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drying out of her hands and inspected the bottom. The shiny metal was smudged here and there with black sooty smears.
    “Oh, didn’t I remember to scour—” Amy’s mother began, as she reached for the kettle, but Aunt Abigail shouldered her aside and began to scrub furiously.
    “Here, let me. I’ll do it, Abigail,” Amy’s mother said, nervously trying to catch the drips that fell from her wet fingers.
    Amy handed the dish towel to her mother and backed away, watching and listening. Listening to all the talk about a small smudge on the bottom of a kettle, Amy was getting the feeling that her aunt and mother were really talking about something else—something different, and more important and more secret.
    She often got that feeling—that when grown-ups talked about lots of little unimportant things, they were really talking about secrets that were somehow connected to things that had happened a long time before. Sometimes Amy had the feeling that she was surrounded by secrets and the clues to secrets, and that it was really important that she find out more about them. But there weren’t many clues in the talk about the kettle bottom, so she kept on backing up until she was out of the room and partway up the back stairs.
    Halfway up she began to run, two steps at a time, and the last three in a mighty jump. Then down the hall, still running, but quietly so they wouldn’t hear her and say what they always said.
    “It’s so unladylike, Amy, and dangerous. Just look at your poor knees.”
    “Amy Abigail, how many times do I have to ask you not to run in the house. You’ll break something.”
    “Let her run, for God’s sake. Not much else she’s allowed to do.”
    Amy’s room in Aunt Abigail’s house was small with a sloping ceiling and cubbyholed dormer windows. She liked its smallness and the sleek polished shine of the floor and the high carved headboard of the old-fashioned bed. She liked the narrow windows that opened right into the branches of one of the enormous pepper trees, so that the whole room was full of cool green light and the sounds of wind and birds. She liked having the tree there, except when she would have liked to see past it, to the Old Road and beyond to where the Hills rose up against the sky.
    For a moment Amy stood at the window, staring out into a thick green curtain of leaves, and then she turned and tiptoed out of her room and down the hall.

chapter four
    F ROM THE HUNTERHOUSE , the view of the eastern hills was blocked by the row of pepper trees, except from one window in one upstairs room. And it was to that room that Amy was going, although it was a place that she was not supposed to visit by herself. It was known as the storeroom because, for many years, Aunt Abigail had used it for storing away all kinds of keepsakes, and things that she was not using at present but might need again someday. It was a lonely place, standing alone and untouched sometimes for weeks at a time, and it smelled slightly of dust and of something else more subtle and mysterious. It was a musty smell, sweet but sad, like the smell of decaying rose petals, and Amy thought of it as seeping up from bundles of old letters and from tissue-wrapped packets of things like baby dresses and wedding veils.
    The furniture that had been exiled to the storeroom was old and out of style. Some of it had once belonged to the Hunter family, but much of it had come from the Fairchild parsonage. There was a desk that had belonged to Amy’s grandmother, a lady’s desk, carved and ornamented, but too small to be useful to Aunt Abigail, who had farm records to keep and household business to take care of. Someday, Aunt Abigail said, the desk would be Amy’s.
    Next to the desk was an ancient rosewood dresser with a marble top and next to it a clumsy old highboy with many glass-paned doors. Then came rocking chairs, bookcases, lamps, and whatnot cabinets and, all along one wall, a row of large boxes and old-fashioned