Saturday morning, overwhelmed by the sound of the helicopter beating over the house, Polly and Jane and Merle took Sam and Helen to the museum in Bozeman. They went through every room, read every label about Plains tribes and dinosaurs, inland seas and megafauna. They winnowed around vanished things, trying to make the children concentrate on giant lizards and bison and insects in amber and quilled cradleboards.

Everything disappeared. Maybe it would help, knowing this. Maybe Polly’s childhood trips to the museum had been meant to bring home the same point. Look at all the wonders that have vanished, and yet here you are.

Polly of the visions, of the X-ray eyes: When she walked a stretch of the river with a group from town Saturday afternoon, people gathering at the city park for a quickly organized search, she truly felt that she held a new special power, that she would find their sweet girl. But she was delusional, in all ways. She found a dead bird, a river-smoothed arrowhead, and a yellow Peake’s ball cap, already half-buried in mud. Polly sat down and cried until Josie, having her own hard time, tears rolling down her face, pulled her up and made her keep walking. Josie and Harry had been due to marry the weekend after Polly’s accident, and then again on this Saturday, July 6, while Maude was in town. Two days before Ariel disappeared, Josie bought her a maid of honor’s dress.

Before the baseball cap breakdown, Polly, who liked silence for the sake of seeing, listened to people in the search group go one way or another: Graham was lucky; Graham was doomed to a life of guilt. Imagine, they’d say, being the one who lived—the poor fucking kid. People in town would be watching him, grading his grief.

Graham was pretty and baby-faced, an angel with an athlete’s body. Working in his uncle’s law office hadn’t gone well. “He needs to keep moving,” said Vinnie. “Not a candidate for a desk job yet.” And so Ned hired him. Graham moved well enough in the restaurant bar at Peake’s. He was attentive but polite, bait for women, though not great when frustrated, not adept at communicating with coworkers. But imposing physically and charming with customers, right until the moment he tried to push Burt’s nose into his brain.