It. He didn’t mean the word that way. Polly watched him crouch near Ariel, then move around to the other side of the girl’s body and crouch again with his face close to one of Ariel’s hands. He did not touch her or move her. Polly would have to tell Drake that in that way, the scene was like a movie. In every other, not: the loveliness around them, the quiet, the way that Harry hummed. When Cy and Shari Swenson arrived, the second night of fireworks had just begun, and Polly huddled by the river facing the explosions rather than Ariel’s body.

Polly truly looked at Ariel only in that first minute, and never her face. The girl was on her side, arms mangled and dropping away unnaturally. Her belly was swollen, feet gray, T-shirt up under her armpits but the bottom half of her black bikini in place. Now, as they waited, Polly’s eyes slid over Ariel’s thick red-gold hair, stretched over sticks and pebbles, matted with leaves and riverweed but still bright. In Polly’s childhood book of Arthurian legends, dead lovelorn Elaine’s hair looked like that, spread out on a wooden boat, a floating bier. Which was ludicrous—Ariel had not died, willfully, of grief.

“Is it harder or easier if it isn’t a murder?” she asked.

But Harry shook his sad, bony, handsome head. “I’m not sure it matters,” he said. “Especially if someone’s young.”

In the bed, in the dark, Polly asked Ned why this would happen again. At least it wasn’t strangers finding Ariel, he said. Out of all the bad, this was good.

She tried to erase what she’d seen, and then she gave up and tried to remember. But in the morning, she would forget to ask Harry why he was looking at Ariel’s hands.

The dream of the night, with some competition, had Polly towing a rowboat down a flooded cathedral choir, past walls of indigo and green stained glass that showed faces and houses and animals and everything in the world. She tried to pick her favorite pane as the boat, paneled with more glass, bumped and gouged her leg and fish followed the blood.

The other dreams were shorter. Polly lost her keys, lost Jane’s dog, lost herself on a forested path in a glowing city. Each time she jerked awake and remembered Ariel was dead.

“Honey,” said Merle. It was 8:00 in the morning, and he’d watched Polly stand by a window for five minutes. “What did you see?” he asked.

The vanished, she thought. Putting the feeling into a word made it stagy, took away its lightness and the sense of an endless pattern.