The novel introduces the precocious 11-year-old Debra Ann Pierce, or D.A., who lives on the same street as Corrine Shepard and (now) Mary Rose Whitehead. D.A. struggles to adjust to her mother’s disappearance the day after Valentine’s Day nearly a month ago. Without warning or explanation, her mother drove off. The girl is certain that her mother will return, probably before the Fourth of July. Until then, she’ll keep the house tidy that she shares with her father.

Now, with no friends in school (except her two imaginary friends, Peter and Lilly), D.A. spends her afternoons biking around town, although since the arrest of Dale Strickland her father has limited how far she can ride. One afternoon in early spring, she watches as a man, “short and skinny as a scarecrow” (69), runs along the edges of a field near the strip bar (a seedy dive that D.A. knows not to go near) until he comes to one of the massive drainpipes put in to control flooding—ironic given the years of drought. He disappears into the pipe. Over the next several days, D.A. returns to watch him. On impulse, after she knows his schedule, she ventures into the pipe and finds the rudiments of a living space, a bed of blankets and a lawn chair.