“Let’s find a map, then.”

“All right.” Josh looked at her. “Let’s do it.”

They left before dawn, and it was still only midmorning by the time they reached the town of Pine Creek.

The country here was beautiful. Wooded foothills, redwoods, the snowcapped Sierras high to the east. The two-lane road wound through valleys and skirted canyons, twin borders of green leafy ferns hemming in both sides, low gray clouds providing a ceiling to the forest, light mist shrouding the shadowed areas between the trees.

But Laurie barely registered the scenery flying by the windows. She kept trying to remember exactly how her parents had been killed. They’d been murdered—of that she was fairly sure—but the details remained hazy, the specifics unspecific, and try as she might, she could not mentally reconstruct the events that had led to her adoption. She had only a vague feeling that the girl, Dawn, was involved somehow and that the grim couple in the photograph whom she knew to be her biological parents had died a horrible, gruesomely unnatural death.

It all came back to her when she saw the house.

They drove out of Pine Creek and down a narrow winding road. Josh said nearly everything had changed in the years since he’d been there. There’d been no McDonald’s in town then, no Wal-Mart, no Holiday Inn, and the condos that had sprung up on seemingly every side of Pine Creek had certainly not been there.

But he grew quiet as they drove into the countryside, as they moved farther away from town. He recognized this road, he said. He recognized this area. And Laurie could tell from his tone of voice that he felt the same oppressive dread she did as the car sped beneath the overhanging branches of the trees.

They drove up and down side roads, pulling in and backing out of long dirt drives, and after an hour or so, through this process of trial and error, they finally found it.

The house.

It looked exactly as they both remembered. It had not been repainted or refurbished. It had not deteriorated or gone to seed. It looked just as it had all those years ago.

And everything came back to her.

It was as if an entirely new door had been opened in her mind. Memories suddenly flooded in: knowledge, emotions, events, sensations. Things so thoroughly forgotten that she’d been unaware she’d ever known them, their presence in her mind having left not even a residual trace.

She recalled the meal rituals, the way they’d all held hands and hummed before eating breakfasts that corresponded precisely to the dawn, dinners that always accompanied sundown.

She remembered Mr. Billington, the man who lived with them, the man who was supposed to have been her father’s friend but of whom her father had always seemed afraid and who apparently had no intention of ever leaving.