But, it seemed, I’d been silly. “Bottle,” I said to Theo.

“But of course, my little chickadee.”

“’Sparrow,’ you asshole. That’s a good Fields, though.” I held the bottle up to the moon. “To us,” I said, very softly, and drank.

The moon was high when we slid, graceless but undamaged, down from the roof. Frances was still collected and fluent, but I thought the whiskey had worked; the wild taint on her words since she’d seen the postcards was gone. It occurred to me, my own feelings rocking more freely than usual on the surface of the liquor, that I’d probably just attended a wake.

We walked Frances and Theo back to LeRoy’s house. I turned to the town circle, and the sight of the farmhouse and its wide front porch. Then I said, “Sher?”

“Well, don’t shout. I’m right next to you.”

She was, too; I’d thought she’d started toward her place, but she hadn’t moved. As if she’d known I was going to ask.

“Tell me about the town,” I said, feeling the twitch of fear in my stomach that goes with the beginning of any risky enterprise.

I had good night vision, but I longed suddenly for a full moon instead of a half. Something — the moon, a star, a last lit window in a house — reflected for a moment in Sherrea’s right eye and was gone. “Why?” she asked.

“Josh said I should.”

“I wanted to know, back when you were still sick, if you’d taken a vow not to ask questions. Now you ask ’em because you’re told to?”

I felt the same rush of irritation I had with Josh. “When have I ever done what I was told?”

Around us was a fury of crickets, but I thought I heard her draw breath. “Always,” she said. “Because it’s the easy path, and the one you’re least noticed on.”

I had a powerful longing to turn and go. “Tell me about the town, Sher. I want to know.”

“Why do you want to know?”

I thought of the camel, and Josh saying that the character of the town might have a little to do with the zoo. And Frances’s frivolous comment about the cooking school. “Because I like it here. I’d say you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if you didn’t want to, you’d have told me so and gone to bed by now.”

“Sparrow,” she said in an odd, unsupported voice. “Why do you want to know?”

I did turn then, and took three steps toward the circle. The movement shook a thought loose. The postcard lying on the floor in LeRoy’s attic, face up in front of the only person in the community who had seen that view before. And the books we were looking for, stored where they would set off that cascade when moved, just as the cards in a tarot deck, if you believed it worked that way, always came off the stack in the right order.