In the summer of 1997, on a dead-end road outside Red Bluff, Oregon, there was a white wooden fence that ran for nearly a mile along the edge of a fallow cornfield. Every few feet, someone had painted a child's handprint in red—hundreds of them, all the same size, all facing the road. I first saw them from the window of a Greyhound bus, and I got off at the next stop. That night, I met a woman named Elara who lived in the last house on the road, and she told me that every spring, a little girl in a yellow dress would walk along the fence, adding another handprint. But no one had ever seen her face. This is the story of what I saw when I finally looked through the missing slat.