As Enid Gamma walked home from school on the first day of summer break, she chatted happily with her two best friends about upcoming adventures.

“I’ve always imagined how exciting it would be to be embroiled in a whopping great mystery!” Enid enthused.

“How could anything mysterious happen here?” harrumphed Harley Harryson. “Everyone knows everything within minutes in a little village like this.”

“Can you give up being a wet blanket for one minute, Harley?” snapped Susie Spekes. Harley made an ugly face at her.

“Girls,” Enid interjected, “don’t be cross! It’s too beautiful a day! Anyway, I was only daydreaming. Our first adventure can be searching out fairies in the pastures and convincing them to grant us wishes.”

Susie giggled. Harley crossed her arms over her front and shook her curly head disapprovingly, but failed to hide an affectionate smile. The girls then turned their attention to plans for berrying and weaving wildflower wreaths and what they would each bring to their hide-out in the Hollow for afternoon teas.

The afternoon sweltered as the three friends strolled through the filtered sunlight of Cypress Road, where the fields of cane and cotton and rice were hidden behind the towering curtained wall of cypress trees flanking the wide, hard-packed clay path. Not until Enid turned from the road to the footpath that led to her home, Mossy Eaves, was she able to see the large gathering of crows squabbling in her family’s cow pasture. The wonder and thrill she’d basked in with her friends wavered. Which of their cows had died to bring so many scavenging birds to one place? What if it wasn’t a cow at all but dear Uncle Francis, whose heart had been weak of late? Now overcome with dread, Enid clasped her lunch pail in one white hand, hitched up her skirt with the other, and galumphed as fast as she could to where the crows were congregating. There she found neither a cow nor a family member, but the whole Lincoln family - Mr., Mrs., and even baby Harriet - dead, arranged neatly in a circle among the grazing grasses and wildflowers…