She had long felt as if nobody but her family could understand her “stuff,” although Red probably came as close as anybody. He just held her when she had bad dreams, because he knew their source. He had them, too, as did most people who were around when Billy did his worst.

Remembering that, Jody felt even more betrayed by him.

Red knew, and he still kept contact with the man of her nightmares.

It was equally true that her “stuff” had so far kept any guy from marrying her for her family’s money. Or maybe it was just a case of how intimidating her grandfather and uncles were to any male passing through her life. Grandpa Hugh was intimidating simply by being who he was. Her uncles intimidated by forming a wall of height, muscle, and distrust around her when a date showed up.

Sometimes she didn’t mind that; sometimes she was grateful.

Jody started to shut the truck door again, but before she could stop herself she did something she didn’t want to, following an old compulsion that she had not been able to break. She dug into the tight space behind the seats until she got her gloved fingers on familiar canvas, lifted out an old green backpack and hoisted it over her shoulders.

“Idiot,” she said to herself, with only lizards as witnesses to hear it.

With the pack on her back, she hiked across the white ground to the gently slanted rear rise of the formation known as the Sphinx. She began ascending, not easy in boots, but getting traction with her gloved hands. After a bit she stopped, pausing on the golden haunches where she liked to sit and stare.

Once there, Jody checked for scorpions, brushed off the top layer of eons of dust, and plunked her butt down on the rock. As the formations eroded, “new” fossils appeared-sharks’ teeth, brachiopods, and other souvenirs of ages past. But those were not the kind that she had addictively collected for years and hid in backpacks like the worn green one she set down beside her now.

Ever since she was a child, she had searched for a different kind of remnant. She was looking for human detritus, things her mom might have left behind, and she’d been looking for them since she was old enough to know that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had searched the most exhaustively for Laurie here. It had never made much logical sense to Jody that they’d look here for so long, but then maybe it took them a while to understand how impossible it would be to dig a grave and hide it in this hard flatness where every anomaly showed up like a fox on snow. Conversely she knew, as perhaps they didn’t for a time, how quickly things got covered up or uncovered, how an engagement ring could get dropped and sparkle in the sun on Tuesday, be buried in windblown dust by Wednesday, and then be found by a stranger thirty years later when it popped up to the surface again. A search for clues here could take centuries, not days or hours. Eventually the KBI had abandoned their search, but Jody didn’t. She had a lifetime to wait for any bit of evidence that suggested her mom had been here at the Rocks that night or at any time. Maybe one day an SOS or Help Me would appear. Maybe she’d look down and read LL Was Here. She thought of this place as a gigantic Etch-A-Sketch: with even the slightest twist of the weather dial, everything shifted in subtle ways. The KBI and the sheriff might have given it their best effort, but the entire surface of this landscape could have altered every moment while they looked, then change again the moment they quit looking, and they wouldn’t even have detected the differences. They could have missed something that wind or rain revealed at a later time.

Like an amateur archaeologist, in her secret backpacks Jody stowed bits and pieces of human lives, always hoping for the “big find” that might startle with its revelation and answer the questions that haunted her. If scientists could find a single tooth that revealed the presence here of prehistoric sharks, could she not find a telltale sign from mere years ago?

As a child, she had shown her first finds to her grandparents, to Chase and to Uncle Meryl and Aunt Belle.

“What’s this?” her grandpa asked her, holding up the artifact she’d found, a hair clasp or key, something lost to memory now. The family had driven out to the Rocks with some out-of-town relatives that morning, a sightseeing trip they always took with visitors.

“It might be something Mommy dropped,” she answered.

She recalled even now the look he passed to her grandmother over her head when she said that. She was six, old enough by then to know her mother was missing and that people had looked for her and that a lot of the looking had taken place at the Rocks. They got cemented in her mind when she was little as a place her mommy might have gone.

She was old enough to sense that she’d said something wrong.

She remembered Grandma Annabelle coming over to her.

“Is that why you picked it up, sweetheart?”

“What?”

“This?” Her grandmother held out the object for her to see.

“It might be Mommy’s.”

That was all Jody remembered of the incident. She didn’t know what was said next. She just remembered getting the feeling they didn’t like it that she’d picked up the thing because of her mother. It may have been the first hint she’d revealed that she didn’t totally believe that her mother was as dead as her father. She was only a child, though, so she didn’t give up trying to snag their interest in her discoveries. The next time she found something, she showed it to Chase.

“Not a good idea,” he said, or words to that effect.

That criticism struck her to the core. It also pissed off her six-year-old self.

“It is, too,” she insisted.

“The reason it’s not a good idea,” he instructed her, “is that hundreds of people leave stuff out there every year. All you’re going to bring back is dirt and germs and other people’s trash. You don’t want to do that.”

But oh yes, she wanted to.

With Uncle Bobby still in the Army, he never saw her fossils.

Uncle Meryl was sympathetic, but did not encourage her macabre hobby.

Aunt Belle took action, lifting her treasures out of her small hands and walking them to the trash bin near the barn. Belle dumped them there, over the rim above her niece’s head, and deep, where not even a child standing on a bucket could reach them.

“No,” Belle said to Jody, as if she were a puppy to train. “No!”

Yes! the child thought, and from then on kept her secret from all of them.

They started monitoring her visits to the Rocks.

She had to wait until she could go with other families, or her Girl Scout troop, and after that she had to wait until she was old enough to drive out to the Rocks on her own or with girlfriends or boys.

“What are you doing?” her friends would ask.

“Picking up the litter,” she’d claim. It earned her an undeserved reputation for being an ecological good citizen. Or, she thought more likely-just a nut. Every now and then she had to stop her well-meaning friends from “helping” her. Sometimes she resorted to offering to get rid of their collections of trash for them, just so she could go through it in her room late at night down on the carpet in the space between her bed and the wall.

Jody couldn’t stop looking, because she couldn’t be sure.

There had been a Kansas playwright, William Inge, whom she hoped to introduce to her honors classes if she ever got to teach any. He’d written Picnic, Bus Stop, Splendor in the Grass, and a play called Come Back, Little Sheba, in which a lonely wife kept going to her back door in the vain hope that her lost dog had returned. Sometimes Jody felt as if she had to keep opening doors in case her mother might be standing there.

Partway up the Sphinx, she examined the ground, not the horizon.

That was why she missed seeing dust rising on the road from an approaching vehicle.