After a moment, Mary Ellen reappeared with two leather binders and an armful of documents in plastic sheeting. She gave us an appraising look before setting it all down on the glass top. She turned to me and said, “I need someone to sign out the materials before I can let you peruse them.” Her eyes slid to Jess and Melissa before she pushed the sign-out sheet and a pen in my direction.

Stifling a laugh at the fact that Mary Ellen deemed my friends untrustworthy, I wrote my name with a flourish, and then Jess and Melissa gathered the materials and followed me to a long wooden table in the center of the research room. The research room was in what looked to be one of the former chapels of the church. It was markedly cooler than the rest of the building, and the stone walls extended up to the ceiling, giving the space the feeling of a cave. I didn’t want to think about what kind of as-yet-undiscovered species of poisonous spiders lurked in the corners.

We spread the materials out onto the table and stood, looking down at them from a high vantage point.

“Look at this: 1965,” Melissa said as she tapped one of the documents. We leaned in and squinted, looking for Whispering Farms. Winchester in 1965 looked nothing like it did today. The houses were interspersed with large swaths of farmland, and present-day subdivisions with hundreds of houses were then unbroken squares on the map.

I ran my finger along Orchard Road, the main thoroughfare to Whispering Farms.

“Look! There’s us.” Our houses were among the first to be built in our neighborhood—that much we knew—but it was startling to see only ten houses clustered around makeshift cul-de-sacs and the rest of the map as empty space.

“Not much has changed except for Melissa’s.” Jess’s, Liz’s, and my houses were all essentially the same in the photograph, save for a few trees removed and the front porch addition on Jess’s house. Melissa’s original house had been torn down and a new one built a couple of years before she moved in.

“Now you see why the builder tore it down,” Melissa said. The original house was a small ranch, built like an army barrack. A perfect one-story rectangle surrounded by an enormous yard.

“Here’s an older map,” Jess said as she slid another toward us. “Nineteen forty-two.”

Held next to the one from 1965, the map from 1942 showed none of our houses. The land was completely open and more populated with trees in dark, shadowy clusters.

“Hey, there, apple trees,” Jess said. We had heard from the older residents in our subdivision that everything around us used to be part of an apple orchard, although that was the extent of their knowledge. That was where Orchard Road got its moniker.