I had finally shut them up. My aunt and uncle simply gaped at me. This was not moving us forward in our discussion. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with Matthew showing up at the rink today,” I reminded them. “Should you get a court order against him? I mean, he doesn’t have any legal rights over the girls anymore, am I right?”

“That’s correct,” Hank said, recovering much more quickly than his wife. “We’ve adopted them. He gave up his rights.”

“And I don’t want to call the police,” Iona said. “We’ve talked to the police enough to last us the rest of our lives.”

“So you want him to show back up again? Scare the girls again?”

“No! But we had enough to do with the police when your sister was taken! We don’t want them coming around here again.”

I understood what it felt like to want to glide below the police radar, though most of the law-enforcement people I’d met had simply been human beings trying to do a tough job with less money than they needed. But I also understood that, aside from Iona and Hank’s revulsion at the prospect of having police cars parked in front of the house again, my sisters were seriously upset. Maybe seeing the police arrive would make the girls fear they were in more danger than Matthew actually represented. After all, he had no reason to harm Mariella and Gracie. Maybe Iona and Hank were right, though for the wrong reason.

“Then there’s nothing else we can do,” Tolliver said, having reached the same conclusion I had. “We’ll be on our way.”

“How long are you going to be in town?” Iona said, sounding a little desperate. “Do you have another job to go to?”

She’d never been anxious for us to stick around before. In fact, she couldn’t get us to leave fast enough, every other time we’d visited.

“We could be here a few more days,” I said, after a glance at Tolliver. As a matter of fact, we didn’t have anything on our schedule now, though that could change tomorrow.

“Okay,” she said, nodding as if we had a bargain. “So we’ll call you if he shows up again.”

What were we supposed to do? I opened my mouth to protest, but Tolliver said, “All right. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow, anyway.”

“I’m going to talk to the school principal,” Iona said. “I hate for them to talk about us, but at least the girls’ teachers need to know that Matthew’s around.”