The one that Jay, Joyce, Haley, and their friends took on the morning of Sunday, April 29, 2001, which once led from Doc Chester’s cabin down to the unofficial part of the Hawksbill Crag Trail along the bluff to the east of the crag is not entirely there anymore; too few souls have passed along it since then to maintain its existence. About fifty feet from Hawksbill Crag there is still a trail you can just barely make out that leads up onto a shelf of higher land and passes a few firepits, but above that, it disappears into dense brush. You can’t even easily follow the remnants of Hawksbill Crag Trail to what used to be Tim’s house on the bluff anymore; whoever owns the house now has not kept it clear, and enough hikers obey that Private Property sign that now the only way to reach that house on foot from the trail involves shoving your way through chest-high thickets of brambles that will leave your clothes peppered with nettles that prick like thumbtacks. But the faintest phantom thread of human and animal movement through it is still there. There’s still a streak of the more fluid medium there, but it is barely distinguishable from the more viscous wilderness around it, the signal nearly buried in noise. But the signal is still there. The path Haley probably took from the waterfall all the way down to the Buffalo River used to be a mule trail in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when there were people living down in the valley. It most likely began to vanish into brush in the 1970s after the National Park System forced the valley’s residents out and people quit using it. It descends the southern slope of Dug Hollow down into the river valley through the only gap in the bluff line’s sharp, rocky edge where the grade is gentle enough to traverse it without having to turn around and climb down backward using all four limbs. Tim insists that the remnant of the old mule trail has become a little game trail that runs through that gap, and although the only people with eyes trained enough to see it would probably be seasoned local hunters such as Lytle James and William Jeff Villines, he thinks it was probably that faint ley line, that almost invisibly thin streamline of ghosts, that Haley, perhaps without consciously knowing it, followed.

  There used to be a shortcut right at the corner of the bluff where Tim’s old house perches. When he bought the property in 1990, there was still a thick old wooden ladder with rungs rubbed smooth by generations of hands permanently leaning against the edge of the cliff, welded into the rocks by time and weather, just beyond his back deck beneath the house. The people who used to live in the valley climbed into and out of it regularly on the ladder. There are still the ruins of five or six houses down there, all gone except for the foundations and chimneys half buried under the foliage. For perhaps a hundred years or so, the children who lived in the valley would go that way on their way to school: walk up the old mule trail, climb the ladder, then take the road—now the private road that leads to Tim’s house—to Cave Mountain Church, later the search-and-rescue Command Center, which at the time doubled as a one-room schoolhouse during the week. That’s a journey of about two miles with an eight-hundred-foot elevation gain, made by children most likely barefoot except in the coldest months of winter—and then back down again home after school. Tim told me that after he had first bought the property, old-timers who had grown up there, people whose families had been displaced by the government via eminent domain in the 1970s, often came out there to see the view of the valley from the high point on the bluff where the ladder led from the mule trail to the road and told him stories about it. When the water in the river was high, the mule trail that went up through Dug Hollow with the shortcut up the ladder to the top of the bluff was the only way to get out of the valley. More than one of those visitors told him an anecdote about an old man who had lived in the valley, who happened to die down there when the water was high; his family had carried his corpse on muleback up the trail, then had to carefully haul it up the ladder with a rope and pulley in order to lay him to rest in Cave Mountain Cemetery.

  The route Haley walked from the waterfall to the river on that first day, if Tim’s detective work is right, is only about two miles as the crow flies, but the last half mile of it involved scrabbling down a precariously steep and rocky slope of pure wilderness. Looking at a map of the terrain, one sees that Haley’s hearing the river immediately after determining she had reached the bottom of the slope tracks pretty well: Cave Mountain shoots upward directly out of the west bank of the Buffalo River. And then she started walking along the river. Incredibly, she swim-waded across it several times—and again, this was in April, when the water is at its deepest and the current at its fastest. She believes she was walking in the same direction the whole time, but it is possible—especially considering she did not eat or drink anything after breakfast Sunday morning for nearly three days—she got turned around in a delirium and doubled back over the same ground more than once. Most of the ground she covered, she covered on that first day: The place where James and Villines found her is not quite two miles north of the approximate spot where Tim thinks she reached the river.

  Haley spent the first night lying on top of a flat-topped boulder beside the river. She said she did this because she wanted to be in the most visible place possible for the helicopters to see her. The helicopters—equipped with heat sensors—were indeed shuttling back and forth over the valley all night, but they never spotted her. (The reason the heat sensors didn’t pick up Haley may have been because boulders stay warm long after nightfall—that’s why cold-blooded snakes curl up on them at night—and the stored heat of the rock might have swallowed the heat signal of Haley’s body.) When the sun rose, she climbed down from the rock and kept walking beside the river.

  When night fell on the second day, she remembered her mother telling her that a hazy ring around the moon means that rain is coming. There was a hazy ring around the moon, so she climbed a little way up the mountain on the east bank of the Buffalo and took shelter for the night in a small cave—not even a cave, really, more of a divot in the rocks with just enough of a ceiling to keep the rain off. “I don’t think it was good sleep,” she said. “It was sort of more just, like, dozing, like a hypnotic . . . It was sort of like a stupor, basically. It was not restful sleep.”

