She hobbled downhill parallel to the fence line, moving quickly, feeling chilled as the sweat from her climb started to evaporate. At the corner of the fence she turned, prepared to follow it to the road, but no, that wouldn’t work: the land sloped down steeply here into a small ravine, the barbwire in one spot grown around and even into the trunk of a maple tree. The tree itself was long dead, its roots exposed and dangling into the opening, leaving an ominous-looking hollow of darkness behind them. The gully was carved sharply into the hillside, narrowing as it ran down the grade, looking like the remnants of a streambed, though Emily couldn’t determine where a stream would have originated. Certainly it was a spot where things fetched up after hard rains: limestone, looking like bone in the low light; rotten logs; tangles of limbs and the soft down of dead leaves—a hundred dark crevices where a snake or a rat might sleep, a hundred dark crevices where a twisted ankle could turn into a broken one. Right now, the girls in her grade would be talking to one another on the phone about boys, and the boys themselves would be playing Super Mario Bros. or a game of HORSE out in the driveway. And Christopher—what would he be up to? He lived in one of the Civil War–era mansions up on North Main, his (it was rumored) three full stories tall with a ballroom, a library, and a separate servants’ quarters out back, now converted into a guesthouse where Christopher was sometimes allowed to host overnights with his friends. She could imagine him out in the little building she’d only seen from the road—it was gray stone, with a copper roof—bent over a pool table or playing foosball with his friends, a lock of dark hair trembling over his right eye as he twisted his wrist or thrust his hips to the left or right. She could—