Chapter 1 Summary

At ten a.m. on a morning in early June, nine-year old Trisha McFarland was sitting in the back seat of her mother's Dodge Caravan, playing with her favorite doll, Mona. By ten-thirty, she was lost in the woods. By eleven a.m., Trisha was fighting back the terror of realizing she was in mortal peril. Her plight was because she had needed to relieve herself and hadn't bothered to tell her mom and her brother Pete that she was stepping off the trail because the two of them were locked in another one of their fights. But mainly, she realizes, she hadn't told them because she had needed to get away from them and their endless fighting before she lost her temper and yelled at them to cut it out.

Trisha's parents had divorced a year before, and her mom had gotten...