“I don’t know,” Frankie said.

“But . . . why . . . Where was she? Outside, I mean. Where was she standing?” Getting details from Frankie was sometimes a challenge; I had to ask just the right question in just the right way.

“By the fence.” She scratched her face and yawned, clearly growing bored. She’d solved the riddle for herself and now she probably didn’t care anymore.

Kennedy certainly didn’t either.

“How is this a conversation we need to be having at four o’clock in the morning?” she asked, her words still muffled by the pillow.

“Okay,” Frankie said, turning and climbing up the ladder to the top bunk.

“Frankie, wait!” I said, feeling like there was more to the story . . . something I should know. “What was Jackie doing by the fence?”

“How should I know?” Frankie said, scooting under the covers. She yawned again.

Kennedy threw the pillow to the foot of her bed. “There! She doesn’t know! Now can you both let me sleep?”

“Fine,” I said, lying back, my eyes wide open. The other two settled down and went back to sleep, but I just lay there, staring at the log ceiling, which I could see better by the minute as the night inched toward day.

An hour later, still totally awake, I threw off the covers, put on sweats, and went downstairs. Through the huge window in the living room, I could see a sliver of the sun rising over the mountains.

It was my last day in Pinedale.

I went outside and covered my clothes and any visible skin in bug spray, then went to Colette’s rock to watch the sun come up. In the field across the highway, a herd of deer were grazing until the sound of a passing semi scared them away.

I took a picture of the horizontal layers of the sunrise: the black silhouette of land on the bottom, then a goldenrod layer, a coral layer, a maroon layer, a bluish-white layer, and shadowy, rippled clouds on top.

A horse nickered somewhere.

I hugged my knees and rested my chin there, wondering what in the world Jackie could have been doing by our fence last summer. I wished Frankie had been more specific. Then, as if I’d summoned her with my mind, my sister banged out the back door behind me.

“Spray your arms and legs, or the horseflies will attack you,” I said, looking over my shoulder at my sister in her dark tank top and shorts.

She shook her head, crunching through the gravel toward me. “They leave me alone.” She stopped near the boulder but didn’t get on it. Instead, she said, “Climbing.”

“Sure, climb up,” I said, scooting over into Colette’s space.

“No, that girl . . .”

“Jackie,” I sighed.

“Yeah, her. She was climbing over the fence.” Frankie turned to the right and pointed. “Right there.”