Summary

Chapter 1 – Fair, 2010. Third-person prose narration places Stacey and her family at the Washington County Fair, an annual event in their county where they are again participating in agricultural competitions, including animal showing and cooking. The fair is attended by people living in the area who call themselves “Hoopies … an insider’s name for the hill jacks or hillbillies who live in the borderlands of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia where Appalachia begins” (11).

As Stacey prepares for her day, she is visited by a pair of neighbors, Beth and John Voyles, who tearfully reveal that their dog has died from some kind of poisoning. Beth tells Stacey that the vet found some kind of crystalline substance in the dog’s belly. Beth wonders if there was something in a puddle of water from which the dog drank. When Beth tried to get a...