Other memories from those days are less distinct. They have the quality of a fever dream—hazy and inconsistent, the swirling world resolving for brief instants into crystalline clarity. I remember lying between my parents at night, my father’s hand on my back measuring every inhale and exhale. His words to the doctor. If you think we’re going to let our daughter out of our sight. I remember the chief of police questioning my parents, and my mother telling him about the blond boy who’d taken such an interest in my sister. As she speaks, my mother’s eyes have a wild, darting quality. The tone of her voice shifts from word to word, turning raw, then affectless, then raw again. I don’t really understand what she is saying, what she is accusing the boy from the volleyball game of having done. I know only that before my eyes my mother is becoming someone I never understood she could be.

In short, a terrifying knowledge came over me in those days. It was the knowledge that I would never be safe again, because I never had been, not once in my whole life, only until then I hadn’t known it, because I had believed so absolutely in the power of my parents.

THE CHIEF of police questioned me, too. My father sat me on his lap and my mother explained to me that one of the nice men who was helping to find Alison wanted to talk to me. This was the first moment I remember feeling truly afraid for my sister. I think I understood that if the police were looking to a child for help, something must be very wrong. I felt a familiar prickling in my fingertips, and as I sat in my father’s lap I began to trace letters in the air. A-L-I-S—.

My mother reached out her hand and placed it over mine, stilling it. “No writing, Clairey. Please. This is important.”

At the time of our family’s vacation, this compulsion had been with me for nearly a year. I’m not sure how or why it started. I would hear a word, and it would feel absolutely necessary to write it in the air. When my mother lifted her hand away, I tensed my fingers against the need—my sister’s name vibrating in my bones, desperate to get out. Alison. Alison. Alison.

The chief of police smiled at me. I drew away from him. I did not like being smiled at by strangers. He asked me if I knew anything about what my sister had been doing, if I had seen anything out of the ordinary.

What did I know? I knew my sister came and went, was there and not there. I knew that eyes followed her wherever she went. I said nothing and hid my face in my father’s chest. He smiled weakly at me and told me what a good job I had done, how brave I had been, which even at that age I didn’t believe. A dish of vanilla ice cream with a maraschino cherry was brought for me. I hated how the bright red bled onto the ice cream, but I ate.

ON THE third morning after Alison’s disappearance, my father announced with unconvincing cheerfulness that he was taking me swimming. I’d been holed up in my parents’ hotel room all that time, and I understood that he’d decided this would be good for me. I changed into my swimsuit, buckled my jellies, and out we went. When we stepped onto the marble pool deck, a hush fell over the other guests. I looked at them looking at us and gagged. I had the distinct sense that they knew something about us we didn’t, and that if they looked at us long enough we would have to know it, too.

“It’s okay,” my father said, nudging me forward.

We were not in the water long, twenty minutes at most. My father gathered me in his arms and tossed me into the air. We raced the length of the pool. We did underwater flips and handstands—my father pushed himself into an elegant plank, toes pointed. I see now that we were trying to respool time. If only we could forget what we were beginning to know, maybe we could play ourselves back to when this vacation was just a vacation. When we got out of the water, my mother would wrap me in a fluffy white towel. Look at you, sea monkey, Alison might say.

A few hours later, there was a knock on the door of my parents’ hotel room. When my father opened it, I saw the chief of police standing very still in his uniform with the braided epaulets. A cartoon was put on the television for me, and my parents went out into the hall with him. Sometime after that, they must have told me what he told them: that Alison had been found, that she was gone. But I don’t remember that part. I remember those epaulets, how they seemed like something from a beautiful story.

WHAT IS known about the night Alison disappeared: At approximately 8 P.M. she met the blond boy by the swimming pool, a fact confirmed by an elderly security guard named Harold Moses. They went to the staff parking lot and smoked a joint together. At 8:30 P.M., the boy arrived at the hotel bar without Alison. At approximately 10:15 P.M., Alison returned to the parking lot, where Edwin Hastie and Clive Richardson picked her up in Edwin’s car, a 1980 Vauxhall Astra, eggplant in color, and the three of them drove across the island to the Basin. They spent two hours at a local watering hole called Paulette’s Place, where my sister was seen with the two men, smoking pot and drinking rum and dancing. Several patrons at Paulette’s Place confirm that she departed with the men at approximately 12:45 A.M.

At 1:30 A.M., a police officer named Roy Cannadine pulled the Vauxhall Astra over on Mayfair Road for erratic driving. Only Clive and Edwin were inside. Officer Cannadine did what he always did with the young men who could frequently be found weaving down the island’s roads late at night. He drove them to the eggshell-blue prison to sober up for the night. In the morning they were released, the car keys returned, and they set off on the two-mile walk to fetch the car from the side of Mayfair Road. They arrived at work on time.

CAN YOU see it? A bar, PAULETTE’S PLACE painted in white on a driftwood sign out front. Dancing and drinking and a haze of cigarette and pot smoke and, in the middle of it all, a russet-haired girl. She dances with the men. She drinks the drinks they hand her.

When she leaves with them, they tell her they are taking her someplace special.

“It’s a surprise,” they say.

“You’ll love it.”

Drunk and high but most of all na?ve, she lets the twisting in her stomach push her forward when it should hold her back. They drive to the beach beyond the black rocks at the edge of Indigo Bay, where a boat is waiting. They bring the boat into Faraway Cay slowly, and she hops out into the knee-deep water and smiles, for the sea is warm and lovely and she knows that she—her thighs exposed to the starlight, the hem of her skirt soaked by the gentle waves—is lovely in it. They tell her there is a waterfall at the island’s center, and they set off for it on foot. She still thinks they are having a good time.

“Not far now.”

“Keep walking.”

Their voices, though still friendly on the surface, have a coldness to them. No, she tells herself. She is just imagining it. Everything shifts so quickly that by the time she understands what is happening, it is too late to think about what to do. (Anyway, what could she do, way out there?)

They pull her into the scrub. She struggles at first, but one of them slaps her across the mouth. After that she is too afraid to fight. More than this, she knows there is no point. They have wanted what they wanted since the first time they saw her on the beach at Indigo Bay in the white tunic she thought made her look so very fetching. They untie her halter top, shove her denim skirt up, yank her panties down. Maybe this was their plan all along. Or maybe the night has gotten away from them. Maybe as they thrust against her, pressing her body against the hard roots of a manchineel tree, the ground littered with its sour, rotting fruit, they experience no pleasure, only terror, because it dawns on them that, having done this, they cannot allow her to live. When it is over, they dump her naked body in the waterfall. On the boat ride back to the mainland, they toss her clothes into the water, never to be seen again.

Or perhaps it was a terrible accident. They are carousing at Rocky Shoal when she trips and hits her head against one of the sharp volcanic rocks for which the beach is named. Or she stumbles into the sea and they realize too late that she is in no condition to swim. They panic. They do the first thing they can think of; they heft her lifeless body from beach to car to boat to cay.

One might imagine it differently. One might imagine it any number of ways, really, the details shifting, the outcome the same. Clive Richardson and Edwin Hastie were taken into custody.

THE NIGHT after Alison’s body was found, I took off my clothes to change into my nightgown and saw that my shoulders had begun to peel. Mere days ago, my sister had rubbed aloe on my sunburned skin. If I concentrated on the memory, I could still feel her fingertips. Now I was shedding that skin. Soon there would be nothing left of me that she had touched.