descended into that bottomless pit if he’d believed he would be able to drag his wife back to the surface? Of course. But he thought of sweet Meriday awakening the following morning, frightened and alone. He swam back to the surface, pulled himself coughing and wet onto the bank, and watched the water desperately in hopes that Clementine, too, would find her way back. But it was not to be, and the longer he sat waiting, the more hope dwindled.