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Wally held it away from her.
    “It is not fake!” said Beth. “I printed it right off the encyclopedia on the computer.”
    “Some encyclopedia!” said Wally. “It misspelled possession and epidemic.”
    Beth's face began to color. Everyone knew that theone thing Wally Hatford could do well was spell. “And the Shanatee Indians, if there were Indians,” Wally continued, “wouldn't have called it Knob Hill. What kind of an Indian name is that?”
    There was nothing for Beth and Eddie and Caroline to do but laugh.
    “So, okay, we're even. You fell for it, didn't you—the shadows and everything? We had you scared half out of your shorts,” Eddie said.
    “That's part of the story Beth submitted to the short story contest at the library,” Caroline told the boys. “She's good, isn't she? If she wins, she'll get it published in the newspaper.”
    “So you just made the whole thing up?” Wally asked.
    “Totally,” said Beth.
    “There weren't any Shanatee Indians?” asked Peter.
    “Nope.”
    “And all that stuff about shadows is nonsense?” asked Josh.
    “Completely,” said Eddie. “We had you guys hornswoggled, but good!”

Seven

Center Stage
    F or many days, the Hatfords and the Malloys didn't see much of each other. It was almost too hot to go outside. Eddie's baseball games, which were keeping the girls there till the end of summer, almost fizzled because the players were so exhausted by the heat.
    People stayed in their air-conditioned houses or went to the movies or the pool. Beth spent her days at the library, working on her short fantasy story about the make-believe Shanatee Indians and helping to shelve books in her spare time. Whenever the girls were home, there was packing to do, and slowly the drawers and closets were emptying as more and more boxes piled up in the living room, ready for the movers. It was depressing, Caroline thought.
    Twice she had crept into the elementary school when only the custodian was around and had goneinto the empty auditorium and up onstage, where she recited, very softly but with the most dramatic gestures she could think of, the scene for a play or a story of her own.
    What she had to do before she left Buckman, she told herself, was recite the poem “The Raven” from the stage. The whole thing. A few weeks earlier, she had done an Internet search for her name, Caroline Lenore Malloy, wondering if anyone, anywhere, might know of her—if a newspaper might have picked up the story of her being carried down the Buckman River, for example, the day she fell in. With trembling fingers she had typed her name, and she had got thirty-four pages of references. The only problem was that none of them said Caroline Lenore Malloy. They only said Caroline or Lenore or Malloy. But one of those hits was “The Raven,” a poem by Edgar Allan Poe with the name Lenore in it: “… sorrow for the lost Lenore. ”
    Lenore was not a common name. In fact, Caroline had never heard of a single other person with that name. It was this that made her decide she simply had to memorize that poem, and once she had memorized it, she had to recite it somewhere onstage.
    When she found the poem at the library, however, she was discouraged by how long it was. So far she had only memorized the first two stanzas, but she was working on it.
    She had to be careful when she slipped into the school. It wasn't allowed, for one thing. None of the students were allowed inside the building until
    September. Once in a while, she knew, the principal came by, but usually only the custodian was there working—tightening door handles, painting a wall, repairing a desk, changing lightbulbs, getting the old school ready for another year of classes in the fall. Classes without Caroline.
    Caroline would sit in a swing or climb on the monkey bars on the playground until she was sure the custodian was working in another part of the building, far from the auditorium. Then she would slip through the unlocked side