"Staying here was going to be like living in a junkyard," Liz notes upon arrival at her aunt and uncle's home. Her uncle is a renovator who spends more time renovating other people's property than his own.

Thus the front yard of his home on the family farm is littered with debris. Nearby are "the remains of outbuildings and barns that looked, to Liz's city eyes, like the skeletons of ancient behemoths, vast wooden rib cages lifting from the fields to towering heights." Wooden rib cages will appear again as Liz learns that in addition to a great deal of junk, the farm harbors some very old, very odd residents. That she sees the barns as rib cages may be why she can see and hear the fiddler, who views them the same way.