“The key,” he says. “Sure. The key for the vehicle of transmission. And once the rains started up again, the fungi had all the fuel they needed to take a road trip through Puget Sound. And beyond.”

“There’s no beyond. It’s going to end here.”

Her phone rings again, and again she silences it.

“So what do we do?” he says and walks out into the lawn, turns, and heads back toward her with his finger raised. “Call Black Creek, for starters.” He goes still and his eyes brighten and for a moment she thinks he’s had another breakthrough. Instead, he kneels down and fingers something from between the pavers of the patio. A quarter. He looks up at her with delight. “Hey! Minted the same year she was born.”

Her phone rings again and before she can ignore the call, he’s jogging toward the rear of the yard and into the needled shade of a ponderosa pine. The one Mia had called her wishing tree. Quarters and dimes and pennies barnacle its trunk, tucked between the plates of terra-cotta bark. One found in an oil-rainbowed puddle in the parking lot of a hardware store. Another found in the grass beneath a bench overlooking the Sound. This one was shaken out of Jack’s jeans; this other was excavated from the couch cushions. Mia never told them what she wished for because she believed that sharing forfeited the wish. The coins reach no higher than four feet yet skirt the entire trunk.

Nora follows him there, and he says, “I’m kind of surprised they’re still here.”

“Of course they’re still here. Why wouldn’t they still be here?”

“I don’t know. I guess it seems like all the wishes should have disappeared with her.”

As he slots the quarter into the tree, Nora’s phone rings again.

“Somebody really wants to talk to you,” he says. “Better get it.”

She accepts the call with a sigh and brings the phone to her ear. “What?”

A female voice offers the bright, sunny welcome of what is certainly a telemarketer. “Mrs. Abernathy?”

Nora is ready to hang up; the phone is already falling from her ear as the voice continues chattering at her with a honeyed Southern drawl. “I know how this is going to sound—and it’s going to sound extraordinary—but I believe we’ve found your daughter.”

Her thumb hovers over the End button. She must have heard incorrectly. Her mind isn’t in the right place. She should hang up and she should call Black Creek, because the two of them are close—they’re so close—to getting to the bottom of this.

“Mrs. Abernathy?” the voice calls out again, and she slowly lifts the phone and mashes it against her ear so that there can be no mistake this time. “Mrs. Abernathy?”

Her voice is a whisper when she finally speaks. “What did you say?”