The next morning, I found the strange jar Penny had mentioned seeing on the patio. It was in the morning. I had woken up early. I hadn't been able to sleep well for the past few weeks, and Grandpa's weird mutterings had sort of floated around in my skull all night, causing me to wake up at various black hours and wonder where I was.

Penny was sleeping, looking like a ghost with her pale skin and dark hair splayed across her pillow. I didn't want to wake her up, so I'd gotten dressed and left the room, secretly hoping that neither Grandpa nor Great Grandma was awake. I was partially lucky—they were awake; I could hear them moving around in their part of the house (the other two bedrooms were on the opposite side of the kitchen as the living room and our room), but they weren't anywhere I could see them. Then I'd quietly gone out the front door and into the bright Minnesota morning sunshine. The weather was colder here, I could tell. Even though it was about seventy degrees at present, that was cool for late August weather; I wondered what the winters were like and decided I didn't really want to find out.

The night before, at dinner, Great Grandma had given me and Penny a bunch of advice that I'd found a little unsettling. "Don't go out into the tall grass," she'd said. "Tall grass hides snakes. So does the pond out by the silo. Lots of weeds and things . . . don't go near the water. There's the old house about half a mile down the road. It's on my property, but you don't want to go there. They never finished the place. House is full of holes. It's abandoned. There's no grain in the silo—no need to worry about much there; just stay out of it. In fact, I would just stay around the house. This farm's got a lot on it, and I don't have the time to care for it. I can't promise what is or isn't out there."

If she'd been trying to freak me out or make me more depressed about being there, she'd done a great job.

Still, in the morning sunlight, I wasn't afraid of much. So I went out onto the patio, where one of the dogs from yesterday was lounging. He perked up when I stepped outside but I shushed him so he wouldn't bark. I didn't want to see anybody right now. I just wanted to be alone.

I didn't know the dog's name, but it was the four-legged one—the one I'd thought had some sort of tumor or wart on its head. When I looked him over, though, I didn't see the thing anymore, and in spite of my former hesitation, I began to scratch him behind his ears and under his chin. Maybe he wasn't so unfriendly after all.

The jar Penny had mentioned was glass—the kind people preserved jam and other things in. I didn't know how I knew it was a preserves jar—I must have had some memory of my Great Grandmother's preserves from a past visit. In any case, the jar was on the patio table, and its contents were glittering in the sunlight. At first, I couldn't tell what the jar held. Whatever was inside looked like an odd mass of pearly yellow and bluish-brown marbles, floating close together in some liquid. The closer I got to the table, though, the more cautious I began to feel. And when I reached the jar and picked it up, held it in my hand, I realized that it wasn't full of marbles but of bloated bugs—ticks, to be exact. If I looked close, I could see their black heads and legs sticking out of their blood-fat bodies . . . blood. They were filled with blood. Squirrel blood, people blood, dog blood . . . whatever kind of blood.

I whipped the thing back onto the table. What sort of weirdness was this? Who preserved bloated ticks? I wanted to throw up. Wanted to wash my hands with soap and water, but that would mean going inside, and I didn't want to risk seeing anyone else. So I jogged away from the patio and into the dirt driveway.

To the right of the house was a carport. Great Grandma kept a maroon Cadillac in there. I didn't know if she drove or not. I wondered whether she was too old. Or if it was too old. That car looked ancient. Behind the carport was a small, one-story, square building. There were some windows in it, but they were too high up for me to see into them. As I continued my exploration, I found the door to the place and peeked through its four-pane window. All I could really see were a bunch of shelves—shelves with china and jars and canisters, a big table in the middle of the room with tools of various sorts scattered across it. It looked really dim and dirty inside. I thought about going in. My hand went inadvertently to the doorknob, but I found it locked.

All of a sudden, as I stood there, I felt as if someone were watching me from behind, and my reflexes spun me around to find Penny—just Penny, thank goodness—standing there.

"You scared the heck out of me," I admitted, relieved.

