Linden Hills

Nedeed’s wife, still locked in the basement, believes that “she wasn’t like these other women; she had coped and they were crazy. They never changed” (204). In a fit of anger, she rips up the women’s books and clothes but, as she does, discovers a photograph album of Priscilla McGuire—another ancestor married to yet another Luther. In each picture, the family is positioned in the same way, with Priscilla’s small son first on her lap then standing alongside her, but as Nedeed’s wife turns the pages and moves through the years, Priscilla’s face becomes more and more obscured by shadow and “what began as a slight gray film was now deepening into a veil” until she had all but disappeared (208).

When Laurel Johnson—or Mrs. Howard Dumont—was young, she spent every summer with her Grandmother Roberta at her tiny house down a “Georgia dirt road” (216). It was there that Laurel first learned to swim and to love water, and she spent each summer in the “sandy pond” in Georgia or learning to love music (218). Soon, Laurel’s swimming kept her away from her grandmother, sent her to Berkeley for college, and then “sent her [Laurel] back a stranger” (227). Now, Laurel works at IBM and lives in a home on Tupelo Drive with her husband Howard Dumont, but something is wrong: “Wrong—she and the house on Tupelo Drive that defied all their efforts to transform it into that nebulous creation called home.