Monstrous oaks and maples layered the streets with shade. Even though it was only five thirty, most of the downtown businesses were already darkened for the night, their signs flipped from OPEN to CLOSED.

She hopped to the needle matted ground. After a quick glance at her scraped palms, she patted the top of her head.

Late on the festival's last night, after the last call of the barkers and the final bow of the acrobats, after the grand lighted carousel had finished its very last spin ...

"If your parents had any sense, they would give you both a good whipping, and then lock you indoors until you've gained some sense of you own."

"Mom and I are going to watch the new dancing competition, Never Before See. The one where they have to pick their teams blindfolded, and then rehearse in the dark."

A few hours later, when the man and woman of the house returned from the gala in their chauffeured auto mobile, they found the girls in bed, thunder receding into the distance, and faithful Mrs. Rawlins waiting up for them with a pot of hot tea.

If you were looking for a book and couldn't find it in the library, a librarian would usually offer to get it for you from another library.

"You're hooked." He nodded knowingly. "That's the danger of good books. They're a gateway to harder reading. One leads to another, and soon you'll be up all night, mainlining encyclopedias."

The windows of the long rectangular room let in a green-gold haze of summer sunshine. A few strangers were seated at the big oak table, reading, making notes.

Gradually, the lights in the house went out, except in the parlor, where the adults kept their vigil. The sky darkened to inky black, strewn with a silver spray of stars

Her feet were daubed with mud. The hem of her nightgown was heavy with dew.

She yanked the notebook out of her backpack. Rapidly, she scribbled down every location she could recall from The Lost One: Rose Lane, Turnpike Road. The cemetery. The meadow.

She couldn't just stay here, imagining everything she was missing, feeling miserable. She had to do something. Something that would distract her from the boiling.

In the grainy gray image, two girls stood side by side. They wore matching pleated dresses, matching buttoned boots, and matching floppy bows in their long hair.

She began by searching for "Evelyn Chisholm." She wasn't sure what she hoped to find.

"Well first, if you had found that book, it was fairly likely that you'd been snooping in off-limits parts of the library. That didn't make you seen one hundred percent trustworthy."

A notepad and a set of neatly sharpened colored pencils lay beside her. She was wearing earbuds, but she tugged them out as Fiona stepped inside.

The Perch Diner had white beadboard walls and linoleum floors. Rows of blue booths ran along each side, and a counter covered with pie stand stood in between

As days passed, the grand brick house grew quieter and quieter. Where once lively music had poured from a gramophone and songs had chimed from a grand piano, there were now closed lids and locked doors.

She left out the book's strange movements, and the pocketknife, and the fact that she and Charlie were hoping more of its pages would inexplicably appear.

They had just reached the second-floor walkway when the lights of the central chamber flashed on. She reeled back into the staircase alcove, half blinded.

The Searcher stepped forward. Its cloak dragged along the parquet. Its hood was to deep to reveal any hint of a face inside -- if there was a face at all -- but she cold sense something within that hood staring back at them both, holding them still with its invisible eyes.

She was still trapped in the dark with one long-dead girl, a ghost dog, and some silent, lunching thing in a long black cloak.

On the morning after the terrible thunderstorm, downed tree limbs wide puddles, and shoals of wet leaves littered their small New England town.

She kicked both legs against the cistern wall, writhing, struggling to get her feet under her. By Evelyn's grip was like a clamp.

With all of summer stretching out ahead--a summer that had seemed so blank and lonely just a week ago--the next grade was a barely visible bump on the horizon.

Once upon a time, when stones were soft and stars were bits of dust, I loved a monster. It seems forever ago and perhaps it was ...

Of course, I was kindly disposed toward all of earth's creatures. Birds and bats, toads and cats, slimy and scaly, noble and humble.

Pa loved creatures, same as me, which is why we had so many roaming the nooks and crannies of out cottage and yard: goats and tree hares, chickens and dibby ducks, a peahen and a an ancient river otter who could no longer swim.

A few weeks later, he was dead in the Great September Fire, along with my ma and little brother, like so many others in the village.

