“Anyway, after innumerable delays I had the coveted laptop; I was seated in an easy chair beside the hospital bed and I wanted to draw Goblin out. My mind was a tangle of thoughts about Goblin.

“ ‘I need to work now, Aunt Queen,’ I said very gently. ‘Kiss me and go off to Commander’s Palace for dinner. You haven’t been there since this started.’

“She was suspicious. ‘But you’ve no phone hookup here; what are you planning to do with the laptop? Write a novel?’

“ ‘I’m talking to Goblin through it. It’s easier for him than telepathy. He feeds off the electricity. He asked for this.’

“ ‘Oh, my darling Quinn,’ she said with a flamboyant gesture of confusion and anxiety.

“ ‘Aunt Queen, let me tell you again, he saved my life. That bastard would have killed me!’

“ ‘Darling, what would happen if you simply stopped speaking to Goblin altogether? And as for the island, what if we destroy the Hermitage, dismantle the strange mausoleum and move all of its gold panels back to the house and let the wisteria have the place?’

“ ‘You’re shocking me,’ I said. ‘You’re hurting me! I want the Hermitage. I’ve been inspired by that marble desk and golden chair. I want to paint the place, floor it in marble. Look, I know the grief I’m causing you. I know the pain you’ve been through with Pops’ death, and I don’t mean for this agony to go on, but I want that place, don’t you see, and it belongs to us, not this interloper!’

“I glanced at Goblin. He was watching Aunt Queen in the most intense manner. And then he looked at me almost listlessly. It was as if he had acquired a taste for boredom. I had to talk to him. I had to make some judgment of what he now knew! I was the only person in the world who understood this problem.

“ ‘All right, precious dear,’ said my beloved aunt. ‘I’m going upstairs for supper.’

“She had previously made known to me, more than once, that there were four restaurants in this complex and the finest could rival any restaurant in New Orleans. This was all Rowan Mayfair’s idea, to provide varying fare for relatives of the sick and the sick themselves. You could grab a quick meal in the generic cafeteria in the basement or mount to the rooftop Grand Luminière for the most succulent choices.

“Aunt Queen had become a regular at the Grand Luminière, and my meals came directly from their kitchen.

“ ‘I’m meeting Nash, you know,’ she went on to say, ‘and if you’d only just—’

“ ‘I’ll meet him when I’m properly dressed,’ I said. ‘Not when I’m got up like Wee Willie Winkie.’

“She rose to go.

“ ‘And there’s another thing,’ I said.