Forward I should say up front: Macomb, Illinois is a real place. If you’ve driven through west-central Illinois, you may have passed through it. The courthouse square is real. The college on the hill is real, more or less, though I’ve changed a few things about it. The Burlington line still runs where I put it. The people are not real. Clara Bell, Harold Whitcomb, everyone in this book who does something brave or something terrible or something in between—I made them up. If anyone in Macomb thinks they recognize a neighbor in these pages, they don’t. That’s not how this works. What I did try to get right was the year itself. 1942 in a small Illinois town wasn’t just war bond posters and scrap drives, though it was that too. It was also a town figuring out who got believed and who didn’t, long before anybody in this story drowns or disappears. I didn’t want that to sit in the background. I wanted it to be the reason things happen the way they do. Clara collects broken things and makes something out of them. That idea followed me around more than I expected it to while I was writing this. Not everything broken in this book gets fixed. I didn’t think it would be honest to pretend otherwise. Thank you for reading it. — R. Vance Osmon