If you wanted to make an animal that's the opposite of a screecher, you might come close with a hummingbear. They're everything screechers are not.

The rest of the year, we made ends meet. We tended our garden plots. Some of us worked as the lumber mill.

It was getting late. The sun was low, tired and flushed after a long day. The path was fir-shadowed. Here and there, sunbeams cut through the limbs like golden swords.

My hands were trembling. I felt the tip, imagining the pain it could inflict. I'd handled many arrows, of course.

I didn't want Connor's lantern. It would just mean having to return it to him later. And I certainly didn't want his company.

Near the edge of the village, I took a left. The cottage was close enough to see.

I closed my eyes and tried to recall my last birthday with my family. Pa and Ma had just finished building our home.

I supposed there was some sense in creating practical things. The way Mae knitted shawls to fight the winter chill.

"What's the point in being mad?" I crossed my arms over my chest. "No one cares what I think. I'm just ... just an eleven-year-old child."

Relieved to see him leaving. I managed what I hoped was a grateful smile, but just then, Birdie slammed her palm on the table with such force that I jumped.

I decided to try one last time. It's my birthday." I said, angling for sympathy. "This is not how I wanted to spend it."

"So?" My pa had taught me that "So?" was a fine response to almost any insult. And it was remotely possible that I'd been insulted.

As we settled, a gavel pounded, and the sound echoed in the rafters. "The council meeting will now commence" announced the chair, an older gentleman with wild white hair and an immense mustache.

"Look, I don't know why the hummingbears are gone. I don't know why the world is changing so fast and so wrong. But I don know that nature's a complicated thing.

There was another feeling that was jumbled with it, becoming stronger. It was a certain uneasiness because Papa was going on a trip tomorrow.

They were five identical yellow plush whales named Raindrop, Dewdrop, Snowdrop, Gumdrop, and Lemondrop.

He rolled it onto his toes and balanced it. Then he flipped the ball upward, caught it, and tossed it to him.

Papa pulled his head out of the back of the car and slammed the door. He tugged at his curly orange beard. "He did," said Papa

The house was quiet. The windows were dark. The lawn was scruffy.

An older woman named Joan entered the room and joined them. She swayed a little when she walked -- it was sort of like she was dancing.

There were buckets of paintbrushes, rusty paint cans, extension cords, and coils of rope.

As if by magic, the misters turned on. First there was a clicking sound, then a wheezing noise, and then the soft, whispery shush-shushing of the misters going full force.

"Just tired. I got up really early. And I think a whole year of teaching is catching up with me. I'm glad it's vacation," she added.

In the basement, the mess from yesterday was laid out before them like the aftermath of a tornado.

The blue and green wings smeared, but the black outline did not. She licked her finger again and rubbed harder.

There was that word again: exciting. He was starting to hate it. Was it possible to hate a word?

He ran downstairs and out into the rain. He put the buggy in the garage.

He could hear the air-conditioner; he could feel the cool air. The beads of sweat on his arms and legs would soon be gone.

"Yes. You have to go back to every house you went to and get the envelopes. Hopefully most of them are still in the mailboxes."

The flames, like orange flags, popped out of the chimney and snapped and swayed, then disappeared. Again and again.

Mostly he waited on the porch, resting against the big round pillar, his legs drawn up close to his body.

When he returned, in a flash, he was proudly holding up his welcome home sign for Papa.

A baby! For just a moment, the air seemed charged.

This corridor was a history of my childhood. There was the spot where I banged into the wall with my scooter.

"Describe exactly what you saw," she said, I was describing symptoms. She was the doctor after all.

A blast of warm air hit me when I walked through the doorway to the algae farm.

A feather from a bird. Something called a pine cone, which she said came from a tree. Glass marbles.

I looked out the window and down at the steep sand dune cliff we were driving on top of. I took a deep breath.

I tried to sleep, but I couldn't get comfortable. Every time I moved, pain streaked through my shoulder. And my head was pounding.

