Chapter One

A town called Ulster in central New York—west of the Hudson, but still closer to Albany than to Syracuse or Buffalo—prospered briefly in the 1960s and '70s when IBM opened a regional sales division on the site of an old dairy two towns away. Ten minutes off the thruway, the abruptly thriving area wasn't long removed from its earlier life as farm country; most of the old sagging barns were bought up and knocked down to make way for new construction, but a few of the better-preserved ones were left on the vistas to go about the picturesque business of their own slow decline. They stand there today, swaybacked, holes punched in their steep roofs by years of snowfall; and the regional sales division has shut down. Roger Howe was offered a job there, a job that effectively represented the promotion which had not been forthcoming in his four years at the office in Westchester. He and his wife, Kay, with a small relocation allowance from the company and what remained of her inheritance from her father, moved upstate in the fall of 1970, when their son Richard was three years old, and Kay, though she didn't know it at the time, was pregnant with Molly.

The older homes in Ulster were well separated from one another, built for the most part on the apexes of the rolling, stony hills that had led its earliest settlers to hit upon livestock farming as their path of least resistance. A number of the IBM families, though, including the Howes, bought into a new development called Bull's Head, laid out at the wide end of a valley which narrowed toward the bald mountain that gave the venture its name. Roger and Kay, who were both twenty-eight and had never