Harvey is obsessed with all the local scary or weird stories his older brother and kids at school have told him—and doesn’t every town have them?—the underlying message always, It could happen to you. There’s the Beast of Bladenboro and the Glencoe Munchkins and the maniac under the bed. “It was all just terrible,” Harvey has said about the Beast of Bladenboro, sounding more like someone sixty years his senior. “It was awful, and it kilt everybody’s dogs so there wouldn’t be nobody to bark when it come after people.” They had had this conversation more times than Shelley can count—Harvey worried that the Beast of Bladenboro would try to kill Peggy, and that it might be the maniac under the bed, because both of them killed dogs. Every time Shelley told him that the Beast of Bladenboro had attacked before she was born and had not attacked since, and that it was probably a wild bobcat or something, and the maniac under the bed is completely made up to scare people, and the Glencoe Munchkins were poor children born with terrible deformities who couldn’t walk and were left to sit on the porch all day while their parents worked and people teased and mistreated them. “Something we would never do,” she stressed. She told him this, and his hand instinctively went up to his mouth and lingered there. “It’s not a scary story,” she said. “It’s a heartbreaking story. It’s a story about people being cruel and hateful, and we have more than enough of those.”

“People teased the Munchkins. They threw rocks at them,” Harvey whispered, his own hand curled into a fist. “And I can’t stop thinking about them.”

“It’s okay, Harvey!” Shelley tries to lead him to other topics he is interested in that will make him laugh. He loves tiny horses and Ninja Turtles and knock-knock jokes. Orange you glad I didn’t say banana again? Yes, yes, indeed I am. Harvey is fascinated by animal droppings and has been since Brent took him to some nature hike in the mountains, where they met someone known as the Scatman Explorer who had a booth with all kinds of samples; Harvey came home and surprised her with some earrings made of petrified raccoon turds and porcupine quills; Roadkill Jewelry, it was called, and on the card there was a photo of the cute little woman named Virginia who had made them. Harvey was barely four but still talks about it all like it was yesterday.