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climb back into bed and curl up with the cats and wait for daylight to make sense of things. But daylight wouldn’t bring sense, only the Drop. She thought of her old friend Gregor. Annie had been on her way to his house with a gift for his ninth birthday: a rock impressed with a bird’s footprint; some kind of gull, she thought, though Gregor would know for certain. A wagon had passed her going the opposite way, and she remembered thinking it odd that they had put up the rain cover in clear weather. When she reached his house she found his mother standing alone in the yard, weeping. Later, over dinner, Aunt Prim told her, “I have bad news for you. The kinderstalk have eaten that friend of yours. Last night. They ate his shoes, everything. Now, no crying. It’s a fact of life we must all accept.”
    â€œBut I saw …,” Annie began, but Page caught her eye and shook her head.
    Later, Annie lay with her head in Page’s lap. “Did the kinderstalk really eat Gregor?”
    â€œMonsters got him, I can tell you that much. But not you. I won’t let them get you.”
    Annie still had the gull rock, pocketed in the hem of her dress. It kept the skirt from blowing around in strong winds.

    She would need to be ready before her morning chores. And because she had never, in all her life, managed to wake up earlier than Aunt Prim, that meant she needed to be ready tonight. The only food she could find was a handful of dusty rinkle nuts that her aunt had been threatening to cook for a month. Now: money, rifle, and then the last, the most important, thing.
    Of course the trunk was locked, but Annie hadn’t lived twelve years in this house without learning a thing or two. Aunt Prim kept the key in
The Book of Household Virtues
, tucked between page 786, “Vinegar in the Use of Removing Blood Stains,” and page 787, “Vinegar in the Use of Curing Barn-foot.” When Page was alive, Aunt Prim used to make them sit after dinner and listen to recipes, medical cures, or worst of all, favorite sayings:
    Hard work and no complaints turns chaff into wheat
.
    Quiet mouse gets the apple; noisy mouse chews the pip
.
    If a cow wanders into the yard, be quick to shut the gate
.
    Always, before she closed the book, Aunt Prim turned to the page in the back where she wrote down the names ofchildren eaten by kinderstalk: Phoebe Tamburlaine was the first, followed by Cowley Crawford, Meg Winters, Walter Rout, and on and on until the last, Gregor Pepin. Annie couldn’t resist looking at the page now. To her surprise, there were more than a dozen new names added after Gregor’s. Beside each name Aunt Prim had printed the date of death and another number. Gregor’s number was nine, the same as most of the children listed before him. But the numbers beside the children listed after him got smaller and smaller, and the dates of their disappearances closer and closer together. The last name was Minnie Wythe, taken a month past, age three.

    The trunk was nailed to the floor at the foot of her aunt and uncle’s four-poster. Aunt Prim slept in the narrow slice of bed between Uncle Jock and the wall. Uncle Jock’s huge feet, kicked free from the blankets, gave off a smell of wet wool. Annie knelt in front of the trunk and eased the lid open. Linen. But underneath the linen was hidden a smaller chest, tightly buckled with leather straps. She had seen it once before.
    Aunt Prim had stepped out to the privy; Uncle Jock was off cutting.
    â€œAnnie, quick, I want to show you something.” Page was kneeling over the trunk, her face flushed.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œProof.”
    The ringstone was beautiful, most of it a soft brilliantpink, with some stones reflecting mauve and green tones. Colored stone was less valuable than white, but Annie thought it much nicer to look at.
    â€œProof of what?” Annie whispered.
    â€œThat Uncle Jock is as bad as we think. There’s