"You just let it sink into the swamp?"

"Fuck it, Glory! What the hell was I supposed to do?"

"Well why in God's name would there be a little baby lamb out there? And in the trap?"

"Ain't no way it got itself up in there alone, that's for certain."

"Ooooh, God . . . God! It's a bad sign. What would Father Becerra—"

A fist slammed onto the table. "We're not bringing the priest into this. I am not a man of God, Glory, and I won't have no talk of superstition in this house!"

Pregnant silence lingered for a heavy moment. Kim, who lay in the shadows in a small den off the small kitchen, steadied her breath for fear of being discovered. She'd fallen asleep on the sofa, there, the ratty old sofa, because the room she'd shared with Cassidy felt too strange, now, too empty, and she'd been wakened early, early, before the sun was even up, to the sound of her father whisper-arguing with her mother in the kitchen.

"This has got to do with Cassie," Kim's mother said at length, her voice low and tremulous. "I just know it." A whimper, then, "We done something to deserve it, Dell. You or I—it's on us, and—"

"No, no," her father firmly replied. "No, I won't hear it. That girl—it's some pervert picked her up and done something. Nothing more."

Kim put her hands to her ears as her mother began to cry in a horrible, stifled sort of way. She knew the woman tried to say more things, but Kim's father put a quick stop to the conversation when he stomped from the kitchen and outside, letting the screen door snap back on its springs. Stiff as a log, Kim stayed where she was, stuck between the obligation to comfort her mother and a fear of chastisement for being nosey. Her daughterly responsibility might've overridden her sense of self-preservation had it not been for the visuals that'd come blundering into her thoughts with her father's words: some pervert picked her up—nothing more.

Nothing more?

Her sister, her little sister—taken by some horrible person. At fifteen, Kim knew enough of the world to know what some grown people did to kids. She'd suffered through the "stranger danger" and "safe touch" lessons in her elementary days. No matter how often she'd missed school, she'd always somehow managed to catch those presentations. But her understanding was colored, too, by her own youth, her own cracked but lingering innocence, and so while her imagination had begun to expand into ample corridors for all the terrible realizations adulthood was set to bring, it hadn't as of yet opened all its doors into them. What Kim was left with, then, was an overwhelming knowledge of harrowing certainties whose edges were undefined; trying to pin down what might have happened and might still be happening to her sister was like chasing a phantom through an impossible maze, all the while knowing that to stop meant the monsters behind would catch up to her.

Nothing more, her father had said. Nothing more. Kim didn't know what to make of his apparent nonchalance. Didn't know what to make of anything, now. But she did know she couldn't sit and listen to her mother sobbing in the kitchen.

Quietly, the girl moved from the sofa, doing her best to avoid setting the bouncy parts squealing and thereby give herself away. She wore an oversized Powerpuff Girls tee and a pair of sweatpants at least a size too large. She'd learned to manage in clothing that didn't fit; whatever she or her mother could salvage from the donation bins was what she ended up with, but as of late, the city had cracked down on the bins, gotten locks for them. That'd pissed Glory off something proper—weren't they just the sort of people in need of charity? or so she'd argued up at City Hall last fall. Hadn't done any good, though, except to get the townspeople even more agitated toward the St. Jameses. They weren't the only poor folk within Surette's lines, to be sure, but to Kim's embarrassment, her parents were the loudest. Why they couldn't keep to themselves, have enough pride not to go around begging for handouts and causing a stir, she didn't know, but she was determined as a toad not to become anything like her momma.

Slipping toward the window, Kim spotted a pair of rubber slides by the television and grabbed them. They were probably Tyler's, probably too big, but she didn't care; they'd do. Then she unlocked the pane of the large rectangle of glass and slid it upward. She cringed as the metal frame grated, heard her mother pause and worried she'd been found out, but before she could allow herself to stop, Kim bent her body through the narrow opening and climbed out into the dim, overcast early morning.

The air was heavy on her bare arms, her face. She felt as if she'd grow damp just walking through it. But the freedom of movement was hers, now, and Kim had the sudden notion that she'd most definitely not be going to school today.

