“Well.” Mrs. Donoghue smiles again. “I should go.” She embraces Taylor first, then Willa. “Finley would be so proud of you. Have a wonderful summer.”

“Okay, so the first clue is ‘start here,’ which is obviously Sandusky.” Willa pull a notebook and a pen from her backpack and unfolds a small map of the United States to compare against the list. “And ‘music is good for the soul. . . .’ ”

Taylor finishes the thought. “That sounds like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Do you think she wanted to go there?”

“Possibly,” Willa says. “But I was thinking that she might have written these clues after she realized she wouldn’t be coming with us. These might be places she thought we would like to go.”

Taylor is quiet for a moment, then sniffles as her tears begin again. Willa’s conscience prods her to be kind, but she refuses to offer any comfort. Every time Willa starts to feel sorry for Taylor, awful memories bubble to the surface. She can still hear Taylor screaming at her in front of the entire sailing team, calling Willa a backstabber and a friend-stealing bitch. Willa weathered those insults without flinching because they weren’t true, but she still gets mad when she remembers how Taylor called her trailer trash.

Willa and her mom had been living in Greenfield Village at the time, which sounds like a tidy little mobile home park with tiny squares of green grass and smiling neighbors. There were a few friendly senior citizens who lived in the park, as well as some kids that Willa played with after school, but mostly living in Greenfield Village was like living in an episode of Cops. More than once Willa had been awakened by red and blue lights flashing on her bedroom wall.

The thing is, Willa can shake off being called poor. It’s as much a fact as having brown eyes or being right-handed. But poor carries the implication that someday your status can change; trash suggests that if the bottom of the barrel is right beneath you, that’s exactly where you belong.

Taylor never apologized. She pretended she never said it and—for Finley’s sake—Willa pretended she never heard it. Now, as Taylor wipes her tears with the sleeve of her T-shirt again, Willa knows Finley would expect her to be the mature one, but instead of offering sympathy, she says, “The third clue is ‘make time for wonder.’ ”

“That has to be Niagara Falls,” Taylor says. “You know how weird she was about that place.”