New Hampshire

New Hampshire provides the setting for two distinct glimpses of Abra Stone’s life: a supervised birthday gathering beside the Saco River and a later moment of solitary deliberation at home. The state’s landscape is not merely a backdrop. A fence separates the Stones’ safe, busy yard from a river considered dangerous to children, while the White Mountains appear beyond Abra’s street as she struggles with what to do next.

Landscape and Setting

At the Stones’ home, the backyard ends at a chain-link fence and a gate secured with a combination padlock. Beyond it, the Saco River runs southeast through Frazier and North Conway before crossing into Maine. In spring, melting snow makes the river wide and turbulent; the local weekly reports at least one drowning each year. The fence may be unattractive, but David Stone and Lucy Stone accept it as a practical boundary between their children and the water.

The wider New Hampshire setting also enters Abra’s view from her bedroom window. In late summer, the White Mountains rise beneath a clear blue sky beyond her street and the Lickety-Split convenience store. This view places her immediate neighborhood within a recognizable regional landscape even as her attention is fixed on a troubling discovery elsewhere.

The Birthday Gathering

Abra’s birthday party fills the backyard with children and adults. The lawn, blossoming apple and dogwood trees, playset, Fun Tunnels, and drifting balloons make the enclosed space a place for play. At least six dozen yellow balloons—Abra’s favorite color—brighten the gathering. Nine children are present, and adults from each family provide ample supervision.

The river remains close, but the children have enough to occupy them on the lawn: they play follow-the-leader, run and roll in the grass, climb, crawl through the tunnels, and bat balloons around. The party’s easy activity depends on the adults’ care and the yard’s boundary; the nearby water, dangerous in the spring, stays outside the children’s play space.

Community and Contrast

On the deck, John Dalton sits with Concetta Reynolds, who wears designer jeans and a World’s Best Great-Gramma sweatshirt and eats birthday cake while he chooses strawberry ice cream. Their conversation turns to the children. Concetta likens the diverse group—six white children, two Black children, and a Korean American baby—to the peaceful community in Edward Hicks’s painting The Peaceable Kingdom. She notes that, over two hours, none has hit or pushed another in anger.

John answers with a more skeptical explanation: the children attend L’il Chums, an expensive daycare whose parents are largely upper-middle-class college graduates. He sees their peaceful behavior as learned from an orderly social environment, not as an uncomplicated sign of childhood innocence. His account gives the backyard gathering a second dimension: the scene is both a family celebration and an observation of how surroundings shape behavior.

Abra’s Neighborhood and the Wider Story

Later, the same New Hampshire landscape surrounds Abra as she tries to decide what to do with information she has recorded about a killing site in Iowa. She has written down the details from a sign, including the ethanol plant, Freeman, Iowa, and its closure. She believes she knows where the victim was killed and buried, but worries that authorities will dismiss her as a child or that contacting them could draw the police to her.

Her mother is preoccupied with Concetta’s illness, and Abra doubts that her father will want to become involved even if he believes her. At the window, she rubs her mouth—a nervous habit her parents have been trying to break—and looks past the corner store toward the mountains. The quiet neighborhood view contrasts with the grave knowledge she is carrying. In these scenes, New Hampshire holds both the sheltered routines of Abra’s childhood and the ordinary home from which she confronts a danger far beyond the state.