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Creek.
    In the silence of the middle of the night, I turn on the classical radio station, very quietly. The sound will not travel as high as Katie’s bedroom, but there is no reason to take chances. The poor girl has such circles under her eyes that she looks haunted. It’s hard to imagine what her life has been like these last couple of years.
    From a hook by the door, I take a fresh apron, the white cottonworn soft from many washings, and tie the long strings around my body once, then again in the front. On the radio is Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, which many consider to be his most elegant piece of work. Humming along under my breath, I take a big aluminum bowl from beneath the counter and carry it to the plastic bins along the wall where we store dry goods—flours, of course, white and rye, whole-grain wheat, and oats; also sugars of various types, brown and white and raw. Stacks of scoops and measuring cups line the shelves above.
    The chemistry of bread is not as exact as you might imagine. Everything influences the mix of dry ingredients to wet, particularly with the artisan loaves I am baking tonight. I use the small shovel in the bin to fill my bowl with white flour and take it back to the center island, then gather the rest of my ingredients and tools—some sugar and loose yeast to help the mother dough along, a scraper and plastic wrap, measuring cups and spoons.
    As I begin to measure dry ingredients into a fresh bowl, my mind drifts back to Katie. Tomorrow the dog will arrive. Before he gets here, maybe there will be time to get her a haircut, maybe some new clothes. Everything in her suitcase was quite plainly purchased secondhand, and much of it is stained or ragged or too small. Her panties, in particular, pain me. Every single pair has holes. I washed everything and neatly folded it all, then stacked it on a chair just inside her bedroom door. The child slept on, oblivious, her body so thin she barely lifted the covers.
    As I measure flour, I imagine her after her mother’s arrest: waking up in an abandoned house, putting on those tattered panties, and trying to comb her crazy hair. I have to lean my hands on the cold steel counter, take a long breath against the blistering heat it rouses in me.
    How could she have slipped through so many cracks? Oscarwas at war, obviously, and Sofia lived here, but didn’t they talk to her? And what about her teachers? Parents of her friends? Didn’t somebody notice?
    Obviously not—Katie had been living with her mother in a house with no running water and no appliances for a couple of months, maybe more. Katie was clearly adept and clever, so she made people believe what they wanted to believe.
    Still. Those collarbones.
    As if to nudge my darkening mood aside, a minuet twirls out of the radio. I stir the liquid ingredients together, set them aside for a few minutes to greet one another, and transfer the sourdough sponge into a clean jar that is carefully labeled. It goes back in the fridge, in a special small box I have outfitted with a lock to which only I have the key. My aunt Poppy tends a line of the sponge, as well, but each of ours has a different quality, as you might imagine. Poppy has been happier than I, so hers is sweeter.
    All of our sourdough starters are born from the same carefully tended mother dough our ancestor carried from Ireland in 1845. How she kept it alive through the famine times is a mystery we don’t examine too closely.
    What we do know is that Bridget Magill carried her sponge to a big house in Buffalo, where she was a cook in a banker’s house, and made the finest bread anyone had ever tasted. More than one matron in the fashionable district tried to steal Bridget away, but she steadfastly cooked for the Mitchell family until her thirty-fifth year. By all accounts the lively, plump old maid then charmed a westward-thinking miner by the name of William O’Hare, who married her and brought her to the gold rush in the Colorado