Chapter 1, Section 1

Cassie was in her closet again.

It was a small closet, five feet wide and three feet deep, but it was lined with cedar, and a single lightbulb in the center of its ceiling gave it a golden hue. Cassie had been in a lot of closets over the years, and cramped as it was, this one ranked as one of the best. It didn't stink, for one thing. There had been no mothballs in the corners or mouldering boxes left by previous tenants to find when they'd moved in. No scarred and tattered wallpaper made the walls unfit for her purposes, either. That first day she'd swept a fine layer of dust off the floor and that was it; the closet was ready. As she'd stood in the cramped, tangy-smelling empty space, she'd felt a rush of adrenaline; maybe this time would be different - maybe this time she would get to finish what she started.

Now a bead of sweat ran down her spine, tickling her skin, and Cassie reached around to scratch her back with the pointed wooden end of her paintbrush. It was August and stifling in the little windowless room, but she barely noticed the heat; she was too intent on the wall that framed the closet door. As she shifted her weight, her clothes swayed on their metal hangers behind her and she bumped the suitcase laying on the floor in which she stored her underthings. Biting back a sigh of frustration - the room really was small - she moved again, considering the wall before her.

There; at the upper right of the door - that's where it would fit.

She dipped the brush into a pot of rubber cement and painted the wall, then pressed a picture she'd torn from a magazine into place among the rest. Stepping back, she bumped into the wire hangers again. She spun around and grabbed them, then tilted her head to the side and listened to make sure she could hear the patter of water on the enamel tub in the bathroom across the hall. Yes;  her mother, Renee, was still in the shower; she had time for one more.

The dining-room shot, she thought; the one with the family seated around the table. She pulled a new magazine out from under the clothes in her suitcase and opened it to a page with the corner turned down. She liked the curtains in that one - thick, brocaded fabric that hung in folds so deep you could store things in them, a far cry from the plain flat panels Renee reworked to fit the windows in each new house they rented. She glanced back at the wall in satisfaction; it would cover one of the few remaining empty spaces. Her premonition was right; this time she would surely finish covering the wall before they moved.

It's perfect, she thought. It was hard to find pictures like this, ones that conformed to all of her rules. They had to show an entire room. No lettering could mar the image. And if they featured a family, it had to be complete.

She tore it out carefully, but as it separated from the magazine, another page slipped out from behind it and floated to the ground at her feet. Cassie scowled down at it, her mood shifting at once. She should have thrown that one away.

Against her will she retrieved it from the floor, and as soon as her fingers closed around it she knew she would have to find its place on the wall. But not here; not among these happy images. She turned with a sigh, reluctantly pushed the hangers of clothing to one side of the rod, and faced the back of the closet. This was where she put the pictures she didn't want to see, the ones that sprang out at her when she thumbed through her magazines. She didn't mean to cut them out. She didn't want them on her closet wall.

But here they were.

Trees. Oaks, spruces, pines, aspens. Picture overlapped picture until a tangle of thick, green forest seemed to grow from the lower back corner of the closet and spread across the wall like a blossom of mold.

This is the last one, I'm not doing any more, she thought, swiping the rubber cement on the wooden paneling in short, thick strokes. She slapped the page on the wall and moved away to get a better look. A man with a chainsaw stared triumphantly back at her. He stood in a clearing ringed by woods, his foot resting on top of a tree he'd just severed from its stump.

The tree he'd killed.