“I can’t believe I’m here,” Stella had whispered to her friend. She was curled up on a musty love seat; the upholstery was so damp, the grosgrain fabric had turned green.

“I can’t believe you left without telling me.” Juliet had abandonment issues on a good day; she was very up front about that. “I was in a panic looking for you the next morning. How could you leave like that?”

“It wasn’t exactly my idea. It was my mother’s. What does she think she’s protecting me from?”

“Life,” Juliet had murmured.

This indeed was the reason that Jenny had directed Elinor Sparrow to rid the house of any current newspapers. Poor Stella hadn’t a clue as to what was happening in regard to the murder case. So it was Juliet who now read aloud from the articles in the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe. Both referred to Will Avery as a suspect. Stella didn’t like the way those words made her feel, as if anything might happen next. As though she might lose her father and not get him back. Such things happened, even in the most stable of lives. Stella’s mother had been three years younger than Stella was right now when she’d lost her father, hadn’t she? She might have been in this very room when she heard the news. She might have been looking out the same window, listening to the twittering of the peepers, unable to sleep. From where she sat on the love seat, Stella could see the branches of the forsythia outside, glowing in the dark. Beyond that it was pitch, nothing but shadows and trees.

“Are people at school talking about me?”

“You can’t think about that kind of stuff. But, trust me, there are a lot of words that rhyme with jail. They’re all idiots at school, Stella. You know that.”

“Right.” Stella was relieved she didn’t have to deal with her classmates. Maybe in Unity people would be kinder. In fact, they might not know about her father’s current situation; they might treat her as though she were an ordinary girl, an unremarkable individual who lived down the lane with her grandmother. An average ninth-grader who had troubles with math but loved science; a loyal friend, a good listener, whose best feature was her long blond hair. “If I wasn’t worrying so much about my father, I’d actually be glad to be here. Away from my mother. Away from all the Hillary Endicotts of the world. Free.”

“Free to do what?” Juliet had asked. She was a city girl, through and through. “Wander through the woods?”

“There’s a town, Juliet. This isn’t the outback. We have stores.”

“Is there a shoe store?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Stella admitted.

“In my opinion, any location without a shoe store is not a town. It’s the countryside. Yuck.”

NOW, on her way to school, Stella was traversing the muddy lane, a thoroughfare so narrow the branches of hawthorns and lindens met overhead to create a dark tunnel. She admitted to herself that Juliet was right, yet again. It was the countryside, no horns honking, no traffic, no one else on the road. It was desolate, really, for a girl used to Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue. Stella shook the bell on her birthday bracelet; she tried whistling a tune, but she didn’t feel any more secure. Starting a new school was never easy, and she actually had the chills when she reached the end of the lane, where it turned onto the paved road of Lockhart Avenue. She noticed a wooden post on the corner onto which someone had nailed a hand-printed sign, black paint scrawled on the wood: DEAD HORSE LANE. Oh, lovely. A countryside filled with deceased animals.

“Supposedly there’s a dead horse at the bottom of the lake,” someone said to her, a boy’s voice, one that startled her. Stella turned to find a tall boy beside her. He was a year or so older than she, with clear, blue eyes. He was grinning at her, as though they’d already been introduced. “It’s not exactly a scientific assessment. The lake is bottomless, it’s one of those glacial lakes fed by an underground spring. Supposedly, in the time of our great-great-great-grandparents, some idiot insisted on riding his horse down the path you’re not supposed to go on, the one where nothing grows. The horse spooked and the rider wound up getting thrown and breaking his neck. People say the horse never stopped running. It ran across the water so fast it didn’t sink until it reached the center of the lake. That’s where it drowned. But it’s all a bunch of bullshit, so don’t let it scare you.”

“Scare me?” Stella and the boy were in step now, walking down Lockhart Avenue. “I don’t scare that easily.”

A car came barreling by, too close to the shoulder of the road, forcing Stella and the boy to jump into a patch of nettle.