Summary. Read and answer questions.
Salamanca Tree Hiddle is taking a trip with her grandparents from Euclid, Ohio to Lewiston, Idaho, to visit her mother's final resting place. Along the way, Salamanca, or Sal, tells her grandparents the story of her best friend, Phoebe Winterbottom, whose mother, like Sal's, unexpectedly decides to leave home. Sal meets Phoebe when Sal and her father leave their farm in Bybanks, Kentucky, to Euclid, Ohio, where Margaret Cadaver, whom Sal's father befriended after her mother's death, lives. Phoebe is a high-strung, prim, and wildly imaginative girl. She feels certain that some sinister connection exists between the morbidly-named Mrs. Cadaver, who is her next-door neighbor, the mysterious notes that keep appearing on her family's doorstep, and the strange boy, whom Phoebe dubs the lunatic, who appears at the house one day. Sal gradually becomes caught up in her friend's melodrama and finds herself engaged in a heady flirtation with a boy from school, Ben