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returned, and with it the birds and the leaves and a planting festival as exuberant as the harvest extravaganza. Amanda West took second prize in the bake-off; the 4-H club showed off its wares, its hand-churned butter and free-range goats; the high school’s ag class staged the annual slaughter and barbecue of its chickens. Grace Tuck rode the rickety Ferris wheel and threw up behind the custard stand. Daniel Ghent watched Milo’s Cub Scout troop perform a knot-tying demonstration; he watched from a distance, and left before the parents crowded the muddy field to congratulate their precocious offspring.
    Eventually, though it never seemed possible, Eisenhower High School emptied its hallways for the summer and a lucky few, with a fanfare of halfhearted speeches and tossed caps, got to leave it for good. Jeremiah West was not among them, but – small consolation – at least got to join the rest of the team’s rising seniors in the ritual streaking across the stage.
    Summer was, traditionally, too hot for traditions. Summer was for sitting on porches sipping lemonade – or talking wistfully of a time when summer meant sitting on porches sipping lemonade, when there were fewer bills to pay and no DVDs to watch, and of how in this mythical past, this rustic paradise of outhouses and unlocked doors, life had been good. Summer was when the gossip that had been fermenting all year was finally ready to pour. Tempers rose with the heat; grudges defrosted; things got interesting. This summer was no different, except that as August approached and blanched the town with its white heat and its memories of the killing day, the rumors took on a new intensity. It was as if the murders themselves had become Oleander tradition. Any argument, any lovers’ quarrel, any innocent encounter in the new drugstore, catty-corner to the old, carried the seeds of potential violence. Surely it was only a matter of time before one would bloom. People waited; people watched. People whispered: about the source of Mayor Mouse’s campaign funding, about the Tucks’ failing marriage and the way that girl of theirs wandered with no apparent supervision, turning up in the strangest places at all hours of day and night. They noted, with their communal eye, the way
that
man
looked at his stepdaughter Jule, who seemed always to be by his side. They knew the King girl had turned into a bigger Jesus nut than ever, as they knew about the restraining order Milo Ghent’s mother had taken out against his father and half brother – and about the way Daniel had taken to lurking in bushes, just to catch a forbidden glimpse.
    They never stopped talking about the murders, but by the time summer had fully settled itself over the town, they’d learned to once again talk of other things, the pettier the better. Somehow, the town talked itself back to life.
    They never talked of Cassandra Porter.
     
    There had been no trial for the sole surviving Oleander killer. Cassandra Porter, who could not remember her crime, pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. The DA offered a deal: conviction with a sentence of twenty years to life, to be served not in a maximum-security prison but the slightly cushier state mental hospital.
    She supposed she should have wanted to fight. Her lawyer had explained: If it was true she’d lapsed into some kind of fugue state, an insanity with the life span of a fruit fly, then she was innocent. At least in the eyes of the law. (If, on the other hand, she’d purposefully squeezed the air out of Owen Tuck’s lungs… if she, Cassandra Porter, being of sound mind and body, had held the boy in her hands and ended him, with malice aforethought, for reasons her brain now contrived not to remember? She was, as they say, guilty as sin.) These were the issues her lawyer walked her through as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from the leap she couldn’t remember taking. Floating on a morphine cloud, dizzy with the pain of twelve