Ophelia thumbed the wheel of her iPod. “There’s songs on here that weren’t here before.”

“They like music, too,” Fran said.

“What you were saying about going out to San Francisco to busk,” Ophelia said. “I can’t imagine doing that.”

“Well,” Fran said, “I won’t ever do it, but I think I can imagine it okay.”

When they got up to the house, deer were grazing on the green lawn. The living tree and the dead were touched with the last of the daylight. Chinese lanterns hung in rows from the rafters of the porch.

“You need to come at the house from between the trees,” Fran said. “Right on the path. Otherwise, you don’t get nowhere near it. And I don’t ever use but the back door.”

She knocked at the back door. BE BOLD, BE BOLD. “It’s me again,” she said. “And Ophelia. The one who left the iPod.”

She saw Ophelia open her mouth and went on hastily, “Don’t. They don’t like it when you thank them. It’s poison to them. Come on in. Mi casa es su casa. I’ll give you the grand tour.”

They stepped over the threshold, Fran first.

“There’s the pump room out back where I do the wash,” she said. “There’s a big ole stone oven for baking in, and a pig pit, though why I don’t know. They don’t eat meat. But you prob’ly don’t care about that.”

“What’s in this room?” Ophelia said.

“Hunh,” Fran said. “Well, first, it’s a lot of junk. They just like to accumulate junk. Way back in there, though, is what I expect is a queen.”

“A queen?”

“Well, that’s what I call her. You know how in a beehive, way down in the combs, you have the queen and all the worker bees attend on her?

“Far as I can tell, that’s what’s in there. She’s real big and not real pretty, and they are always running in and out of there with food for her. I don’t think she’s teetotally growed up yet. For a while now I’ve been thinking on what Ma said, about how maybe these summer people got sent off. Bees do that, too, right? Go off and make a new hive when there are too many queens?”

“I think so,” Ophelia said.

“The queen’s where my daddy gets his liquor, and she don’t bother him none. They have some kind of still set up in there, and every once in a while when he ain’t feeling too religious, he goes in and skims off a little bitty bit. It’s awful sweet stuff.”

“Are they, uh, are they listening to us right now?”

In response came a series of clicks from the War Room.

Ophelia jumped. “What’s that?” she said.