Chapter 1 Summary

A girl says that when she was ten, she thought that only people she didn't know died. She came to this conclusion while spending her summer holiday at a house on Fort Road. Usually, the family lived on Dickenson Bay Street in a house her father built with his own hands. They were staying on Fort Road because their real house needed its roof repaired.

From the yard of the Fort Road house, the girl could see a cemetery in the distance. She didn't know what it was until she asked her mother what those specks of people were doing out there. Sometimes people would come early in the morning and her mother told her they buried children in the mornings.

The girl is afraid of dead people because she never knew when they might turn up. Sometimes they would appear in a...