In a small town, the narrator, a woman, watches a girl from her cheerleading team die during childbirth, leaving behind a sickly little boy named Dickie-boy. The husband takes a new wife, called the Vamp by the town women because she is an outsider, who sleeps around and looks down upon them. The Vamp also had a daughter from a previous marriage, named Marleen, who was a pretty but strange little girl. She became friends with the narrators daughter, who came back with strange stories about the little girl that the narrator didn't always believe.

Marleen and Dickie-boy got along wonderfully, and with the narrators daughter, they'd play strange games, like forcing Dickie-boy to act like a dog. Dickie-boy was creepily good at hide-and-seek. Marleen also gave people the creeps, staring into the distance muttering to herself. Then one day Dickie-boy's head fell off while Marleen was dragging him around. Marleen claimed that her mother had cut his head off and glued it back on so she could blame it on Marleen. Then when the narrator's daughter finally goes back to their farm to play with Marleen, she finds her playing with bones in the dirt, saying it's her brother's bones.

A year later, the father dies, and the Vamp disappears before the funeral. Fairly suspicious. Marleen claims her stepbrother is back and they play together just like before. The narrator ends up engaged to the fire marshal, who decides to sleep with Marleen on his last night single (she's gone into prostitution). He comes back and gets married to the narrator, but somehow is never the same after Marleen. Marleen herself still lives in the same house, the crabapple tree having taken over even more space. The town tells scary tales about it.