“Olivia Charity. I’m Manfred’s neighbor. I’ve been so worried about him. In trying to get him out of this terrible predicament he’s in, I confess I went overboard. But when you hear the result of the stunt I pulled, I think you’ll forgive me. I had Manfred’s welfare at heart.” She looked at Manfred meaningfully. The ball was in his court.

Manfred made his jaw snap shut and said numbly, “Please come in. I can tell we need to talk for a while.”

“We sure do,” Magdalena said, though in a somewhat modified tone. She swept into the house when Manfred stood back, and Manfred gave Olivia a big, silent, questioning expression when Magdalena’s back was to them. Olivia just smiled. Then Magdalena turned around and the moment was over.

“Um, please, come in and sit down,” Manfred said. He’d had a lot of visitors lately, and he was beginning to wonder if Midnight was isolated enough. As he turned to close the front door, he saw a naked man walking on the sidewalk across the street. He froze for a second. The man was Diederik, and Diederik was definitely fully grown. Manfred pushed the door shut before Magdalena caught a glimpse. He thought, What the hell?

But he turned to face his guests, who hadn’t seen. He did his best to act as though they were the sole focus of his attention.

“Can I get you a glass of water or some coffee or some tea?” he asked, not too surprised his voice came out funny.

“An explanation will be sufficient,” Magdalena said, sounding every inch the lawyer.

“Please, let’s sit in the living room,” Manfred said, shepherding them farther into the house. Anything to get away from the front window.

With tactical precision, Magdalena sat in the armchair so that she could look at Manfred and Olivia at the same time. “All right,” she said, her hands planted on her knees. “Let’s have it.”

Manfred was more than ready to leave the explanation to Olivia, since he had no idea what she was going to say. He was surprised when she gave Magdalena a factual account of their trip to Bonnet Park the day before—factual, that is, if you believed in telepathy and if you didn’t know that Olivia had a lot of experience as a sort of covert operative.

To give the lawyer credit, she listened with every appearance of attention and interest. If her slight smile got tighter and tighter, that was only what Manfred expected.

At the end of Olivia’s story, Magdalena said, “You know this is a bunch of bullshit, right?”

“I know to most lawyers it would sound like the chitchat of a total nut,” Olivia said. “But I also know you’ve done legal work for my . . . boyfriend, Lemuel Bridger.”