  The sun rose again. “And then the third day it was more of the same. Just kept walking.” At some point she began to hallucinate. “When you start to starve, when you start to dehydrate, people hallucinate all the time. I hallucinated people in the trees. I hallucinated family members. I hallucinated a valley full of flamingoes. I just remember coming around a bend in the river, and the flamingoes were everywhere. I don’t know when. It could have been day two. It could have been day three. Honestly, once I got to the river, the days were kind of monotonous. I wasn’t really doing anything to distinguish one from the other.” Lytle James and William Jeff Villines found her at about two in the afternoon that third day, probably around the same time that Kelly, up on top of the mountain, was pleading into TV cameras, addressing an imagined stranger she feared had abducted her daughter.

  Although by Tuesday afternoon Haley’s parents had begun to fear the worst—a human abductor—it comforts me to remember Kelly’s first reaction on the first night her daughter was missing upon learning that Colleen Nick had asked to speak with her: that surprising spark of anger. The idea that Haley might have been abducted by some pedophile was a drumbeat that began faintly the first day when Dennis Boles thought to drive back to the parking lot at the trailhead to see if any cars were missing and jot down the plate numbers, and got louder and louder until the third day, when Steve and Kelly themselves had started to become convinced of it. Kelly’s first instinct was annoyance at the absurdity of the notion; it makes more sense for some predatory kidnapper to lurk around a Little League game, which was where Colleen Nick believes her daughter was taken, but why on earth would one be hiding in a remote wilderness on top of a mountain thirty miles away from the nearest traffic light? You have to start thinking in a sinister vein to even begin to come up with plausible explanations—like maybe he followed them there. . . . Or perhaps there did just happen to be an evil pedophile also out breathing the fresh mountain air, smelling the wildflowers, and enjoying the beauty of nature that day who had pounced on the opportunity to kidnap a lost six-year-old girl. Kelly had thought the idea absurd at first—Haley had not been abducted; she had to be right there somewhere in the woods—and in the end, the moral paranoia that imagines child rapists hiding behind trees in the forest turned out to be wrong, and her initial gut instinct turned out to be absolutely right.

  The scene of Steve and Kelly taking their daughter home to Fayetteville on the morning of Wednesday, May 2, 2001, is a TV cliché you can well imagine: a crowd of reporters and news anchors on the lawn, vans of many different media organizations with satellite dishes on top jamming up the ordinarily quiet suburban street, mailbox stuffed to overflowing with cards and letters from well-wishers, many from people the family knew and many not, including one from Robin Williams, who had been following the story. Haley said no to appearing on Oprah because she didn’t know who Oprah Winfrey was. I think it is a testament to the maturity of Steve and Kelly’s judgment that this decision was apparently Haley’s call. They did say yes to some media coverage, like the local news outlets, and the Dateline NBC episode later that year. But after the initial burst of attention, they wanted more than anything else to get back to their ordinary lives. They were completely uninterested in getting famous or profiting off of their daughter.

  After being home for two days, Steve and Kelly decided it would be best to leave town for a little while, enough dead time to make the crowd of reporters on the lawn go away. They asked Haley where she wanted to go, and her favorite thing she had seen in her very short life was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which they had visited before on another family vacation. So they took off for St. Louis, where they spent a long weekend, and on Monday Haley was back in kindergarten, having missed only a week of school.

  It was during the drive up to St. Louis, about five hours from Fayetteville, that Haley, who must have been in a very unusual state of mind after having just gone through a harrowing and physically grueling experience followed by two days of being made to feel like a superstar, told her parents—told anyone for the first time—about her “imaginary friend,” Alecia.

  This side of my family—my father’s, the Hales—is not particularly religious, nor inclined to pay much attention to the fairies that flutter in the spiritual spectrum between brute magic and faith. My mother’s parents, the Campbells, also generations-deep Arkansans, were devout Southern Baptists. But the Hale side, by far the closer and happier side, were mostly agnostics, areligious, some soft-core Easter Christians the most pious among them (i.e., a Christian who only goes to church on Easter, like a football fan who only watches the Super Bowl). My father and my uncle Jay in particular, a physicist and a mechanical engineer, respectively, being very “left-brained” people, had a pretty cold relationship with the Methodist Church they had grown up in, which crystallized into atheism in their harsher moods. Joyce also grew up attending a Methodist church, but she, too, had drifted away from it. My mother took me and my younger brother to church on Sundays—the Southern Baptist Convention she’d been raised in at first and then, as the Southern Baptists leaned righter and righter until they had politically alienated her, experimenting with other Protestant denominations—but my father wouldn’t go along unless we were in Arkansas or her parents were in town, when he suffered through it politely. But as I was growing up, we began attending church with less and less frequency, and by the time my youngest brother was born, we had pretty much stopped; for a few years, I went through a hatred-of-religion phase à la Sam Harris/­Christopher Hitchens in my angry-young-man days.* Haley’s father, Steve, had grown up Methodist, too, and their small family—Steve, Kelly, Haley—attended Methodist services sometimes, but they were not particularly regular churchgoers, either. Religion has just never been a big part of the lives of the people on that side of my family; I always thought of them as admirably sane, skeptical, rational thinkers.

