I was drinking the last of the pear nectar. As I lowered the bottle, I reversed my grip on the neck, smacked the glass against a sign post as I turned, and ended crouched in front of Mr. Lyle with a broken bottle in my hand. I was probably more surprised than he was.

He was smiling, in fact, way up at the top of his great height. I’d forgotten how unreasonably large he was. “Teakettles, bottles — do you always fight with your drinkables?” he asked. And: “You should turn round and have a look before you use that. There are things you don’t know.”

I did not, of course, turn around. “Frances?” I called.

“I don’t—” I heard the clunk-squeak of a car door opening. “Ah. I see,” she said. “Sparrow, before I decide how to manage this, tell me, who are these people?”

I was frantic to look behind me. People, plural; the woman must be there. I tried to figure out what Frances wanted to know. “Night before last, Mick saw their car and avoided it,” I said slowly. “Then yesterday, when Mick left his last body at my place, I went to someone — someone I thought I could trust — to help me get rid of it. She brought these two around. They were pretty peevish when they found out Mick wasn’t resident anymore.”

“Is that true?” Frances asked, but not, I realized, of me.

“It is so, absolutely,” said the other familiar voice, the rough, low-pitched female one. I could hear that she, too, was smiling. “A careful witness, that one, who draws no conclusions. But it is not all that is so.”

“What do you want?” said Frances.

“That we should help one another, maybe.”

In failing tones, with a fortune in skepticism, Frances said, “And this, I take it, is symbolic of your good intentions. My God.”

“And which one is yours?”

I couldn’t bear it anymore. I looked over my shoulder.

The long black car had pulled out of the alley at as much of a diagonal as it could manage; it blocked the sidewalk as well. The woman Dana had addressed as “Maitresse” stood in the open passenger’s side door. Her costume yesterday must have been casual wear. Now she was a different kind of formidable: black suede pumps, long dark legs, a black sheath dress of dull nubby silk, a fur stole white as a cloud of talcum, long dark neck rising out of it. Her face, under a black-and-white turban, seemed younger than it had yesterday. And still, nothing shone or sparkled anywhere about her except her immobile silver eyebrows.

Behind the wheel was the dark-skinned person in the bright-patterned hat, the one who’d peered in the windshield waving spark plugs. Beside the driver was the big gray dog.

The back door on our side was also open. And on the back seat, head lolling down as if it had been propped against the door before it opened, entirely unconscious, was Mick Skinner’s new body.