Summary

The narrator’s mother held the narrator while Mrs. Netterfield looked in the windows. She waited in fear and wondered what to do if Mrs. Netterfield somehow gained entry to the house. Eventually, after Mrs. Netterfield had looked in the windows, she left. The narrator’s mother stayed indoors with the doors locked until the narrator’s father came home from work. Once, when the narrator asked what became of Mrs. Netterfield, her mother said, “They took her away. Oh, I think so. She wasn’t left to die alone” (316). The narrator eventually married and moved to Vancouver, but she still had a subscription to her hometown’s weekly newspaper. One day, in the paper, she saw a poem written by a woman with the last name Netterfield. It was not Mrs. Netterfield, but someone who had moved from the narrator’s hometown to...