They passed by the open door of an immaculate if slightly impersonal master bedroom and went to a closed door near the end of the hall. Allison opened this, and Stevie followed her into a darkened, smaller room that seemed to be a guest bedroom, except there was no bed. The walls were lined with packed bookshelves, and there were dressers and a rocking chair, but nowhere to sleep.

Allison opened the curtains, and the room was suddenly airy and bright.

“Light can damage things,” Allison said. “That’s why I keep it so dark.”

With the sun pouring in, Stevie had a better look at where she was. While this room was neat as a pin, nothing here was curated or impersonal. Every surface was absolutely full of old paperbacks and textbooks, yearbooks, notebooks, photo albums. One entire set of shelves was filled with vinyl record albums, and a small portable turntable sat next to them. There were white archival boxes, and colored and clear bins, and wicker bins—everything precisely labeled: MAKEUP, HAIR SUPPLIES, JEWELRY, SCHOOL SUPPLIES, MISCELLANEOUS DRESSER CONTENTS. . . dozens of these. Sitting around and among these things were knickknacks: a stuffed Snoopy doll, a pink rotary telephone, a small figure of a monkey, a lumpy pottery bud vase. And all over, there were turtles—a large stuffed one; a pillow; a print; an oversize ceramic figurine of one, as big as a stuffed animal.

“My parents kept all of Sabrina’s things in boxes,” she said. “They tucked them away in the attic. When I got them, I brought them out and gave them a space of their own. I know it may be odd to keep these things, but it comforts me. I come in here sometimes to sit and read. I feel close to her in here.”

This room was Sabrina Abbott, right down to her hairbrush and her erasers. She looked at the spines of the books. Sabrina was certainly a serious reader—there were two shelves of paperback classics, textbooks on psychology and history, with a few romance novels sprinkled in for good measure.

“Part of me has always wanted to organize them by color and size,” Allison said. “But I’m a librarian. I can’t do that. Here . . .”

She indicated the top shelf of one of the bookshelves, which had about half a dozen small notebooks. She took one of these down carefully. There was a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock on the cover, along with 1977 in large cartoon print.

“Her last diary,” Allison said, opening it with care. “The last one I have, anyway. Look at this.”

She laid a hand over the actual entry, leaving a list exposed at the bottom of the page:

Piano: 1 hour 15 minutes

Calc: 50 minutes

German: 45 minutes

Physics: 30 minutes

History: 45 minutes

“She wrote it down every night,” Allison said. “How much homework she did that day. I’ve read these diaries so many times I have them memorized.”

She withdrew the book and set it back in its place on the shelf.