She tossed the slides onto the grass and stepped into them. Beyond the small plot of land that constituted their yard, past the small mesh-and-wood-and-corrugated-metal that was their modest chicken coop, rose trees upon trees. Kim knew that heading back that way would bring her eventually to mud and water, to Devil's Crack Creek and the veining waterways where her father kept his boat and shed of fishing and hunting and other gear, to the black and green world that belonged to alligators and snakes. Left and right, though, would be other houses like hers, or trailers, maybe, or a rusted-out swingset or plastic playhouse. She was in no state to run into any neighbors. Not wrinkled Miss Mariana (who was so old people neither remembered nor asked her surname) with her weird wandering eye or old Frank Benoit who sat out on his porch with his weird clouded glasses, smoking cigars literally twenty-four-seven, watching everything that happened with his shit-smelling grimace or the Coburn children, two little toddlers virtually put out to pasture every morning and left in the yard to eat dirt and dig worms while their momma day-drank with anyone who happened to pop in for a bit of gossip.

No, Kim sought solace, and more than that, she sought Cassidy. Not the physical form of her sister but whatever vapor, whatever essence lingered of her. To know what her sibling knew, to feel the vibrations of her existence . . . Kim had multiple times attempted to retrace her sister's movements on the day she'd disappeared, but she'd never come up with any clues, not even a feeling of what might've happened. The general story was that Cassidy had skipped the school bus (as usual) and spent the morning wandering the neighborhood. There'd been credible witness testimonies throughout the day, placing her at the Seven-Eleven, the Dillingers' back yard (to play with their dogs), the closed-down Happy Days Daycare's playground, and LaBlanc Park, where she'd wandered around testing some of the exercise path's stations and fed the ducks at the duck pond bits of cat food she'd gotten from who-knew-where. By late afternoon, though, Cassidy had disappeared from view. The last person to see her had done so at Basin Bridge where it was still an overpass before veering off across the water to shortcut the drive between their side of town to the old quarter, filled with its stately homes. Someone had seen a child in red rubber boots clambering down the sloping abutment.

That was the last sighting. Afterward, Cassidy had never come home, and Kim had called the police. The child's prints had patterned the mud yet drawn nowhere near the water, and on the concrete wall beneath the bridge, words to which Kim had never been made privy had been painted in blood. Not Cassidy's blood, that she knew, but animal blood. Nobody had told Kim any details, though she didn't know why. She was old enough to hear whatever they were afraid of her hearing. She'd seen more than her share of violence and blood, between all the times her younger siblings had needed stitches or broken bones and the chickens, fish, and crawfish she'd had to help kill and scale and peel and all the dead or injured animals she'd found in the surrounding bayou. Blood, even her own, meant little to Kim. How many times had her daddy made her bleed? And how many times had she dealt with her monthly humiliation? Enough to become used to the sight of the stuff.

She wished she'd seen the words on the wall, though.

Instinctively, without sensing she'd made much of a conscious decision about it, Kim set off straight back across the yard, toward the black trees.

Dawn had begun to touch the bayou, and yet rather than cast its light in beams from above, dust the plant life and treelimbs as if from an angel's glitter shaker, it seemed more to seep up from the soil and moss, to reach its dim and eerie fingers through the fern and root to join the miasmic morning mist from some hidden pocket of earth below. When the real heat of the late morning arrived, it'd burn off much of the obscuring murk hovering about the trunks and vines, give the impression that wholesome things could happen here, but in those liminal spaces, dawn and dusk, when the forest was transitioning between the mysterious nighttime and vibrant daytime realms, it showed its sensitive underbelly. The world played by different rules in its old places, and though Kim didn't exactly know that she knew this, she held a reverence for the atmosphere around her, as did most people who spent time living so near to such natural age.

A slight chill hung in the air, damp enough to settle in miniscule beads on the girl's long, unkempt brown hair. Kim moved through the foliage, the low palms and cypress knees. The forest floor was clear enough, the fullness of the wet season rains not yet having soaked and flooded these parts. She'd used to play hide and seek with Cassidy and Tyler amidst these trees. There were several particularly old and gnarly specimens that offered much in the way of narrow crevices and low-hanging branches, spots to squeeze into and disappear (though impossible to escape if one were discovered). Yes, she and Tyler and Cassie, they'd spent much time occupying one another, but that'd been before Tyler found girlfriends, decided he liked taking them back into the woods more than he wanted to play games with his sisters.

But Kim didn't want to think about Tyler. His disgusting face and his disgusting acts, his seeming lack of concern for their missing sibling. The younger ones were too small to know any better, but Tyler? He'd hardly expressed any upset at Cassidy's disappearance at all.

