I stare at the girl for one moment more and then reach for the number of a cottage for rent, just beneath her missing poster. The place is seven miles out of town and four hundred dollars a month. When I call the owner, Kirk, he explains that there’s no TV service, phone line, or central heat.

“It’s what you’d call bare bones,” he says. “A nice getaway, though, if you like things quiet.”

“I do.”

(four)

The first time I saw Mendocino, it hardly seemed like a real place. The tidy streets were lined with gingerbread houses, most of them white with lavish trim and picket fences. The whole village stretched out on the shaggy, rounded bluff against the Pacific, small enough to take in all at once, with one grocery store, a handful of cute shops, two cemeteries, and an elementary school.

“What are those?” I asked Hap, pointing at a wooden square-sided turret attached to a neighboring house. Mrs. Stephens, my social worker, had just left and we were standing in Hap and Eden’s front yard on Covelo Street.

“Tank houses,” Eden explained. “Water towers.” Her body was soft and round and smelled of powder, while Hap was tall and tautly built, with wide shoulders and a handlebar mustache. If he looked like a cowboy, she looked like a grandmother, but wasn’t one, I’d just learned. They’d fostered a lot, but never had children of their own.

Their house was beautiful, a large Victorian that looked to me like a ship. The second story was set wider than the first, with rounded front windows aimed at the headlands, a wild expanse of gold grass and wind-twisted cypresses. As we stood together, just getting the feel of one another and this new arrangement, the sun was setting in their front yard.

I’d just come from Fort Bragg, from a small, sad box of a house near the army base. From there, you could see the ocean too, but not like this. Nothing I’d ever seen was like this. The sun slid into the Pacific as if it was slowly melting, a ball of widening orange-pink taffy that seemed to pulse from the center, like a beating heart. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

Then, just as the sun vanished completely, there was a sudden green flash.

“That’s good luck,” Eden said.

I’d stopped believing in luck, but something was happening. Mendocino had already begun to pull on me, like gravity.

—

Following directions from Kirk, I head out of the village on Little Lake Road. Five miles later, the road turns from asphalt to packed dirt and gravel. Firs and pines and Sitka spruce thicken around me, pushing in from all directions, black-tipped fairy-tale trees that knit shadows out of nothing, night out of day—as if they’ve stolen all the light and hidden it somewhere. God, but I’ve missed them.