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Krystalle’s big birthday party—that awful party. That would have been ’85, the year before Maythorn disappeared.
    The path was still recognizable—probably part of the dogs’ vast network of appointed rounds—and Elizabeth studied it, appraising the possibilities.
It was so beautiful and manicured over there…all that professional landscaping…the rose garden…and it’s been almost twenty years since anyone’s lived there. I wonder what’s left.
    She thought about her unfinished wreaths down in the workshop, but the faint trail was too enticing. She started up the slope. Behind her the wind riffled the poplar trees, twirling the leaves with a thousand brittle rustlings to sparkle gold and green in the sun. Higher up, the pines grew close and dark, their long shadows thrusting toward her, but beyond them there was sunlight.
    She paused to look back at Full Circle Farm. A hawk was circling high over the fields below and she saw the flash of his pale belly and then the copper gleam of his broad tail. He circled once more, then set his wings and soared south in her direction, crowning the ridge and dropping down into the hidden cove that had been Mullmore.
    Elizabeth climbed steadily toward the ridge, carefully pushing aside the pine branches when their prickly fingers brushed her face. Here the trees grew so close that most of the usual clutter of multiflora rose and black-berry bramble had not been able to gain a foothold. Her boots trod noiselessly on the soft duff of pine needles and she was soon at the top, at her line fence.
    And here was the scuttle hole that Sam had built so many years ago, a narrow, zigzag parting in the fence that a person, but not a cow, could slip through. As she angled herself through the opening she could hear him saying,
Now maybe those girls won’t keep snagging their clothes trying to crawl under the barbed wire.
And for two years the path and the scuttle hole had seen almost daily use as the two little girls ran in and out of each other’s homes, families, lives. Elizabeth stood there on the other side of the fence, remembering.
And then it stopped. I don’t think Rosie ever came up this way again. I know I didn’t.
    Long rays of afternoon sun shafted through the old hardwoods—maples, poplars, hickories, and oaks—that guarded the upper slopes of Mullmore. Emerging from the deep, chill shade of the pines into the brilliance of this south-facing slope was like coming into another country, a dreamlike, mazy kingdom of slanting autumn light. A small wind trembled through the treetops and a shower of brilliant leaves swirled around her.
Like Danaë,
she thought,
when Zeus came to her disguised as a shower of gold.
Caught in the dream, she held out her arms and lifted her face to feel the leaves flutter against it. She stood there as the air grew still and the leaves fell to the ground. Then she set off down the trail that led to the clearing below…and to whatever remained of Mullmore.

3.
    S LEEPING B EAUTY’S C ASTLE
    Wednesday, October 5
    The trail wound through the trees, a narrow ribbon twisting down the wooded slope. Far below her and only partially visible through overgrown shrubbery and rampant wild vines, Elizabeth could see the dark red tile roofs of the abandoned house and outbuildings. Mullmore lay in the heart of the sheltered cove that previous generations had known as “the ol’ Ridder place.” Almost two hundred acres, it had once been a prosperous farm, comprised of steep woodland, gently rolling pastures, and an unusually large stretch of level bottom—so-called “tractor-land,” much prized for ease of cultivation. But when the Mullins had bought the property at a staggering price—“Paid cash for it too” the local grapevine had insisted, “cash out of a suitcase”—it had swiftly become apparent that they did not intend to farm.
    The log barns had been sold—dismantled and hauled off on trucks. And the weathered old farmhouse, with its gently