“I’m loathe to admit this, I really find it almost embarrassing now, but it’s one of those nights when I can’t stop myself so I’ll just say it and be done. After my sister left, back when those stories about her used to crop up—I suppose I was fibbing when I said that I didn’t really understand what was happening. In actuality, I knew full well. Yes. I was young, I’ll admit that, and not all of it made sense to me, but the idea of her leaving like that perplexed me. Troubled me because of something that happened. One day, maybe a week or so after Sarah was gone, the sheriff and one of his men came out to the house for a visit. ‘A friendly visit,’ he called it—he and my father were hunting buddies and went as far back as school together—but there was something in the air that time that didn’t seem exactly right. A look in the man’s eyes, that sheriff’s, that said he was curious about all that he’d been hearing. The way he wandered around the yard as he spoke to my father, looking out across the fields and toward the outbuildings, sort of scanning the horizon for anything he didn’t recognize. I was playing near the side of the house as they talked, not really listening but near enough to make out what was being said. And my father, not defending himself but simply stating it, said that he’d been with me that evening—when Sarah left. Recalled it specifically that we’d been working on a project for my school and that’s how he remembered it now, because of helping me build a birdhouse out in his shop. Now this was true, of course, the birdhouse that we built together—it was one of the few moments that we had as father and daughter back then—so I knew it well. When it happened. And it was not on the night of my sister’s disappearance, or anywhere near it, for that matter. No, it wasn’t. The sheriff, seeing me over in the grass with my dolls, looked at me without asking anything, a question of any kind, but stared into my eyes. Searching my face for the truth. I looked up at my father, and then back at the two men in uniform, and it was then when I said, in that whisper that I used to have as a child, ‘Yes, that’s right. My daddy and me built a birdhouse that night.’ Which seemed to be enough for everyone. After they were gone, the authorities, my father came over and sat next to me—not one to ever play with toys, that man; I’m not implying that—he sat and watched me for a moment. Reached out and touched my hair with a smile and said, ‘Well, well. A chip off the ol’ block …’ And you know what’s funny? I might still have that thing, the project we built, out in the garage if you’d like to see it. I believe I just may do.”