“Bernadette...” Molly muttered, taking a poster in her hands. “I wouldn’t have pegged her for a Bernadette.”

“I wonder if she ever had a nickname,” Jess posited. “Betty or Bernie or something.” I didn’t answer her, but I wasn’t sure she was speaking to anyone but herself anyway.

“Want to take a ride?” I asked, instead.

We arrived at the edge of the mountain thirty minutes later, and I parked the car on the side of the road, the same place we had been dropped off all those years ago, and we trudged up the wooded mountainside, avoiding the one paved road in case anyone from the house was home.

I’d been watching this family for almost four years now. I’d drive up here, stake out the spot in the woods where I kept a Styrofoam cooler painted black and stuffed with blankets and binoculars and a Nikon D810 Full-Frame DSLR. And I’d sit there for hours, watching them. The parents, Douglas and Cheryl, ate dinner in the dining room on opposite sides of the long table, with large glasses of wine. The younger son, Graham, brought home girl after girl, introducing these brunette bombshells to his parents, who seem disinterested at best, fucking them with the windows open in his second-floor bedroom, leaving the lights on as he fell asleep. Then the older one, Reed. He hardly ever came home. But when he did, he was angry about it, putzing around the yard, walking in circles around the firepit as he talked on the phone with his girlfriend, Veronica. He never wanted to be there.

And I understood why.

I led Molly and Jess through the woods the long way, around the house and yard and lake. Though the Walker family always goes on vacation this time of year, the risk of taking a shortcut wasn’t worth it.

We moved in silence until we reached my spot, a slight valley in the woods where my cooler sat camouflaged by branches I’d broken down. I pulled the cooler to the edge of the woods, to the place Ruthie disappeared into. To the last place I saw her.

“They all said there wasn’t a barn here, but look at that.” I pointed to the grass in the nearest corner of the yard, still slightly yellowed and flattened four years later. “It was more obvious in college. But what was I supposed to say? That a barn mysteriously disappeared? And I realized because I was trespassing?” I took a photo of the progress then, as I had every single time I stood there. “And look at what else—” I opened the cooler and pulled out a large freezer bag filled with smaller baggies. “These are fibers from my jacket that night. I found them on the trees. They match the holes perfectly. And this—”

“Is that a—”