Austin sat on the high stone with the blood-sacrifice pool while clouds drifted below the stars, the tide slid slowly out to sea and Macey talked. She talked about Mike and June, about Stella Miller, about newspaper reports, the books she was reading, the city directory. She talked about her parents: how every conversation had to be light and easy, like cake without calories; how angry she was that they would not ever actually answer a question.

Austin felt as if he were listening to her soul.

Macey shimmered in front of him, and only when they spilled over did he realize the shimmer was tears in her eyes. And yet she did not stand like a weeper; she stood like a fighter, like a sheriff in a Western ready for the shoot-out.

“I don’t believe things are meant, Aus. That’s too horrible. God or the angels dictating arsons and victims and little children without toilets and a nine-year-old stabbed. I refuse to believe things are meant. But it is your responsibility to learn something. So what about Venita?”

He did not know where her thoughts were going. Venita had gotten out of the fire unscathed. There was no possible connection between Venita and Mr. Sibley. Aus felt almost ambushed by Macey’s emotions; he was not anywhere near her level; it was exactly like his own father with his own mother.

“Aus?” said Macey. “When Nana gave you a glass of cake? Remember that?”

“Lucky Devil’s Cake. As in you lucky devil, you, this is the world’s best cake.”

“Yes,” said Macey. “Yes. Stop right there. That’s my question. How come we’re the lucky devils, Aus? How come we have the world’s best cake?”

Austin thought: This is what passion is, caring that much. This is why Mom is so mad at Dad. She says he doesn’t have enough emotion. She wants this much from him.

He wanted to give Macey everything he had, every emotion and every fiber, but she took another step back on the sand. She was entirely dark against the faintly gleaming ocean. He patted the stone beside him, aching to be back where they had been half an hour ago. “Do you feel as if Venita’s fire and the barn fire are connected, Mace? I can’t see it.”

She drifted toward him, slow as tides, and finally sat next to him. Their canvas jackets rasped like tent flaps.

“I know now there’s not an actual mystery-type connection,” she said. She let him rest his arm around her and he did not consider anything more. The evening belonged to fire and death now. “The two fires didn’t start from the same match. But I can’t let go, Aus. There is a connection, and I haven’t got it clear, but it will get clear, the more I think about it. The more I ask.”