“You guys hungry?” Nora asked as she knelt down next to the pit and started snapping dried-out pine branches to use as kindling.

“I am!” Finn practically shouted. “I bet the coyote is hungry, too.”

“What coyote?”

When the fire was lit and the campsite flickered with amber light, the Wilder women roasted hot dogs over the open flame and listened to the end of Finn’s recording. Finn held her breath as the lone coyote cried. He sounded farther away than she remembered, smaller. She rewinded the tape back thirty seconds and played it again, then five more times. Maybe he’ll hear it, she thought, scanning the manzanita bushes for pairs of glowing eyes. But the coyote did not visit their camp that night. The only proof he existed at all was on that tape.

NINE FOLLOW THE MUSIC

“What did she mean? ‘This feeling will pass’?” The tape had gone silent many seconds ago, but Finn was still holding out hope that her mother’s voice would bring it back to life.

“I don’t know,” Zadie answered. She also appeared to be waiting for something.

“There aren’t any other tapes like this, are there?”

“Not that I know of.”

Finn waited several more seconds before finally pressing stop. “Do you remember that campground? What was it called?”

“Constellation.”

That trip must have been important to her, Finn thought. Why else would her mom not want anyone recording over the tape? It wasn’t an echo, but it was a memory, one her mom wanted to preserve.

She pulled out her phone and typed “Constellation Campground” into the search bar. The first result was a campground in central Arizona, not far from Sedona. “I think I found it,” she said, clicking on the map.

Zadie took her eyes off the road briefly to look at Finn’s phone screen. “Yeah, that’s the one. Wait … you’re not suggesting…”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Her sister sighed. “This means we’re going to have to camp, doesn’t it?”

It should have taken the girls only a little under seven hours to get to the Constellation Campground. With bathroom breaks and a stop to look at the World’s Biggest Mousetrap, it took them over eight. “Imagine how big a mouse would have to be for that to work,” Finn wondered out loud (roughly the size of a cow, they decided).

It was almost seven P.M. by the time they rolled up to the camp office, a tiny log cabin whose front porch danced with an array of wind chimes, dream catchers, and whirligigs. The hand-painted OFFICE sign above the door was written in connect-the-dots style lettering that resembled constellations.