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was fading into fall, they hadn’t changed at all, and deciding the bowl was just too small for them, he took them back to the stream.
    Of course, he knew about the murder that had occurred in the old house at the Crossing—everyone in town did. He’d heard the stories about why the man had killed his wife and child, but he knew they were just stories. When Chad Jackson had first told him that the man had gone crazy and killed his wife, and that everybody who ever lived in that house afterward went crazy too, Seth had asked his mother about it.
    She’d laughed when he repeated Chad’s tale, and told Seth that people had been telling stories about that house for as long as anyone could remember, and he should just ignore them.
    Instead, he’d gone out Black Creek Road the next day and stood exactly where he was now, gazing at the house across the street.
    Though the lot it stood on wasn’t particularly large—maybe half an acre—there weren’t any houses on the lots next to it, or the lots next to those. Nor were there any houses at all on the side of the street where he stood. In fact, there weren’t more than five houses on the whole stretch of Black Creek Road that lay between there and town.
    All of them were old, but Seth knew the one at the Crossing was the oldest. It was small, and practically square, and had no front porch—only a stoop with an ugly metal awning over it. There were shutters at the windows, but they were all sagging and didn’t look like they’d close even if anyone wanted them to. There was nothing particularly special about it. It was just an old house, lacking even the smallest interesting design detail. Not like the wonderful big Colonial, Georgian, and Victorian mansions strung along Prospect Street, or the smaller versions with the same kind of architecture that filled Roundtree’s side streets.
    But this house—and what had happened within its walls—held a strange fascination for Seth, and time after time, year after year, he found himself coming back to gaze at the nondescript building as if something in the structure might explain the terrible events that had taken place inside. It was as if the house itself didn’t look very happy—if a house could look happy—and now, with the For Sale sign stuck in the unkempt front yard yet again, Seth thought it actually looked sad.
    Sad, but no different than it looked earlier in the day.
    And there was nothing unusual about the second story window.
Nothing except the killing of the little girl who had once lived behind it.
    Taking his camera out of the pocket of his jacket, he took a few more shots in the fading light. In one of them, a glimmer of the setting sun found its way through the branches of the maple forest and caught the second story window perfectly. If he’d caught the moment, and the picture came out right, the upper window should contain at least a partial reflection of the setting sun.
    As dusk began to settle, Seth finally started back toward the center of town, silently praying that his father wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t tried to join Chad Jackson’s softball game.
    As he approached the pizza parlor, he saw Zack Fletcher and some of his friends crowded around one of the outside tables, and he crossed the street before any of them saw him.
    Better to turn away and pretend they didn’t see him than walk right by and have
them
pretend they didn’t see him.
    Two blocks later he turned on Church Street, and a couple of minutes after that he was in front of his own house. He was about to climb the steps to the front porch when he looked up at the house and cocked his head. Then, instead of going in, he crossed the street and turned around to look at it from farther away.
    If he pretended the houses next door weren’t there, and the big oak tree in the front yard was gone, and took away the front porch, his house looked almost like the one out on Black Creek Road.
    His was bigger—much bigger—and newer, and