Do you know this book? discussion

1. Book about a young girl who compulsively shop lifts each time she hears from her aunt. She also has dreams about being trapped in a small iron "cage' of fencing that marks a historic spot in her town. It turns out her aunt was really her mother, who abandoned her as a small child inside the little fence.

2. Book about a boy who starts spending a lot of time with an old guy in his neighborhood who used to be in prison. The man divided his yard into a grid using string and teaches the boy extreme concentration by having him focus intensely on one square at a time. He talks about how he memorized every inch of his jail cell this way.

3. Book about a kid growing up in the Panama Canal Zone. He has a sister? His parents are non-military and there is some tension between that group and the military group. There's a lot about jumping off a tower into the water. I can even remember the cover art: it's mostly gray, looking like heavy rain, with a kid doing a cannonball.

Okay, number three is called Rainy Season.

Sorry, those are not familiar.

How about a book about two twin pre-teenage boys who find a time warp or something in their backyard, and one brother stays in there for a year so he wont have to be a twin anymore?