Each day brings a new hope that someone will find them. Planes fly banners over the beach, advertising Corona. The pilots loop back over the marsh but never look down. Other days an employee from the motel rattles a bag of recycling to the dumpster. Some nights a couple stops in the motel’s parking lot to fuck in the back seat of a rusted-out Ford Explorer. The car rocks on its frame for a little while, and after it goes still the man ambles out to light a joint. Sometimes the woman squats on the edge of the marsh to piss behind the cover of the reeds. The women call to her, the shush of the wind through the grass like a whisper. Look, they try to say. Look. Look. Please see.

Cars and buses thrum past on the Black Horse Pike, trucks delivering cuts of filet mignon and rib eye to the casino steak houses, or vans of fresh laundry for the hotels: sheets and pillowcases that have been boiled clean, napkins and tablecloths stiff with starch. At one point or another the women in the marsh have wished for that kind of a cleansing, a way to scald their secrets away, their pasts swirled down the drain.

The man has turned their heads so they both look in the same direction: east, toward the lights of Atlantic City. They have been placed there to watch, to warn. Their eyes are open. They wait.

CLARA

IT WAS THE HOTTEST DAY of the summer so far when the missing girl’s uncle came to see me. I sat in one of our metal folding chairs, shifting every now and then to unpeel the flesh of my thighs from the seat. Des said we didn’t have the money to run the window unit in the shop, so I always felt feverish and sticky. Sweat sluiced down my spine and my hair was heavy and damp on the back of my neck. I had just bought a fan the week before, one of the old metal kinds with a steel cage over the blades, from the pawnshop on Pacific Avenue. I’d made Zeg, the owner of the shop, test it so I could be sure it still worked. He grunted like he was put out, but together we pushed an old TV away from an outlet, plugged the fan in, and watched it rattle to life. I touched my fingers to the cage, their metallic, rusty smell practically in my mouth, like dirty nickels. There was still enough space to slip something small between the bars toward the blades—the end of a pencil, a fingertip—and it beckoned, a dare.

“Christ, don’t do that!” Zeg said. “You know how sharp that metal is? That thing will slice your finger off.”