The tall sentinel elms around the school block were gone, of course, and no trees had been planted in their place. The tiny houses on the square—all built after 1960—looked exposed and vulnerable under the black sky.

There were more gaps in the rows of homes facing the former schoolyard. The Somerset place next to Dale’s old home was just gone, not even its foundation remaining. Across the street from the Somersets’, Mrs. Moon’s tidy white home had been bulldozed into a gravel lot. His friend Kevin’s family home—a ranch house that had seemed modern and out of place in 1960—was still there on its slight rise of ground, but even in the dark Dale could see that it was unpainted and in need of repair. Both of the grand Victorian homes north of Kevin’s house were gone, replaced by a short dead-end street with a few new homes—very cheap—crowded where the woods had once started.

Dale continued slowly east past Second Avenue, stopping where Depot Street ended at First. Mike O’Rourke’s home still stood. The tiny gray-shingled house looked just as it had in 1960, except for the rear addition that obviously had taken the place of the outhouse. The old chickenhouse where the Bike Patrol had met was gone, but the large vegetable garden remained. Out front, staring sadly across First Avenue at the harvested fields, the Virgin Mary still held out her hands, palms outward, watching from the half-buried bathtub shrine in the front yard.

Dale had seen no trick-or-treaters. All of the homes he had passed had been dark except for the occasional porch light. Elm Haven had few streetlights in 1960 and now seemed to have none at all. He had noticed two small bonfires burning in yards along Broad, and now he saw the remains of another fire—untended, burned down to orange embers, sparks flying in the strong wind—in the O’Rourke side yard. He did not recall bonfires being lighted for Halloween when he was a boy here.