I couldn’t remember how much I had told him. Apparently not much. He sat at the kitchen table saying, “What? What?” while I told him the whole story and scrambled us some eggs. The Brunswick stew I put back in the freezer. I know you’re not supposed to refreeze food, but if I nuked it long enough, it should kill the bacteria. And it was too late for spicy food.

“Don’t you get messed up in this, Patricia Anne. These sound like strange people.”

I handed him some buttered toast. “Betsy Mahall, Susan Crawford’s sister, isn’t strange. She and her husband, Terry, are going to raise Susan’s children.”

“Well, it’s good the children have somebody.”

I nodded. “Somebody who really wants them.”

The lights went out just as we were finishing our eggs. And I hadn’t checked since I got home to see if we had an E-mail from Haley. Given our track record with electricity, it could be days before I could use the computer.

“She’ll be home in two months,” Fred said, reading my thoughts.

This time we lucked out. The lights were back on the next morning, had been off only four hours. Ice still coated our skylight and deck, though, and a fine mist was falling, almost like a fog, coating the tops of pine trees. I slid across the deck with Woofer’s breakfast, a good way to break a hip, but I had to see if he was all right.

Which, of course, he was. Snug and happy in his igloo, money well spent.

I was watching Virgil Stuckey on TV, a repeat of the story of the night before, when Fred came into the den, dressed for work.

“The roads are too icy for you to go out,” I exclaimed when I saw him. “Wait a while. It’s supposed to get above freezing during the morning.”

“I called Mark. He’s got a four-wheel drive. He’s going to pick me up.”

Mark Taylor was a young man who worked for Fred. A very nice young man whose hobby happened to be stock-car racing, a fact which didn’t comfort me on an icy morning.

“It’ll be fine.” He pointed to the TV and Virgil Stuckey. “That guy looks just like Willard Scott.”

A few minutes later, I watched nervously as he slid across the deck. The sound of Mark’s car motor roaring in our driveway was not comforting.

“You call me when you get there and don’t you let Mark drive fast.”

“Don’t worry.”

Yeah. I closed the door, picked Muffin up, and went into the boys’ old bedroom where I had set up the computer.

“Maybe we’ve got a message from your Mama,” I told the cat.

We did.

E-MAIL

FROM: HALEY

TO: MAMA AND PAPA

SUBJECT: DAVID ANTHONY