Nora’s box of cassettes was still sitting in the back seat. Zadie reached back, fished out a tape, and fed it into the player. As the opening melody of “A Song About a Bird” filled the car, she closed her eyes and softly hummed along. It worked before. It will work again, she told herself, and waited for a message that would lead her to her sister.

But as the last bittersweet piano chord faded out, it was clear that no premonition was coming. She rewound the tape and started over, but she didn’t have any luck the second time, either. By the end of the third listen, Zadie yanked the tape out of the deck, unraveled its reel until she had a nest of ribbon balled up in her fist, then hurled it out the car window.

Joel was right, she thought, dismayed. I should have taken her home.

Zadie opened her contacts. At the very top of the list was Anderson, Kathy. Her thumb hovered over the icon for a moment before she put her phone to sleep. Twenty-four hours, that’s how long she would give herself to find Finn. If her sister was still missing by tomorrow evening, she would call the police.

Dawn was breaking when Zadie first saw the small fishing village nestled at the bottom of the hill. The clapboard houses, the church steeple, the boats in the harbor were all bathed in a rosy half-light. As she drove into town, a quaint wooden sign on the side of the road certified that she was in the right place:

EARNEST, WASHINGTON

Where it’s important to be…!

Cute, she thought. If Finn were here, she’d have made them stop and take a picture with the sign. Maybe we can take one on our way out of town. That was, of course, assuming that Finn was here and not, as Kathy would say, “lying in a ditch somewhere.”

Stay calm, she told herself, slowing her breathing. She needed to think about this logically. If Finn in fact had hitched a ride to Earnest, she would be looking for their mom. So it stood to reason that Zadie should be doing the same. Two birds, one stone.