“Sure?”

When she nodded, he tucked it into a pocket. He didn’t know who was more relieved right then: Alicia, because he’d offered her the weapon, or himself, because she hadn’t taken it. He didn’t feature anyone else messing with his Semmerling.

She led him out of the foyer. “Come on. We can talk in here.”

Jack followed her as far as the threshold, then stopped, staring.

A jungle. A high-ceilinged room, almost a loft, with big skylights, and green everywhere. Not houseplants. Trees. Little trees, yes, but trees. Some with their tops wrapped in clear plastic, like oxygen tents, and others with bandages around their trunks.

“What is this?” he said. “A tree hospital?”

She laughed, and Jack realized this was the first time he’d heard that sound from her.

“You ought to do that more often,” he told her.

“What?”

“Laugh.”

Her smile faded. “I might do just that… once the house is gone.” Before Jack could say anything, she turned and waved a gloved hand at the room. “Anyway, this is my hobby: plant grafting.”

“No kidding?” he said, stepping into the room and looking about. “That’s a hobby?”

“It is for me. Or maybe it’s therapy of sorts. Whatever it is, it gives me… pleasure.”

For an instant there he’d had the strangest feeling she was going to say “peace.”

“How’d you get into something like this?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It started in college. There was this sickly tree right outside my dorm window. All the other trees around it were doing fine, but this one was stunted, had fewer leaves, and those it did have were shriveled and smaller than its neighbors’. I took it upon myself to save it. It became my mission… So I watered it, fertilized it, but no good. It just got worse. So I asked one of the grounds-keepers what he thought, and he said, ‘Bad roots. Nothing you can do about bad roots.’ They were going to rip it up and plant a replacement there.”

“Don’t tell me,” Jack said. “You started a save-the-tree movement.”

“Yeah, right… ‘Woodsman, woodsman, spare that tree.’ “ She shook her head. “Believe me, between my pre-med courses and my waitressing job, I barely had time to sleep, let alone become some sort of tree-hugging activist. No, I simply read up on grafting, took a couple of cuttings—they’re called ‘scions’—from the sick tree, and cleft-grafted them onto a branch of a healthy one, then I sealed the union with grafting wax. Shortly after that, they cut down the sick tree and replaced it. But it wasn’t really dead, you see. Part of it was alive and well on its neighbor. By the time I graduated, the grafted limb was growing like crazy—easily the leafiest branch on the tree.”

Her blue-gray eyes beamed at the memory.

“Congratulations,” Jack said.

“Thank you. After that, I sort of got the bug. I go to a nursery—the plant kind—and pick out the sickliest-looking sapling. I buy it for a song, along with another healthier looking tree of the same or similar species, bring them home, and graft the runt onto the healthy one.”