  According to Tim Ernst in his book, on the first night Haley was lost, Kelly called a psychic from the landline in his cabin. Here’s Tim: “Then Kelly got an idea to call a psychic and wanted to know if I had a phone book. She must have detected a slight hint of skepticism in my face because she looked right at me and said, ‘At this point I am willing to try anything!’ ” There are no atheists in foxholes. Tim continues: “At 11:08 p.m., she placed a call and spoke briefly with a psychic. . . . ‘She is lying down next to a stream and is unhurt,’ the psychic said. . . . As it turns out, this information was exactly correct.”

  I disagree with Tim that what the psychic said could be called “information,” but it’s true she happened to be right. At that moment, the first night, Haley was lying on a rock beside an inlet of the Buffalo River, hoping the helicopters would spot her. Perhaps that psychic simply possessed the same thing Lytle James and William Jeff Villines had: intuition. (As Lytle James told the Dateline NBC reporter whom it had apparently taken mighty persuasion to get him to talk to on camera, “Well, when an animal’s hurt or lost or something like ’at first thing they always do is go down to the water.”)

  Kelly kept calling psychics throughout the ordeal, and the next day, Crow Johnson—another family friend who had come to help (Crow is a folk singer/painter/textile artist who favors long, flowy scarves and silver Navajo jewelry—a crunchy über-hippie in addition to being a dyed-in-the-wool Arkie, and of my family’s friends it is thoroughly unsurprising that she would be the one to have this idea)—knew that a convention of dowsers, or “water witches,” as they’re sometimes called in the Ozarks, was then being held at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, and she faxed them topographical maps of the area, which they faxed back with their divined suggestions for search areas.

  I distinctly remember first learning about water divination from Jay and Joyce when I was a kid, walking in the woods with them on their property in Pea Ridge. Although they were deeply mistrustful of organized religion and Christianity in particular, and though they did not exactly believe in water divination, they had a strange sort of respect for it, as they did a lot of the old Ozark folk wisdom. It is just as deep a part of the landscape’s human psychology—its psychogeography, call it—as the tall tales and the ghost stories and the melodies in its music that have aural ancestry in the ballads of the Scottish highlands. Plus, it works sometimes. They and I know that those times when it appears to work are almost certainly just lucky accidents, the coincidences of confirmation bias that give magical thinking its power over our pattern-hungry minds. But you’d have to have the heart of a robot not to feel at least a little tingle in your spine when it does.

  I think all the business with psychics and water witches all but vanished from Kelly’s mind as soon as Haley had been found alive and safe. She didn’t need it anymore. She was out of the foxhole.

  Her own mother, on the other hand, was not only terrified for Haley during those three days, but also devastated with guilt. She still is. A part of Joyce’s soul never made it out of the foxhole.

  Alecia. Although Haley did not yet perfectly know how to read, from the moment Alecia first appeared in the story—as the family was driving up to St. Louis on day three after she had been rescued—she always insisted on that slightly unorthodox spelling; she pronounced it “ah-lee-see-ah.” She was also insistent on other specific details. Alecia was four years old. She had long, dark hair that she wore in pigtails. She wore a red shirt with purple sleeves, red pants, and white sneakers. Haley drew a picture of her:

  Alecia, Haley said, had had a flashlight with her. She had guided her to the river. Haley:

  From the moment I knew I was lost, I had this imaginary friend. I have always referred to her as an imaginary friend, and I always will refer to her as an imaginary friend. Her name was Alecia. My mom has said before—and I actually don’t know if I agree with her on this, I think—she said she was afraid I didn’t have any imagination. She genuinely was, like, worried for me. I actually think that I had an extremely active imagination, but I was also very good at distinguishing between my imagination and reality. I had a very rich inner world. I loved to play pretend, loved to play dress-up. But I was also very like, “Okay, that is pretend, and this is real.” And I never had imaginary friends before this experience, and I never had any after. And I never saw this particular imaginary friend again. But I remember, her name was Alecia, she had long, dark hair, she was four, she had a flashlight, and I think I specifically told my parents that she appeared to me as being four because she didn’t want to scare me. I’ve always been someone who really likes to be in control of myself. I don’t need to have control over every situation, I just need to be in control of my own faculties. So I think that her being younger than me was a way for me to still be in control. I’ve been asked before, “Did you think that she was another child?” And no—I was fully aware that this was a noncorporeal being that was with me. And she was a little girl, and we had conversations, we told stories, we played patty-cake, and she was just a very comforting presence. But I knew that physically, I was alone. It is hard to explain. I don’t know how else to say it other than she was an imaginary friend. She did guide me. I didn’t know that there was a river. But she helped me find it. And I don’t know if that was just me blindly walking through the woods and finding a river and attributing that to her, or if she actually guided me to the river. . . . I did have hallucinations, but later. I had hallucinations distinctly separate from my imaginary friend that were due to the effects of exposure. I one hundred percent did not think there was another child with me. I knew, physically, I was alone.