Beyond the town bounds, the road climbed. Unpainted houses held rusting cars in their slanted yards, and mangy dogs barked and barked as the three Mackenzies trudged past. Then came a stretch of pure woods, and a hilltop intersection where a Dairy Queen ice-cream stand had been abandoned. He never learned where the other two roads, the one straight ahead and the one to the left, went. His parents would turn right and head back downhill, through more woods, past the spiky sandstone wall of the Pomeroy estate. Once or twice Owen heard the sound of tennis balls back and forth, and the splashing of a swimming pool, but usually nobody seemed to be home. The lives of the rich were hard to imagine; they involved a lot of not being home. On the other side of the road, on the upper edge of Willow, the cemetery appeared, its granite stones, pale pink and pale gray, sharp-cornered and bald in the sunlight. The road, heading farther downward, became Washington Street, a street of houses with narrow side yards and terraced front lawns, which after three blocks gave way to the commerce at the center of Willow: the movie theatre, the savings bank, a bicycle shop, and, at the five corners where the street met the Alton Pike, Eberly’s Drug Store, the Lutheran church, the Hess Funeral Home, Borough Hall with its little park, and Leinbach’s Oyster House, a restaurant on the first floor of the old sandstone building that had once been the inn called The Willow. Owen’s heart always lifted, and the weight fell off his legs, when he and his parents would come into this downtown, which he walked through every school day, and which he could reconstruct store by store, house by house, in his mind’s eye sixty years afterwards.

It was on this Cedar Top walk, one day, just after the forsaken ice-cream stand, that Owen had noticed in the grit at the side of the road a milky-white thing like a collapsed balloon; it had the glossy look of a toy. He bent down to look closer and his mother, behind and above him, said, in the voice she reserved for extreme urgency, “Don’t touch it!”

What could be the danger? It was not alive but her voice suggested it somehow was. “What is it?” he asked.

“Something batsy,” she said.