"Sorry. I saw you come over here. I have the key for it." She nodded toward the shed.

"You do? Why?"

"Great Grandma just let me have it, when I asked her about it."

It had never occurred to me that Penny might have been interested in exploring anything. She passed me by and went to the door, retrieving a key from her jeans and fitting it into the lock. It clicked open at once, and the door opened outward with an ages-old groan, the sort you might be afraid of in a dark, empty house. But this was a sunny day, and Penny was there, so in we went without giving it another thought.

What we found inside was not impressive. There were the things we'd seen from the window—nothing much there. And to the right, which had been blocked from view, was a floor-to-ceiling cabinet that, when opened, revealed a bunch of china. All sorts of cups, plates, tea pots, even spoons and knives, vases, and other odds and ends we couldn't identify the use of sat in half-painted array on the five or six shelves there. It occurred to me that all of it was hand-painted, most likely by Great Grandma. It was a hobby of hers. Selecting a random piece and examining it revealed to me her initials in gold, on the bottom, and my theory was confirmed.

"Did you know Great Grandma painted this kind of stuff?"

Penny looked at me with her large eyes. "Yes. I figured that out when I saw her stuff inside. I think all of this stuff was unfinished."

I frowned. "It's been sitting here a long time. Look at the dust on it."

"Hmm. Yeah. I bet she has a hard time painting anymore."

"Help me with that box," I said, pointing to a large one up high. I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach it. "Just stand there, in case it falls. Can you catch it?" I asked Penny, already trying to scrabble my fingers around the edge of it, not really considering that her ability to catch it would depend on what was inside. Just as I began to edge it off the shelf, some giant-seeming shape plummeted down on top of me, shrieking like a demon. I didn't even have the chance to scream, as my heart about stopped, and I fell hard onto the ground with the box tumbling on top of me.

Fortunately, the box had some old quilts in it, or I might have been seriously hurt.

"Kitty!" Penny exclaimed in joy, much to my annoyance.

"What is a stupid cat doing in here?" I barked, getting to my feet and rubbing my behind. "She nearly killed me!"

"Come on, Rob! Pet her. You scared her."

"I scared her? Oh, poor cat." I refused to look at that giant ball of fluff. My eyes turned to the box, which had spilled over. A couple of filthy old blankets lay on the ground. As I put them back in, I noticed that an old framed photo had been wrapped up inside one of them; fortunately, it hadn't broken, so after only a brief glance at it, I rolled it back into the quilt and then into the box.

I sighed. I'd been hoping to find something a little more interesting.

There was a small window in the shed, on the right, where Penny was standing, and a face suddenly appeared in it.

I was so startled I nearly choked on my own spit.

The face belonged to a kid. "What are you doing out here? Don't scare us like that!"

"What're you up to?" he snarled at me like I was trespassing or something.

Penny came out of the shed holding the cat in her arms, absent-mindedly saying, "How did this cat get in the locked shed, Rob?" She spotted the boy. "Oh, hello."

"There's a hole in the wall at the back, cat-sized," he answered her question. "I seen her go in and out lots of times."

The cat leapt down from Penny's arms, accidentally scratching her, and my sister cried out in pain. The fluffball passed me, rubbing my leg, and then stopped in front of the boy, where she stood still and started to hiss, like she was angry.

"What's wrong with her?" I asked, feeling goosebumps prick up on my arms.

"Stupid cat's never liked me."

I stared at the kid, hardly knowing what to say. He was about my height and didn't look too terribly intimidating in stature, but his bright yellow spit of hair and his freckled pug-nose made me wary. He had a canvas tote bag slung over his shoulder and was wearing some homemade knee pads for no apparent reason, seeing as he didn't have either a bike or a skateboard and was wearing sneakers. So I gave him a good scowl and growled right back, "I'm not sure I like you, either."

He sized me up with his eyes. I could tell he was trying to figure me out. He stuck his thumbs in his pockets and strode a few steps toward me, but I held my ground.

