As we approached the house, I pointed to a purple smoke bush and whispered, “Wait there.”

I went to the front door and was about to bust it down when it occurred to me that I could just try the doorknob.

It turned, and I walked in to see Nettie wincing as she sat on an old tweed couch beside AG Grant. AG was sucking on her arm while one of his hands was groping under her T-shirt.

I shrieked in disgust and Nettie shrieked in surprise.

“You horrible man!” I said to AG. “So this is how you keep from being bit twice.”

He licked his bloody lips. “It’s my right as her master.”

“It’s no one’s right to exploit another human being.”

“I knew you were faking amnesia,” he said. “I’m going to file a complaint with the Council and have you locked up until you’re as old as you are crazy.” He reached for the phone on the end table.

“Pick up that phone and I’ll beat you with it like you’re a snare drum at Mardi Gras,” I said. “Nettie, move away from that creep.”

She slid to the other side of the couch and said, “Milagro, you’re having a relapse. You don’t know what you’re doing. You need to get back to the ranch and have a session with Dr. Lily. I can take you back.”

“Tell me where your father is.”

“Why?”

“Because he murdered Wilcox Spiggott.”

Her shock looked real. “My father didn’t murder anyone!”

“That’s not what Wil says,” I answered.

I heard a noise behind me and turned to see Matthews.

He held a long, sharp knife. He gripped it like a man who knows how to efficiently French-trim a rib roast.

“You again, you troublesome woman.”

“Daddy, what are you doing?” Nettie said. “You promised me that you didn’t hurt Wil.”

“Natalie, I didn’t. Not that he’s of any consequence. He was nothing but a disgrace to his noble people.”

“Daddy!” Nettie said, and stood up. “Wil was wonderful. He loved me.” She stepped forward until she was beside me. “I loved him, too. I wanted to be his thrall.”

“You’re too good for the likes of him,” Matthews said to Nettie, but his eyes didn’t waver from mine. “You deserve a respectable master, like Mr. Grant here.”

I said, “Wilcox was trying to make a positive difference in this world!”

“We don’t need a ‘positive difference,’ you disgusting half-thing,” Matthews sneered, “with your graphs and charts, your timelines and your American ideas about equality and progress! You would have destroyed our whole world.”

“Then you should have come for me, not Wil.”