“Still, even looking in the windows is a kind of violation,” she said. “Ask the house’s permission first.”

“Um . . . right,” I said. “Let’s get Timmy down to the playground before we worry about that.”

It was an awesome playground, with at least a dozen pieces of equipment of various degrees of size and complexity. Timmy made a beeline for a structure like several small log cabins on stilts, with stairs and ladders leading up to them, slides coming out of them, and a variety of rope and board bridges connecting them. The whole area around the cabins was paved with some sort of rubbery substance that bounced underfoot, which probably did a lot to cut down on broken bones.

And the whole playground was empty. A pity, really, to build such a nice playground and have no one use it.

“Watch me! Watch me!” Timmy shouted, as he began scrambling up a ladder to the tallest cabin.

“Oh, dear,” Rose Noire said, sprinting after him.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

When I got back to the street again, I glanced back and saw Rose Nore, with her ankle-length India-print skirt tucked up to a more practical level, waving her hands frantically as Timmy leaned backward out of one of the cabin windows.

With Timmy safely occupied—well, at least occupied—I strolled back toward Nadine’s house.

Holding my folded newspaper like a totem, I scanned the street. It didn’t look as if my acting efforts were particularly necessary. Not a creature in sight. Perhaps the residents of Westlake were all double-income couples who worked long hours to pay for their mansions.

As I crossed the street and slogged up the sidewalk toward Nadine’s house, I thought of another possibility—most of the residents were probably wealthy enough to summer someplace else. Days like this, I could understand why. Though if everyone had gone away for the summer, why had they all left their air conditioning on high—the only sound I heard was the hum of several dozen huge compressors laboring away up and down the street.

Nadine’s house was small, compared to some of the others, but still impressive. Like all her neighbors, she had a lawn manicured to velvety smoothness and lined with neat pruned shrubs in beds of perfectly mounded mulch.

As I trudged up her walk, I found myself thinking about what Timmy and Spike could do to all that uncanny perfection if you turned them loose on it for five minutes.

I pressed the doorbell, producing not a single note or even a chime, but several bars of vaguely familiar music. As I stood there waiting for an answer, I tried to hum it and figure out what it was.

When I thought enough time had passed, I pressed the doorbell again. This time I listened more closely and recognized the notes—the college anthem.

Most people at Caerphilly College tried to forget about the anthem whenever possible. The tune was twittery and unmusical, while the original words were embarrassingly flowery and sentimental—no doubt because they had been written by Mrs. Ginevra Braken-ridge Pruitt, a late nineteenth-century poet of dubious talent. The administration would have replaced the song long ago except that Mrs. Pruitt and her family were among the college’s biggest donors—nearly every third building on campus was named after one or another of the Pruitts. The students had succeeded in getting the administration to agree that the anthem needed new words, but since the commission to write them was now in its fourth decade of existence without coming any closer to agreement, I had no doubt that if Michael achieved tenure, we’d be humming the damned song at college gatherings until his retirement.