Told nonchronologically, the story of the murder is interspersed with rosy flashbacks of Rhea and Rhoda's hijinks. On a hot midsummer's day, eleven-year-old Rhea and Rhoda Kunkel fly down a hill on their bicycles. The twins are bright and vivacious, pale and redheaded, completely inseparable, and notoriously giggly and mischievous. In that moment, they are "drunk with power." They sail towards Whipple's Ice, where the Whipple family works. The narrator, a woman recounting her childhood, recalls attending their wake shortly after, where their bodies looked artificial in the caskets. She reveals that Roger Whipple was the murderer: a gentle, developmentally-challenged "big slow sweet-faced boy." Rhea and Rhoda bike up to Roger at the barn behind Whipple's Ice, and tease him as all the neighborhood kids do, playfully and without malice. Roger invites them up to his room, offering to show them "secret things under his bed." Rhea goes first. She never comes out. Eventually, impatient from waiting, Rhea enters too. Roger claims he doesn't remember anything after that point, including why there was blood in his room and why he took a bath in the middle of the day. But later, the girl's bodies are found in the icehouse. The narrator breaks the story to mention that as an adult, she would regularly cheat on her husband behind the icehouse. Afterwards, the narrator would imagine Rhea and Rhonda's death, like this: After Rhea goes upstairs in the Whipple's house, Roger says that Rhea went home. Rhoda insists that Rhea'd never go home without her. She pushes her way into Roger's bedroom, stumbling against "something on the floor tangled in bedclothes." Roger follows her in. The scene ends. The narrator concludes, "I wasn't there, but some things you know."