A STITCH IN TIME
By
Maria, who talks to trees and petrol pumps and muses on such matters as why things turn out one way and not another, is just the type to see Harriet, a girl from a hundred-year-old photo, reflected in the glass framing a sampler done by the same girl. This happens on a seashore vacation when Maria and her parents have rented an early Victorian house; and though Maria, a sober eleven-year-old, is brought out a bit by a boy she meets there, she's also secretly preoccupied with a sense of time's obliteration and a feeling that Harriet is still about. Maria's conviction that Harriet died young proves false, but there was a landslide as she had sensed. . . . It was the dog she's heard barking who was killed, after Harriet's escape. Somehow the knowledge that Harriet grew up and changed helps Maria see that she will too--not much of a wrinkle, but it has dimension and it could pull others like Maria along with her.