A very sad thing happened in the first week of June. Mrs. Manzo came over to tell them that Mrs. Lavasseur had died in her sleep. She’d had a very successful day painting a single mill smokestack. Then she went home to bed. She never woke up. If Abe had had the worst kind of death imaginable, perhaps Mrs. Lavasseur had one of the best.

The Grovers — even Lowen — attended the visiting hours at Field’s. Lowen dressed in his best clothes, though he didn’t wear a suit jacket; over the year his arms had grown another three inches and his jacket no longer fit.

When it came time for the family to walk up to the open casket and say their good-byes, Clem hung back for a moment, but not Lowen. Since drawing his Abe comics, he felt calmer, braver. This time he would look at the body. He would look death straight in the face.

It wasn’t as scary as he thought it would be. In truth, the body in the casket looked like Mrs. Lavasseur, and it didn’t look like her. It was like viewing the discarded skin of a snake. The energy that made Mrs. Lavasseur Mrs. Lavasseur was gone.

He wondered what her artistic soul was seeing now.

The Corbeaus were at the funeral, too. While standing graveside, Lowen overheard Mrs. Corbeau say, “You wait and see what that family has set off. There’ll be so many tourists trampling through Millville that we won’t even recognize our lovely town.”

Sami rolled her eyes at Lowen.

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said.

But in a way she did. What none of the Dollar Kids realized on that bright June morning was that their crowdfunding efforts set actions in motion that would affect the town for years to come. Folks would travel to Millville to taste Mum’s pasties and to visit Restored Riches. Artists would bring their art to be exhibited in Rena’s expanded shop. Many, realizing that houses cost very little in Millville, would stay. With so many artists in town, other businesses would come too: a coffee shop, an art supply store, a bookstore, even a greengrocery that sold rutabagas. Eventually, Ms. Duffey and a group of artists would convince the company that owned the old mill building not only to leave it standing, but to turn it into studio space for painting and sculpture. (She would no longer regret her decision to turn down a marriage proposal and stay in Millville.) More folks would come to Millville to see the extraordinary art that was being produced. More houses would be built to accommodate all of the folks who wanted to live there. A wing would be added to Central School.

On the day they stood in the cemetery, none of the kids could know that visitors to the mill would be greeted by large comic panels — panels that told the history of the town from its early days of papermaking to the present.

As for Mrs. Corbeau, she wouldn’t stick around long enough to realize that selling dollar houses had been good for Millville.

Just a few months after the funeral, she and Mr. Corbeau would sell their shops, move to Florida, and complain about the traffic.