The bridge was already unsafe when Ezekiel reached it. He and three other railway workers spent hours trying to prevent a freight train from entering flooded track, and by the time they returned, the road into town was underwater. He walked the final mile with water up to his waist, following the glow of emergency lamps and the sound of people calling names into the rain. The school gymnasium was empty except for overturned chairs, muddy blankets, and a handwritten notice saying that the families had been transferred to shelters in surrounding counties. Someone told him Hazel had gone to the county clinic after falling and striking her head during the evacuation. Another person thought Beatrice had been taken on a bus with the other children.
He found Hazel the following morning in a hospital forty miles away. She had a concussion and a fractured wrist, and her first words when he entered the room were, "Did you find Bea?" Ezekiel told her he was still looking, because he could not bring himself to say anything else. By nightfall, they had visited every nearby shelter and called every hospital that still had a working telephone line. On the third day, a county official assured him that all the children from the school had been accounted for, but the name Beatrice Walker appeared nowhere on the final list. On the fourth day, a clerk told him she was probably among the missing presumed drowned.
Hazel refused to accept it, and Ezekiel refused with her. They put up notices at bus depots, churches, railway offices, grocery stores, and hospitals, using the only photograph of Beatrice they had managed to save from their flooded house. Ezekiel traveled to two counties on borrowed money and walked into buildings where staff barely looked up as he spoke. More than once he was ordered to use a different entrance, and at one office an administrator told him there was no reason to keep searching if the official list said the child was gone. He went back the next day, and the day after that, because an official list had never kissed Beatrice goodnight or felt her small hand slip into his. Eventually the notices yellowed, but he never stopped carrying one in his wallet.
After the railway reassigned them to Ohio, Ezekiel kept the letters in his suitcase because Hazel said one day they might need to show their daughter how hard they had tried. On her birthdays, they baked a strawberry cake even after there was no little girl to blow out the candles. Hazel would put the cake on the kitchen table and ask Ezekiel to describe what Beatrice might be doing at that age: starting middle school, learning to drive, graduating, perhaps falling in love. He obliged until their imagined conversations began to hurt too much. When Hazel died of a