His daughter was sitting cross-legged on the mattress in her purple coat, with her backpack open beside her.
And curled against her side, half buried in the blankets, wearing what Sam slowly recognized as one of Nora's old sweatshirts, was a little girl.
She could not have been more than five or six. She had a cloud of light brown curls, matted and tangled, and a small pale pointed face, and enormous gray eyes that were fixed on him over the edge of the moon blanket. She did not scream. She did not move at all. She just looked at him with those enormous eyes, and for a moment the only sound in the basement was the hiss of the lantern and the far-off movement of the river.
Nora had gone white.
"Dad," she whispered.
Sam could not speak. He was on his knees in the opening in the wall, half in and half out, the cold at his back and the lantern light in his face, and he could not make his mouth work at all.
The little girl sat up slowly. The blanket fell from her shoulders. She was so thin that the sweatshirt hung off her like a dress. She looked at Sam's face for a long time, studying it, the way you study a picture to make sure it is the right one. Then she looked at Nora. Then back at him.
And then her face broke open into a smile, a smile so wide and so trusting and so full of relief that it went into Sam like a blade.
"Daddy?" she said.
Nora made a small sound and put both hands over her face.
Sam crawled the rest of the way through the hole. He did not know he was going to do it until he had done it. He knelt on the concrete floor of the old bakery basement in front of the crib mattress, and the little girl, without any hesitation at all, climbed out of the blankets and into his lap and put her thin arms around his neck and held on.
She weighed almost nothing. She smelled of dust and peanut butter and cold and of a child who has not had a bath in a long, long time. He could feel her heart beating against his chest, fast as a bird's.
"You came," she said into his collar. "Nora said you would. She said you can fix anything. She said you check for monsters."
Sam looked over the child's tangled head at his daughter.
Nora had taken her hands from her face. Tears were running down her cheeks, and she was not wiping them away. She looked terrified. She looked eleven years old. She looked, for one strange shining second, exactly like her mother.
"Her name is June," Nora said. Her voice shook. "Junie. She's six. I found her three weeks ago. Dad, please. Please don't be mad. Please don't call anybody. Please. I promised her."