It was one solution. It was a good one, in fact: guaranteed to remove me both from Tom’s reach, and from the thorn-hedge maze of reminders of my past mistakes. It didn’t help Theo, but maybe I could come up with a way to do that, too. “Can I think about it for a while?” I asked.

“No,” said Frances, “I expect you to fling yourself onto the back of my horse without so much as a clean handkerchief. Of course you may. Please do.”

“Oh, shit!” Theo wailed. “No towel!”

“No, no towel,” I agreed.

Frances shook her head at me. “You’re not a very nice person. I’ll get you a towel, Theo. In the meantime, pretend you’re a drip irrigation system.”

Theo pushed the streaming hair back from his face as Frances went in the back door. Wet-headed, without his glasses, he looked like a stranger. “She’s doing better, I think,” he said.

“Frances? Better at what?”

“That’s right, you were busy not noticing everything. She’d rattle off the speeches, but they were all bitter. And she wouldn’t fight back.”

“Wouldn’t fight back?”

“I don’t know how else to put it. I think she felt responsible for what had happened to you.”

I frowned.

“Well,” said Theo, “I know you can be stupid without anybody else’s help, but maybe she didn’t. Anyway, you were pretty much wired in series. You got better, she got better.”

I didn’t say anything, and it was just as well, because Frances came out with a towel and sailed it at Theo.

“LeRoy wants to know if you’d mind having corn fritters again,” she said to him.

Theo looked at Frances in disbelief. “Mind? I mean, do you?”

“That’s what I told him. But he wanted me to ask. Saints and angels, if there’s one thing people around here seem to know about, it’s food. The place must have been founded by an exiled cooking school.”

“You’re staying here, too?” I asked, surprised. “At LeRoy’s?”

“Attic. Why,” Frances said, aggrieved, “does everyone put me on the top floor, as if I were likely to have a nasty accident with a chemistry set?”

“Maybe they’re hoping the stair-climbing will cut into your natural vivacity.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Have you been listening to me for too long?”

“Sparrow, is that you?” LeRoy’s voice preceded him to the screen door. He opened it and poked his long amber-brown face out. There was a streak of flour in the cropped black fleece of his hair. “Mags asked me if I’d dig out some old schoolbooks of mine for Paulo. If I can find ’em, will you take ’em back with you?”

“If you don’t mind them a little seasoned with machine lube.”

“Nah. Someone threw the physics book in a vat of Coca-Cola once, from the looks of it. Frances, is it okay if I look around in the attic?”

“It’s your attic. Can we help look?”

“I don’t know,” LeRoy said, a little desperately.