Four weeks, Kim thought. Four weeks. And though she understood on a surface level that finding her sister alive and well was highly unlikely, Kim couldn't quite grasp the absence, the complete absence of that freckled, tip-nosed, defiant sister of hers, that girl who'd eat a grasshopper on a dare or wade barefoot in creeks, who'd always had dirty but rosy cheeks and who'd stood up for her older sister more than once.

"Where are you?" Kim breathed into the thick air, the sound of her own voice smooth as butter into the calm.

Some unidentifiable bird began to titter a ways off, almost as if in response, but the girl took no heed of it, instead wiped her running nose and sniffed, hard. She pulled up her t-shirt without any regard for whom she might be flashing and used its hem to wipe at her eyes. She'd spent many moments weeping amongst these trees, lately, mostly about the enormity of life, the turns that it'd all taken with Cassidy and the horrible people at school, with her brother and her mother's constant upset and her father's worsening drinking. Her own aspirations had begun to dim. Returning to the classroom had served only to remind Kim that she had no prospects beyond her myopic world. She was nearly sixteen, nearly able to take on real work, not just the babysitting and helping around the house her mother expected and didn't pay her for anyhow, but the thought of being out in the community around other people, having to serve or work around them, terrified her. But if she didn't do it, if she didn't get out and earn her own living, she'd never be able to leave her parents, and staying put was just as frightening a prospect as interacting with customers.

She couldn't be around her daddy anymore, nor Tyler, now, especially with Cassidy gone and her momma being an absolute wreck. No help would come from that quarter.

A massive, looming cypress tree rose ahead of Kim. She'd meant to come to it, known it'd be there; this tree had been Cassidy's favorite for the sheer girth of it, the way it stretched out like folds of stiffened fabric at the base of its trunk. From the tree's fanning branches,the Spanish moss dripped in fat rough gray curtains like old warlocks' beards, motionless in the stagnancy. Even Kim could sense the unease permeating the atmosphere, the tension hanging suspended, as if this place were waiting for something. What exactly that something was, the girl didn't know, but her father's horrifying claim about finding a drowned lamb in the swamp had certainly set Kim's nerves on edge. The mere suggestion of a ghostly warning was enough to influence her perception, and maybe her mother was right: maybe Daddy's discovery was a sign that something was wrong. Kim might have spent most of her life in a state of indolence, but she'd never felt what she felt now, standing amongst those trees.

Sucking in a breath, Kim spun a circle, the notion that someone was nearby so sudden and intense that she practically stumbled over her feet. But the sparseness of the trees, the gray and misty spaces between them, revealed no one.

Her lower lip began to quiver. Sunlight had yet to make its way down, and the damp morning air had crept into her collar, around the waist of her pants and up into her armpits. Hugging herself, she took several determined steps toward the massive cypress tree. Black-green moss rose up the trunk nearly four feet, indicative of the high-water line. When the rains really got underway, Kim would have to keep the youngers from venturing back into these parts.

Reaching out her hands, the girl brushed her palms against the hoary bark, ran her fingers along the rough ridges. The cypress knees themselves were high enough to sit on as stools, fat enough to spread a bit of lunch on. She and Cassidy had picnicked here a few times. Tyler had most definitely rolled blunts out here. (For as accepting as their father was of most illicit substances, the man couldn't tolerate marijuana in or near the house.) This place had held a certain magic, been an escape for the three of them, but that magic had been broken. Kim had no one, now.

Suddenly, as she rounded the cypress trunk paying more attention to her feet than her hands, Kim's fingers found themselves tracing an unexpected rut, and when the girl brought her eyes up from the ground, she realized a deep gash had been sliced into the tree. It ran vertically, about two feet long and at least two inches deep, and it was fresh, for the sides and center of it wept a sticky fluid.

Kim slowly drew back her hand, rubbed the sap between her fingertips, stared at the substance nonplussed. Returning her gaze to the tree, she continued her trip around it and discovered two more gouges, equally deep though at a lower level than the first.

Someone or something had damaged the trunk of their cypress, and whatever it was, it'd been strong. Kim couldn't think of any animal with claws that could've done the job.

The fine hairs on the back of the girl's neck stood on end, eliciting a chill across her shouderblades and down her spine. She wasn't alone . . . she was sure of it.

Entirely ill at ease, Kim swallowed the dry lump in her throat, wiped her sticky fingers against her sweats, and decided to head back home and brave her parents, neither of whom had looked set to have a good day.