Michael was out, of course, because he was tagging along with Dad and Dr. Blake, who were similarly unavailable. Rose Noire managed to sound genuinely sorry when she informed me that she was driving Mother somewhere. When Rob finally showed up, he turned me down with a convoluted and implausible excuse. I felt more sure than ever that he’d once again found true love with someone he suspected would not pass muster with the family. And none of the other relatives were answering my phone calls.

But late in the afternoon, when I was beginning to think I’d have to give up my plans, I got a call from Sandie.

“What’s new?” she asked.

“Not much,” I said. “Timmy has several new boo-boos, and the sheep are getting very tired of playing horsie-horsie.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were, like, investigating. Trying to find Karen and all.”

“There’s a limit to how much investigating you can do with a toddler underfoot,” I said. “And for some reason, everyone I ask to baby-sit Timmy seems to have other plans this evening.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “If you really, really need someone, I suppose I could help out. Of course, I don’t have that much experience with kids.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “And if you’re serious . . . ”

“Sure,” she said. “Just let me know when you need me. After all, if you can do anything to help wrap this up and get bloody Nadine off my back, it’s worth it.”

We agreed that she would come over around eight and I returned to playing tag with Timmy with a lighter heart.

Dad tried to join in the game, but while trying to hide, he found several vigorous new poison ivy shoots behind the barn and took it very personally.

“It’s my fault,” he kept saying the whole time we were putting on our plastic gloves, pulling the vine out by the roots, and shoving it safely into a trash bag. “It’s all my fault.”

“Why, did you plant it?” I asked. “Some notion of Dr. Blake’s perhaps? Does one of the animals from the zoo need freshly picked poison ivy to thrive?”

“No, of course not. I just haven’t done a poison ivy hunt in weeks.”

“Probably because Dr. Blake has been keeping you too busy with his projects.”

Dad looked pained.

“Yes,” he said. “But they’re such worthwhile projects. And I think it’s important to spend time with him. You understand that, don’t you?”

Yes, I understood—Dr. Blake was over ninety, and since he and Dad had only found each other a few months ago, they had a lot of catching up to do.

But I could also see that Dad felt incredibly guilty about falling down in his self-appointed mission to keep his family safe from poison ivy. As a young man, while on a bird-watching trip to the Dismal Swamp, Dad had volunteered to climb into the water and untangle some vines that were keeping the boat from moving. The water had been up to his neck and the vines turned out to be poison ivy, resulting in the worst case of poison ivy anyone in the county had ever seen. The experience had made Dad passionate about exterminating any poison ivy that dared to grow near his family or friends. Discovering that the enemy had infiltrated our yard while his back was turned definitely depressed him.