Horowitz, Leah: So the pallbearers came to take Holling, and his father stood. They all stood. And when Holling passed him, his father put his hands on the casket and began to howl. Horrible, horrible hollow howls that could not be stopped, because there was no comfort. The pallbearers stood still. They waited a long time.

Even through the Blank, Meryl Lee heard the howls. She thought she would hear them the rest of her life. She thought they would echo in the place where her heart had been, forever. She did not go to the graveside. She could not go to bear those last words, to bear that thud of earth, to see Holling. She could not go.

Her parents drove her home. In the next weeks, Danny Hupfer and Mai Thi came over, and Mrs. Baker, and some of the other teachers from Camillo Junior High, and even Mr. Goldman, but Meryl Lee did not leave the house much that whole month. Everything she saw was without Holling, and the howls echoed in her empty chest. She could not go onto his block, she could not pass that Woolworth's and its lunch counter where they had had a Coke, she could not walk down Lee Avenue, and she could not, could not, could not go near Camillo Junior High. She could not. Because if she did, then the Blank would change. It would become a hole, a dizzying white hole, and she would fall into it, and she would be the empty hole where the howling echoes rolled around, and she had already come close, very close, to falling in.

So in September, her parents made phone calls to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls. She would have a new start, her parents said. A whole new routine, her parents said. She would meet so many new friends. She would become so accomplished. That's what the headmistress had promised. Meryl Lee would become so accomplished. And she had never before lived so close to the sea. The Maine ocean would be beautiful, they said.

And Meryl Lee knew that Holling Hoodhood had never been to the coast of Maine. He had never been there. And nothing familiar would be in Maine. Not Lee Avenue. Not Camillo Junior High. Not Goldmans Best Bakery. Not anything. Maybe that was where she should go.

Her mother packed her clothes for her. Her father packed some books for her. They bought her St. Elene's regulation uniforms: six white shirts, three green and gold plaid skirts, two green and gold sweaters, and two green blazers with the gold St. Elene's cross insignia. They packed them all carefully into her suitcase. Then on the day, they packed her into the car.

On the ride up to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy, it rained all across New York. And the whole way through Connecticut. And every mile of Massachusetts. New Hampshire and southern Maine were nothing but gray drizzle. They stopped at a hotel in Brunswick overnight, and it poured.

The next morning, Meryl Lee leaned her head against the hotel window and stared at the blurred world outside. None of them spoke.

Chapter Two

1967 to '68

No one on the peninsula knew how long Matt Coffin had been around. A year? How old was he? Hard to tell. 13, 14? He was that kid who lived down by the shore, that kid who never went to school, that kid who skipped rocks into the waves at sunset, that kid who was always by himself. That kid who never let anyone get near him.

He did live by the shore, in an old lobster shack left behind by Captain Cobb after he died.