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remembering that the light is on behind her.
    She steps back automatically, instinctively wanting to conceal herself, and then wonders why.
    It’s probably just one of the neighbors, she tells herself. Everyone on the block must know that this was Carleen’s old room. That’s the kind of detail that’s become legendary in Lake Charlotte—at least it was in the year Rory lived at home, after her sister vanished.
    She remembers the way cars would slow in front of their house as curious onlookers stared, and how kids would gather on their bikes outside the iron fence, peering at the house as though they expected to see Carleen’s ghost.
    Rory sighs and moves to the light switch, turning it off and plunging the room into darkness once more. She pulls the door closed behind her and goes slowly down the stairs to the second floor, passing her mother’s closed door.
    She hesitates for a moment, considering knocking and asking if her mother is all right.
    But that seems too invasive somehow. Kevin told her that their mother spends a lot of time in bed, sometimes watching her portable television and sometimes just staring at the ceiling or out the window. The only time she leaves the house on her own is to walk to morning mass at Holy Father Church two blocks away.
    Rory vowed, when she came here this summer, to make an effort to turn her mother around—to get her out of bed and back out into the world.
    But tonight, she’s too exhausted to make the effort.
    She passes the closed door to the master bedroom and continues to the guest room down the hall. This is where she’s staying for the summer, instead of in her old room upstairs, across the hall from Carleen’s.
    She’s been telling herself that she’s chosen to stay down here because it’s cooler, and because she wants to be near her mother and Molly.
    But the truth is that her childhood bedroom, like her sister’s, simply holds too many haunting memories. And though she now realizes that it’s going to be impossible to spend the summer here avoiding any thought or discussion of the past, the last thing she wants is to immerse herself in it.
    She goes into the guest room, leaves the door open behind her so that light spills in from the hall, and turns on the big, ancient box fan propped in the window. As the motor hums to life, she sits on the edge of the twin bed and looks out the window, facing the same view as she had from Carleen’s room directly overhead.
    There’s no sign of the man she had seen on the sidewalk.
    Yet for some reason she finds herself shivering again, hugging herself as she stares out into the still, steamy summer night.

 
    C HAPTER T HREE
    “C ap’n Crunch? I used to love that stuff.” Rory peers over Molly’s shoulder into the bowl of cereal in front of her on the table.
    Her sister glances up and narrows her eyes. “Do you mind? I’m trying to eat.”
    “Just checking to see if it’s the kind with crunchberries,” Rory says.
    Silence.
    “So, is it?”
    “No,” Molly tells her. “It isn’t.”
    “The peanut butter kind?”
    “No. Okay?”
    Rory shrugs, refusing to take her sister’s hint. Maybe, she tells herself, Molly just isn’t a morning person. Carleen never was. She would growl at anyone who tried to talk to her before noon.
    Or maybe Molly just can’t stand me, Rory thought ruefully, going over to the counter and looking around for a coffeemaker. I guess I can’t blame her for that. She thinks I took off and left everyone behind without a second thought while I gallivanted around the country these past ten years .
    Which is basically what I did .
    Rory sighs, opens a cupboard in search of the Mr. Coffee machine she vaguely remembers from years ago. Yesterday morning, there hadn’t been time to make coffee. She’d forgotten all about it in the flurry to get acclimated and see Kevin off. Now she has a pounding headache from not feeding her three-cup-a-day caffeine habit, and if she doesn’t find that Mr. Coffee