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the Bunny Man?”
    “A guy in a rabbit suit who runs around with an axe,chopping up people who get onto his property. People claim he hangs out at the old hospital complex off Pine Road. It’s abandoned now, but it used to be a tuberculosis hospital.”
    “I know that place,” said Fairen. “I’ve driven past it a bunch of times. Scott said it was a mental hospital.”
    “Scott’s a moron. But it doesn’t matter. We can put that part in as a legend, too, since everyone believes it even though it’s bullshit.”
    She folded her hands like a model student and looked down at the list of requirements. “It says we need to have five illustrations. Maybe we can go down there and take some photos. It’d be really cool if we wait until the project is almost due and the trees are all bare and wintery looking.”
    Temple shook his head. “It’s a five-hundred-dollar trespassing fine if you get caught. Plus there’s all kinds of druggies and skinheads and runaways who hide out there.”
    Fairen smiled. “Zach here’s a black belt in judo. He can take ’em on. Or we can ask Scott to come with us. He’s pretty scrappy.”
    Temple groaned. “ Don’t ask Scott. He’ll be dragging us down there every weekend just because he knows his folks would flip out if they knew he was doing it. I don’t care that he’s like that, but he’s not going to pull me down with him.”
    Zach looked at Fairen to see what she would say. He had known these people for only a couple of months, since he had moved to town and started participating in the summer Madrigals concerts at senior centers and music camps. He felt comfortable with Temple and Fairen and her fairly obnoxious friend Kaitlyn, but Scott remained something of a mystery to him. He carried himself like the silverback gorilla of the pack, and perhaps his mother being a teacher was the reason why; on the first day of school, it had taken only minutes for Zach to infer that Scott’s ass was the one to kiss if he had any intentionof fitting in. Scott was a senior, and had been at this school all his life; yet in his Abercrombie khakis and rugby shirts, he looked more like he had been airlifted in from a prep school than raised on brown rice and folk tales. Even so, Zach liked the guy well enough. Not that disliking him seemed to be an option.
    “Listen,” she said, “I just want to take a few photos. If you don’t want to go, fine. Zach and I will go, and I’m sure Scott will be happy to come along.”
    Temple looked to Zach for help.
    “I think it’d be pretty cool,” said Zach. “It’s supposed to be based on Germania, after all. It says in there that they offered human sacrifice. Maybe if we make it real creepy, she’ll think it’s genius.”
    Temple folded his arms against the desk and dropped his head onto them in resignation. Above it, Fairen smiled at Zach. It wasn’t that Zach believed Fairen’s idea was better. On the contrary, he thought it was risky and dangerous, and not in a fun way. But he felt compelled to support her anyway, based on a bit of wisdom taught to him by his dad: never side against a strong woman, because it never ends well.

4
    1964
Mainbach, West Germany
    They lived in a tidy half-timbered home at the end of a country road, there in the rural reaches of Bavaria. Five days a week, sometimes six, Judy’s father climbed into his navy-blue Mercedes sedan and drove to Augsburg Air Base, twenty minutes away by Autobahn. Although he was a civilian, he could have elected for his family to live on base, to have Judy attend the fifth grade at the American school, but John Chandler spurned these things. His daughter was no military brat. He was an expert on the cultures of the Soviet republics, and no expert on culture would wall up his family in cinder-block Americana for two years while the heart of West Germany beat just outside the guard towers.
    The rented house came fully furnished and appointed, with a lovingly tended garden out back and