It was a picture of two girls. One was tall and thin with dark braids; that was clearly Nora. The other was much smaller, with a cloud of curly hair drawn in yellow crayon and a big smile. They were holding hands. Behind them, in brown and orange, was something that looked like a brick wall, and in the wall was a dark hole shaped like a doorway, and above the hole Nora had drawn a moon and a great many stars.
Underneath it, in Nora's careful printing, it said: SECRET CASTLE.
He stood looking at it for a long time. Then he went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table and did not know what to do.
He could ask her. He thought about it. But he had asked her about the peanut butter, and she had lied, and he had let her. And he knew his daughter. If he came at her directly, she would shut down the way she had after the funeral, like a house with all its shutters closing at once, and he would lose whatever thin thread of trust they had spent the fall building. He thought about the school counselor, Ms. Abernathy, who had told him in September that grieving children often built private worlds to live in. Imaginary places. Imaginary friends. It was normal, she said. It was a way of feeling safe.
Maybe that was it. Maybe the small curly-haired girl was imaginary. Maybe the secret castle was a place Nora went in her head.
But imaginary friends did not eat forty ounces of peanut butter.
On Tuesday night, the week before Thanksgiving, he did not go to sleep.
He lay on top of the covers in his clothes with the bedroom door cracked an inch and the lights off, listening to the house. The furnace kicked on and off. The wind moved in the bare maples outside. At ten-thirty he heard Nora's light go out. At eleven he heard nothing. At eleven-forty, so quietly that if he had been asleep he would never have heard it, her bedroom door opened.
He held his breath. Small footsteps on the landing, avoiding the third stair, the one that creaked; she knew the house as well as he did. The soft zip of a backpack. The rattle of the chain on the back door, slowly, slowly. The click of the latch.
Sam got up, put on his boots and his heavy Carhartt jacket in the dark, took his phone and a flashlight from the nightstand, and went down the stairs after her.
The cold hit him like a slap.
It was nineteen degrees, according to the thermometer on the back porch, and the sky was clear and black and hard with stars. Frost glittered on the grass. Nora was already at the end of the backyard, a small dark shape in her purple winter coat, slipping through the gap in the hedge that led to the alley behind Locust Street. She had her hood up and her backpack on both shoulders, and she was walking fast, with the stiff purposeful stride of somebody who had done this many times before.