I dreamt that I was back in the overturned rover. But it was different this time. Scarier somehow. I looked at the seat next to mine.

Like giraffes. Why didn't they tip over with those long necks? Or snakes. How did they move, since they didn't have legs?

Right now, we were watching a courtroom drama. It was a really old one -- from the 1980's.

There was pizza made from real flour, and fresh tortillas with rice and beans, and creamy macaroni and cheese. Lime gelatin with strawberries, fruit punch, and mandarin oranges (my favorite).

Before anyone could respond, the emergency alarm started blaring. "Again?" I said.

I heard footsteps coming down the hall, so I shoved everything into the box and pushed it back. Then I rushed to the wall where the filter was and pretended to empty the dust.

That sounded nice, but who would send a condolence message to us? Who would tell us how sorry they were that we'd lost a member of out family?

We kids spent most of our time in the mess hall. I had pulled out a puzzle and spread it on the floor to piece together.

The next morning when we went to the mess hall, none of the grown-ups showed up.

The storage units had some foods I didn't recognize: a strange-smelling dark brown bread and a jar of small black candies.

Two hours later--or was it three?--we were still sitting in the train. I was exhausted, and I hadn't done anything.

I heard a rustle of wings. Didn't bats bang on ceilings? I held the glow stick up and squinted at the ceiling.

Everywhere I looked, there was something to see. Colorful posters. Tiny blinking lights that hung from the ceiling.

Things were different there. For one, it was much bigger, with more people. There as even a baby human.

They'd fixed the light timer. They'd installed a new kind of battery charger so we didn't have to ration power and could have hot showers.

That evening after supper, we kids played Ping-Pong. We laughed and smiled and had fun. It was perfect.

But before he could finish his sentence, the lights suddenly flicked on to reveal a room full of people. A huge sign that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

So a few days later, I waited by the door to the train tunnel for my guests.

We played game after game of Ping-Pong, to the cheers of the whole planet.

They were the grown-ups. They were in charge. And yet I'd seen children behave better.

But it was a huge leap, a giant chasm of a leap, to think that one thing turned into the other.

I began to walk, humming softly, and maybe it was the rhythmic movement, or my off-key tune, but the baby seemed to relax.

Other than a cottage or two, thick woods edged up against both sides of the road. I kept waiting for the baby to disappear into the underbrush.

They were probably the only people in the world we could tell without being laughed at or locked away.

She looked quite proud of herself. And not nearly so helpless.

I removed my notebook from my waistpouch to make certain I remembered the precise locations.

As if on cue, a steam engine chugged through the hills just west of us. We could see its dark, confident body, its steamy breath.

It hadn't been easy. The snails liked to burrow deep beneath the tangled tree roots.

Gingerly, I picked her up by the scruff of her neck, the way a mother dog would hold a puppy.

After a few minutes, he blew a glistening, perfectly round bubble, about the size of my palm. Carefully he added it to the top layer of his nest.

I sighed. If the unthinkable could happen, if your family could vanish in a moment, why couldn't a sculpture of a screecher come to life?

For the next hour, I counted. I sorted. I noted. I sketched. I measured.

Next I tried the new willow grove samples. The bubble slid right off every leaf.

I pointed to Roundtop Ridge, where the train tracks were. The same place the last big fire had started.

I was the child, and they were the adults. But I was also healthy and able-bodied, and they were not.

I walked down the line, choking and coughing like everyone else, and finally, there he was.

I returned the snails and brushed my dirty hands on my coat. "I started to wonder. What makes these two trees, and only these two, ....

"He just wants what's best for you, I think. The worry on his face yesterday, when he didn't know where you were ... He loves you so much."

I noticed a gray-templed man, nattily dressed, standing to my left. I'd seen him before. It was James McLachlan, owner of the near by mill.

Was I making a terrible mistake? Giving a gift was almost as bad as accepting one. It made you obliged. I created a connection.

I closed my eyes again. I saw the hidden grove. I saw adults listening to a child. To me.

It helped that nature is resilient, and sometimes surprisingly quick to recover.