Innisfree Strange things had happened at Innisfree before. In fact, strange was usually normal at Innisfree. But what had happened the night before was a new sort of strange. A frightening, unsettling sort of strange, the sort of strange that nags at you when you try not to think about it and flickers behind your eyelids when you try to go to bed at night and won’t let the sleep come.

Sadie hadn’t come home.

The game of hide-and-seek had ended hours before, at dusk, as usual. At Innisfree, games of hide-and-seek took place in the tangled woods surrounding the shack on all sides, and they lasted all day. You could hide anywhere, practically. Up in a tree; behind a thorny bush; in a hollowed, burnt-out stump. You could even bury yourself in the dirt and leaves and wait there for hours, breathing in the musty smell.

But there were rules too. Rule number one: you couldn’t hide in the river. The river might look cool and inviting, but it was filled with tricks and temptations and secret dark swirls that would grab a little girl around her ankles and pull her down to the bottom.

“Look down, but don’t lean over too far,” Emery had warned his girls one day as he paddled them along the river currents in the rowboat. “Just far enough to catch a glimpse.”

A glimpse of what, Tennyson and Hattie had asked their father.

“The little girls at the bottom of the river,” he answered. “That’s what the Mississippi does. It tempts you in, and then it catches you. It loves you and doesn’t want to let you go. So it pulls you down to the bottom and keeps you there. If you look down, you’ll see the faces of the little gi...