The nights are bad, he says, but the days are not much better. “If you have a kid, you know the feeling you get when you look away from him in a store, and a few seconds later he isn’t there. I’ve felt like that for two months.”

In Wood’s life as a Christian, he has seen how holiness can change us forever, but, as he is now discovering, this is also true of evil. Whoever took Sara, as she bicycled by a cornfield on a sunny summer afternoon, almost certainly drove right past Wood’s house, a half-mile down the same road. Wood was home at the time (along with his wife and two older children) writing a lesson for Vacation Bible School at Norwich Corners Presbyterian Church, where he is lay pastor. If he had glanced out the window, he might have seen the car go by. Now he must live with the knowledge that “at the moment in her life when my daughter needed me the most, I was a half-mile away and I couldn’t help her.” That the thought is completely irrational affords him only the coldest of comfort.

As these cases go, what happened to Sara was not remarkable among the two to three hundred reported stranger abductions of children each year in the United States–nothing as spectacular as the abduction of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma, Calif., who was dragged off in front of her friends by a knife-wielding stranger who burst in on the girl’s slumber party. Investigators have no reason to think anyone was stalking Sara in particular. On the morning of Aug. 18, she shopped for fall clothes with her mother, brother and sister, then returned home for lunch. At about 1:30 Sara rode to church to get some sheet music for the evening Bible class. On the way home she rode past a small cluster of houses near the church, turned onto Hacadam Road and up a hill to the spot where the papers she had been carrying were found later that afternoon. Her bicycle was in a clump of trees across the road. It couldn’t have taken her more than five minutes to cover the half mile from church, which means that whoever took her happened to drive down that quiet road at the precise moment when she was vulnerable, made up his mind and acted in an instant. When a coincidence like that results in good–if she had fallen and hit her head, and someone drove by in time to save her life–we call it a miracle. Wood himself is too good a Christian to think this, but what happened to his daughter seems like an anti-miracle, a moment when God turned his back on the world.

And from that singular event has issued a river of grief that will run until Sara and all who knew her are dead. Evil destroys the innocence of everything it touches: a stretch of road, a summer afternoon will never be the same for Wood. He faced the fact that the first step in investigating a missing child is to eliminate the parents as suspects, and unflinchingly took a polygraph test to prove that he didn’t do away with his daughter. (Police say none of the Wood family members is a suspect.) The second tier of suspects are neighbors with police records. Wood was shown a list of these. None had any connection to Sara of which he was aware, but he does not recommend the exercise for anyone who wants to sleep nights in the same community for the rest of his life.

Daily life offers only a series of irritating distractions, unwelcome reminders that summer turned into fall whether Sara was there to greet it or not. Wood’s wife, Frances, spends her days at home by the telephone, which she answers warily; the number is listed, a direct pipeline to a whole nation’s worth of psychics and crackpots, but of course there’s no question of changing it, ever. Wood goes to his job each morning, teaching aviation mechanics at a school in Utica; afternoons, he visits the church, which is now also the command center for two dozen state troopers who are still working on the case. Sometimes he stops by a former bowling alley in nearby New Hartford, which has been taken over by volunteers who have mailed out more than 3 million posters all over the country, offering rewards up to $150,000 and a toll-free number for information–1-800-684-SARA. He has a fantasy of someone–maybe right this second–seeing the poster, then looking out the window to see Sara going by in a car, although a part of him recognizes that it is much more likely that the break in the case will come from one of the dog-handlers who are still pacing the roads and fields in ever-widening circles from Hacadam Road. At night he sometimes stands for hours looking out the window, toward a place by a field of corn that was high in August and is now just stubble, facing a little grove of maples and aspens that have gone yellow in the months since Sara bicycled by them on her way home from church. Then he turns toward bed and tries to sleep, hoping that when morning comes, he won’t remember his dreams.