Her mother stared at Stevie grimly.

“The woman who made these was named Frances Glessner Lee,” Stevie went on. “It used to be that when someone died, there was no set method for examining the body and the scene. All kinds of people would be sent who had no formal training, and they’d move things, or they’d guess at what happened, or they’d contaminate the scene. Sometimes people would be accused of murder when it was an accident and the other way around. So this woman . . .”

Stevie flipped to the photo of the grandmotherly woman with the old-fashioned glasses and bun who was peering lovingly into a skull.

“. . . was the heiress to a tractor fortune, and she was friends with the chief medical examiner in Boston. He told her about all the trouble he was having with how bodies and scenes were being treated, and all of the things you could learn about a death from the scene and the body. She basically established forensics in the United States. Then she made these miniatures, each depicting an unexplained death. Each one is a contained mystery. They still use them to train detectives.”

Her mother walked over to the counter, shaking her head. Stevie observed her surreptitiously.

“I wish you’d get another hobby, but . . .”

The sentence was left unfinished.

Stevie flipped back to the kitchen scene and let a few moments tick by while she waited for her mother to speak again.

“What are you up to this afternoon?”

“I was going to read,” Stevie said.

“It’s a gorgeous day. You could get some sun.”

Stevie hmmmmed and leaned in close to the picture of the death kitchen.

“I got a note,” she said casually, “from a guy who owns a summer camp. He read about me, what I did at Ellingham. He asked if I wanted a job working there as a counselor. I guess he thought I’d be an interesting addition, you know, something extra for campers.”

“A summer camp?” Stevie’s mom said. “You?”

“I know,” Stevie said. “Right?”

Stevie had never precisely been the outdoor type. They had camped once as a family, when Stevie was twelve and the neighbors down the street invited them to come on a week’s trip to a state park. Stevie spent most of the week huddled under their RV awning trying to read, while her parents and the other family drank iced teas and beers and talked about television shows and what was “wrong with America.” No one could swim in the lake because apparently there was some kind of brain-eating bacteria in it. Periodically someone would encourage her to walk through the woods or try out the mountain bike. Stevie viewed these offers with grave suspicion and declined. Stevie couldn’t listen to anything or talk to anyone because her parents had taken her phone in order for her to experience some “offline time,” which she had been anyway because they were in the middle of nowhere with no real signal and no Wi-Fi.