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the one belonging to the Walters. The Walter children are in school, but Mr. and Mrs. Walter are at home, planning for the opening of their store. They’re sitting at the kitchen table together, creating a grand opening flyer. If Olivia could see them, she would think that they haven’t seemed so happy in a long, long time.
    To the right of Olivia’s house is Mr. Pennington’s, and today he is in his backyard, feeling as happy as the Walters are. Last summer, when he was having a hard time, he didn’t get around to planting his vegetable garden, but this year he’s feeling up to it. He’s standing by the weedy patch that two years ago was the home to neat rows of lettuce and beans, and he’s making a chart of what he’ll plant where. He thinks that this summer he might try growing beets. “Is that a good idea, Jacques?” he asks, and Jacques wags his tail.
    Robby Edwards and his parents live on the other side of Mr. Pennington’s house. Right now Robby is in school and Mr. and Mrs. Edwards are both at work. Robby likes school (even though his special class moved from the high school back to the elementary school last fall), but he’s eager to graduate and start working. “I want responsibilities and a paycheck,” he tells Mrs. Fulton, his teacher, as they study a math worksheet. “And a girlfriend.”
    The Fongs live in the house on the right end of the row. They’re not home, either, although when they are at home these days they enjoy working on the nursery for their baby girl, who will be born soon. Today they’re at their studio on Main Street. They have offered to exhibit the artwork that will be entered in the competition during the town celebration, and they’re trying to figure out how to display it.
    â€œJust think,” says Mrs. Fong as she eyes their large workspace, “by the time the exhibit opens, our baby will be here.”

When Flora moved to Camden Falls at the beginning of the previous summer (which seemed now to be both a very long time ago and a very short time ago), there were many days when she wanted to be alone, so she would escape to Min’s attic. Eventually, she began to explore it. She had hoped the attic might be like one in a book — hiding a doorway to another world or at the very least harboring a trunk full of treasure. But Min’s attic had proven to be of the more boring kind. It held boxes of old clothes (but not even very old clothes) and boxes of dishes, plus some furniture of dubious quality that wasn’t being used but that Min couldn’t bear to part with. At last, though, Flora had discovered a carton holding old letters and keepsakes and papers and journals. Careful examination of some of the letters had led Flora to a mystery. It wasn’t, she had to admit, quite as exciting as the mysteries Nancy Drew usually found herself thrust into (often on the very first page of the book), involving spies and thieves and jailbirds. But as homegrown mysteries go, Flora’s wasn’t a bad one.
    Flora had learned that long ago (in 1929, before Min was born) Min’s father had done something that had lost a lot of money for a lot of people. A bit of reading had revealed that he hadn’t done anything wrong; as a stockbroker he had made investments for his clients, and when the stock market crashed, sending the country into the Great Depression, his clients lost their savings. Those clients had blamed Min’s father for their losses, which led to a chain of events that, Flora realized, had affected more than just the people whose investments had been lost. Employers lost their businesses and had to let their workers go. The workers, now with no income, were forced to give up their homes or to find lower-paying jobs. Babies were born into poverty when they once might have been born into prosperity.
    Flora’s mystery grew more interesting when she learned that Mary Woolsey was