“Help!” I yell in the direction of the Chrysanthemum, the middle cabin, the smallest of the three that face the beach. I’d seen lights on the night I arrived, but nothing after that.

“Someone help me!” I call out as loudly as I can. Loud enough to be heard in a storm, I think, let alone on a quiet morning. “Someone’s got my wife!”

I jump out of the skiff, grab Aubrey, who is still crying, and run up the concrete steps from the beach to the lawn. I set her down.

“Everything will be okay,” I tell her. “Stay right here. Don’t move. Okay?”

“I want Mommy,” she cries out.

“I know,” I say, trying to calm her. “I do too.”

I hear voices in the cabin, and I wonder if I’ve hallucinated everything. The sunlight on the water had scrambled the images of what I’d seen. I run up the steps of the deck and inside through the kitchen to the living room facing out over Hood Canal and the conifer-crusted hillsides beyond.

“Sophie?”

It’s the TV, of course. Sophie’s gone. An infomercial for a pressure cooker is playing.

I’m in a pressure cooker.

I breathe in for a second. My heart is about to burst from my chest. I’m going to have a heart attack. I’m going to fall on the old fir floor that Sophie coveted that morning as we ate waffles. What is happening?

I return outside just as a woman and two children come back from wherever they’ve spent the first part of the day.

“Someone took my wife! Call 911! Help me!”

The woman sees the look in my eyes that indicates unequivocally this is no joke. She tells the boy and the girl to go inside the Chrysanthemum, and she reaches for her cell phone.

As I run, I yell for the old man with the dog to call 911 too. Cell service is terrible. My own phone only works a quarter of the time here—and never when you need it most.

Like right this minute.

Up the steps past the hot tub I trace where I saw the shadowy figure of the man carrying off my wife. I’m moving as fast as I can. I’m tall, and the salmonberry thicket that arches over the trail to the road above the cabins cuts into my arms and hands.

“Sophie! Sophie!”

Nothing.

At the top I see nothing. No sign of her. Nothing at all. A silver Honda Accord whizzes toward me, and I practically throw myself in front of it, but instead of stopping, the driver veers past and flips me off.

“Fuck you! My wife! Someone took my wife!”

The car disappears, and I can’t read the plates without my glasses. I suck air into my lungs and run back down the trail to the cabin.

The woman in the middle cabin identifies herself as Teresa Dibley. She tells me that she’s called the sheriff. “What happened?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “My daughter and I were out checking pots, and I saw someone arguing with my wife, then he hit her. He grabbed her. Carried her. My glasses fell. I couldn’t see everything clearly. She was right here.” I point to the glass, now in shards, from which Sophie had been drinking while she sat on the bulkhead.