“I’ve never seen a dead person,” said Josie. “Outside of a coffin. I’ve avoided it.”

Jane always looked ethereal, even when she politely dripped scorn. “No reason to rush,” she said mildly.

“I saw four bodies before I turned nine,” said Polly, despite the fact that she despised one-upmanship. It was a blurt, a confession, and they all stared at her. Polly surprised herself, and she surprised her mother, too. Jane the athlete slid on the slimy green river rocks but stayed upright.

Josie opened her mouth to ask for some sort of accounting for these bodies—who what where why—but she knew half of it, after years of Polly, and started walking again.

Polly tried to concentrate on the good stuff, the wild iris, blooms long over, the wild asparagus, stalks bushed out. Today, instead of mushrooms, Polly found a dozen different animal bones, some owl pellets made smaller, stranger bones, a hiking boot, shotgun shells, an empty wallet and a half-dissolved copy of a novel. Jane found an old teakettle. Nora found a broken wristwatch. Josie saw something blue and screamed. It was a motor oil jug; Josie had no sense of naturally occurring colors.

They were shiny with DEET in defense against trapped flood pools, little spas for miasmas of happy mosquitos, as they struggled over ankle-breaking cobble, slick from the dropping river. They saw evidence of beavers, two dead deer, a pile of fluffy feathers from a fox or hawk or owl kill. They saw two black snakes and many indiscriminate live birds. Polly could identify dozens of perennials, but she was largely bird-blind, despite being dragged through the wilds and thickets of America by her father, grandmother, Maude. The dogwood and willow stands were dense and mucky, broken up by abrupt rock banks. Everyone but Jane fell down, everyone got blisters from bad-fitting rubber boots.

On the ride back to town in Nora’s back seat, Polly flipped open the soggy book she’d found, looking for some meaning, and read:

Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

It didn’t take much to make Polly’s addled brain expand. She knew Jane was watching her. On the seat between them, a folded newspaper with Ariel’s face smiling out at the world; next to that, a frilled baby summer hat, a pacifier covered with dog hair, and an energy bar. Polly squinched her eyes shut. Her brain teemed.

They brought their finds to the sheriff’s office, where they learned that another body had been found on the river, probably that of a Chinese American honors student from Claremont who’d been on the wrong trail in Yellowstone Park the previous June, slipped in the wrong place, been swept away. Cy bagged the boot, saying it was a match to the one found on the body. “Hell of a long ride on the river.”

“Who found the boy?” asked Polly.