He jumped at the woman’s voice. She stood up from where she was sitting on the edge of one of his mismatched chairs, thick round glasses pushed up to contain a mane of curly hair, wearing a dark vest with some kind of emblem. “I am so sorry to bust in here like this. I cannot get her to leave. For a little girl who has barely made a peep in the last twenty-four hours, she’s a stubborn one. When we pulled up down the street just a few minutes ago, she got out and ran through the fields. I could barely keep up. She just walked around the back and let herself in. Lily said she could find you, and she was right.”

He wanted to pound himself on the forehead. In his haste to leave last night, he’d never locked the back door.

“I don’t know who you people are, but you’ve got to get out of here,” he said.

The girl stared at him without blinking, the whites of her eyes contrasting sharply to her dark black skin. She wore shorts and a T-shirt with a cat on the front and the word “cool” written above it.

“Again, I am so sorry,” the woman continued. “We wanted to call you but there was no number—”

William moved past her. “You’ve got to go.”

“I’m Lois Jumper.” She followed him down the hall. “That’s Lily in your living room. I’m an agent with the Investigative Services Branch of the National Park Service–”

“Lady, I’m going to need you not to follow me,” William said as he entered his bedroom, closing the door.

“I know this is unorthodox, it certainly is for us,” she said through the door. “But you have to understand. Rangers found that girl in the middle of the national park in North Dakota less than two days ago. Mr. Chance, we have no idea where she came from. She barely speaks. It’s like she just appeared out of nowhere.”

He’d heard so many stories like this over the years. People at Target, in the line at Bobbie’s Dairy Dip, in the beer garden at M.L. Rose. People with fantastical or bizarre stories, from sharks with two heads to the Taos Hum. The worst was always the stories about a missing loved one. Do you think it’s aliens?

His mother would always respond like an angry lioness, all five foot two of her. Please don’t, she would intervene. Please don’t bother my son.