And if he was related to Aubrey Hamilton, maybe there wasn’t anything sinister about the fact that he was hanging around her house while she was away for the summer.

Still—the fact that he had not corrected my mistake, and had let me go on thinking he was Aubrey—and his clear anxiety when it had looked as if Timmy was about to go into the barn—made me wonder if Freddy had something to hide.

Just then I realized that my purse, which was sitting on the table beside the stack of yearbooks, had begun vibrating. Which meant that someone was calling me on my cell phone.

I closed the yearbook, grabbed my purse, and rummaged around to find the phone while I headed for the library exit. Though I stopped to answer it in the library’s vestibule, which still held a little of the air conditioning.

“Meg? Is that you? Meg?”

Rob, sounding panic stricken.

“It’s me,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Get back here right away! I don’t know what to do about—no!”

Twenty-Three

Rob hung up, leaving me still firing questions at him. And didn’t pick up when I tried to call back. Didn’t pick up the whole dozen times I tried to call him while breaking every speed limit on the way back to the house.

When I got to the point where I could see the house from the road, I was relieved to see that the house wasn’t on fire or surrounded by a SWAT team. In fact, the only thing I could see happening was that Rob was out in the yard, holding the garden hose with the spray nozzle on while a stark naked Timmy ran in and out of the water. Timmy was probably giggling by the look of it. I couldn’t tell Rob’s mood, though. Had the crisis, whatever it was, passed so soon, or was he pulling a fast one to cut short his stint of childcare?

“Thank God you’re here,” he exclaimed when he saw me striding across the yard toward him. “Timmy has—no! Get back!”

Timmy had started to run toward us, until Rob spotted him and turned the hose on him, much the way I’d seen police on television turning fire hoses on rioters. Luckily the spray from our garden hose was considerably less forceful and wasn’t likely to hurt Timmy, only make him giggle and prance around gleefully.

“Easy with the hose,” I said. “You don’t want to knock him down or get water up his nose.”

“No, I’m just trying to keep him the hell away from me.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“He’s covered with poop!”

I glanced at Timmy. He didn’t seem to be covered with anything, except maybe drops of water. I could see one or two dabs of what I had supposed was mud, but nothing thirty seconds with a washcloth couldn’t fix. Still, given Rob’s well-known queasiness . . .

“What happened?” I asked aloud.

“I turned my back on him for a minute, and the next thing I knew, he’d taken his diaper off and was waving it around. What a mess! You should see the kitchen.”