All that is over is not past and when
memories come to haunt they don’t ask our permission to do so.
But . . . The Tree Musketeers—Francis “Frankie” Maniachi,
Vivian “Viv” Cleary, and Elizabeth
Narrated by
bestselling novelist Biz Buchanan almost sixty years later, There Comes a Time is an unforgettable
story about what three young girls did during a long ago summer to keep their
lives and those of the ones they loved from coming apart at the seams and what
they continue to do to make amends. Told with empathy,
humor, and insight, There Comes a Time
is both a powerful and emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and of-an-age
story about lifelong friendship, the timelessness of grief and guilt, and the
hope for redemption.
* * *
Prologue
The girls didn’t
blame me at the time and to the best of my knowledge, still don’t, but I’ve
never entirely forgiven myself for instigating what happened that night in
Founder’s Woods. Then again . . . if I hadn’t done what I’d done, more than one
grave would’ve been dug that summer.
Of course, not
everyone in town remembers the events that unfolded back then with as much
remorse, or gratitude, as I do. “What’s done is done. Forget about it. Time
heals all wounds,” someone not old enough to know better is bound to pipe in
whenever the summer of ’60 comes up in conversation. But there’ll come a time when
they, too, will understand that the border between then and now is more like a
cobweb than a brick wall, and when memories come to haunt . . . they don’t ask
our permission to do so.
A breeze ruffling oak
boughs on a full moon night or the whistle of the late train rumbling down the
tracks is all it takes to bring back the press of cold steel on my neck, the
sound Frankie’s leg made when it cracked in two, and Viv’s scream cutting
through the sultry air on a long ago summer night evil paid a visit to our
small town and took our young lives as we’d known them as a souvenir.
Chapter One
God only knows why
my best friends and I loved getting the hell scared of out of us every Saturday
afternoon at the Rivoli Theatre or the Starlight Drive-In after the sun went
down, but we spent most of our childhood jumping halfway out of our skins.
The radiated ants
from Them! sounded an awful lot like
cicadas, and after we saw The Fly the
three of us strained to hear one calling to us, “Help me . . . please, help
me.” The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
whose main character was a doctor—like my father—who discovered his neighbors
were being systematically replaced by alien duplicates grown in pods scattered
around his small town—like ours—had the girls and I spying into our neighbors’
windows for weeks to ascertain if they’d been similarly afflicted, but it was the
The Tingler that almost did us in.
Unbeknownst to us, the owner of the downtown theatre had fastened something
called the Percepto! beneath the seats
and when he activated the vibrating device at just the right time, it felt like
that alien parasite had crawled off the screen and into our spines and we ran out
the Emergency Door screaming and swatting at each others’ backs.
But while every
day back then might’ve felt like anything-can-happen day, to the best of
my recollection, which, if I do so
say myself, remains remarkably sharp for a gal on the dusky
side of her sixties, our lives were
fairly ho hum. Other than a recluse most of the kids in town believed to be a
practitioner of the dark arts, a group of bad boys who hung out in Founder’s Woods,
and the occasional escapee of Broadhurst Mental Institution, nothing much out
of the ordinary occurred in Summit, Wisconsin—a town deemed so unremarkable at
the time that a popular travel brochure left the Points of Interest section blank—until the record-breaking heat
ushered in the spring of ’60 like a harbinger of the horror to come.