After a minute he said, "You're all right."

Inside I sighed relief. "Yeah, so who are you?"

"My name's Jay, and I live over there."

He waved an arm in a huge circle, finger pointing off somewhere behind him, but he kept his eyes on me.

"Then what are you doing over here?" I asked.

"Felt like being here," he said.

That made enough sense to me, so I shrugged. But I didn't know what else to say.

"Well aren't you gonna tell me who you are?" he said after a minute.

I shrugged again. "I guess I could. But I don't plan on staying here too long, so it doesn't really matter."

"Where are you going?"

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, kicked at the gravel. "Oh I don't know. Just not staying here. Probably going back to where I came from, I guess."

"Where's that?"

I rolled my eyes like he was asking too many questions. That's how I kept the upper hand, see. "Just not here, that's all."

He shuffled around a little, looking like he was sorry for bothering me, which was kind of funny. But he didn't go away, and I started feeling a little sorry for him, so I gave in and told him who I was.

"Penny and I—that's my sister, Penny— we're staying over at my Great Grandma's house," I said.

Jay's jaw dropped. "That old raisin is your great grandma?"

"Raisin?"

"Yeah! I call her the raisin, cause she's so wrinkled and everything. Geez, I can't believe that's your great grandma. She's so weird. I hardly ever see her but for when I come over here and hide out on the farm. She says there's snakes and ghost animals and stuff. I've never seen ghost animals, though, and I know what to do if I see a snake. Uh huh, we're all a little scared of her. But that's real crazy she's your grandma."

"Great grandma."

"Yeah."

He was so shocked about my Great Grandma that I didn't feel like mentioning my grandpa after that. I remembered something in what he said. "Who's we?"

"Huh?"

"You said we are all a little scared of her. Who's we?"

Jay grinned. "Oh, just me and the other kids at school."

"What school do you go to?"

"Just the only one that's ever been here. Oxcart Elementary."

I was suspicious then. Elementary school? I narrowed my eyes, cocked my chin up at him. "Just how old are you, anyway?"

Trying to look important, he said, "I'm in the sixth grade!"

"Oh. We'll I'm in the eighth."

"Are you gonna be in school here?"

"Maybe, if I'm still around. I told you I'm not going to be here for too long, though."

Jay rolled his head, which one-upped my eye-roll. "Yeah, yeah, I know. So you wanna go exploring?"

I thought about that for a minute, looking around to see what Penny thought, but she'd wandered back inside long ago. So I said yes. Even though he was just a kid, I didn't have anything else going on. And Jay said he knew what to do about snakes, and I believed him.

He was real funny, Jay. After a while, I saw why he was wearing those kneepads and had that bag. He really meant that he wanted to go exploring. We walked all around that farm, into the spooky, dark old barn and around the big pond (where he said there were water moccasins as long as five yards, and I believed him). We went up to the henhouse, where he got on his knees and crawled through the square hole. There were all sorts of old straw beds in there, and feathers, too, but there definitely weren't any chickens. Jay said he bet foxes got them a long, long time ago. We also went to the gates leading to the fields where cows and horses used to stay. They were just big, overgrown empty stretches of land, now, laying there looking sad, as if they missed the animals. Then we went to the huge silo, which was this super-tall, cylinder-shaped metal building where they used to keep grain. It was huge, and we looked through the little opening down inside it. A ladder led down into its empty depths, but it was kind of far, and there was lots of overgrown grass and stuff down there, so we decided we'd explore it later.

Everywhere we went, Jay crawled around and picked stuff up. He got sticks and rocks and a soda bottle and some pieces of rope—whatever interested him, which was basically any old junk. I didn't ask him any questions about it, because I didn't really care what he did with it.

By the time we made it back to the road we'd started on, he had his bag half-full.

"I gotta go," he said.

I nodded, and then I watched for a minute as he ran off down the road. When he was a ways off, I turned around and walked back to Great Grandma's house. I wondered what Penny had been doing all morning.