She runs for the woods. Soon, but it doesn’t feel soon, she’s skirting the meadow of the family graveyard. The pink hibiscus is already budding on the iron railing. Mother used to tell her that those flowers were gowns the fairies wore when they went to fairy balls; the bare rings in the forest where grass never grows, their ballrooms. Rosalie wanted to pluck the blooms, waltz them in pairs in her hands, but Father said no. No trees felled nor flowers picked on the farm. In his presence, at least, the older children follow these rules scrupulously. The younger will turn out less compliant.

Mother believes that her dead children are all eating from golden plates and flying about on silken wings, but Rosalie knows otherwise. She feels the breeze-like fingers of the three children buried nearby. They touch her face, her neck, whisper excitedly about this living thing on the path. They weave about her, web her in, whispering about the things that she evokes in their memories: churned butter honey biscuits warm milk bonnet ties when the wind blows little redcap little redbreast perhaps when you’ve taken a nap your little white cheek will be red didn’t you ever dream of a house up on a treetop the sea you can never be sure of it.

Stars, hide your fires, they tell her. Don’t leave us here.

How shocked everyone would be to learn that the child who consorts with ghosts is Rosalie. She does this so that Mother won’t have to.

Now comes a part of the path so dangerous that the ghosts don’t follow. Rosalie has seen strange men here before, here where the path and the forest meet. She’s seen dark figures draw back into the shadows as she passes, hide behind the largest tree, a massive trunk all sheathed in lichen. Maybe it was only one man and one time. She knows that people come to the forest to hunt. Sometimes the baying of hounds can be heard, or the crack of a rifle, sometimes a tree is hit and bleeds its golden sap, but no hunter would have felt the need to duck away at the sight of her. She gestures for Rolla to stay close, but Rolla ignores this and Rosalie can’t risk raising her voice, calling attention to herself.

A few months back, Grandfather had taken her aside for a warning. Now that she’s growing up, he’d said, she should know some things. Some hard truths. The forest is a place where girls disappear, and not just the pretty ones. Then things are done to them, the things all the more terrifying for being so vague. He mentions Alex Verdan, who farms nearby, and whom every child in Harford County, boy and girl, black and white, has been warned to stay away from. Not that she’d meet Mr. Verdan in the forest, but someone like Mr. Verdan. Why, Rosalie wonders, was she ever allowed to play there?