Down the street, there was a house with a fake wishing well on the front lawn. It was wrapped with silk flowers. In the waking world, every day Owen passed it on the way to work, the sight made him giddy with disdain for its creepy niceness. He led Melody there and they used it as a place to sit as he filled her in on what he’d discovered the previous night. While she swung her legs, her calves disappearing through the brick work of the well top, he caught her up on the solar cross, Aaron Feit, Crenshaw, the old house, and his theory as to the caper Feit and the young mother, Kiara, had planned. He paused and added, “I think the baby’s name is William.”

“What a night,” she said.

“And I haven’t even mentioned my run-in with cutters.”

“How close did they get?” She put her hand lightly to her chest and shook her head.

“There were three of them. I tripped trying to get away and they got damn close. This one I’d seen earlier. A creepy old guy hiding in the corner of a young couple’s bedroom while they were engaged in sex.”

“They’re known to be attracted to scenarios happening in the waking world like you mention.”

“Sex?”

She nodded. “If they can’t find likely sleepers to unhook, they will crowd, invisible, into the bedrooms of the living and watch as life is conceived and the silver cord is set.”

“What’s the chances there will be an unseen cutter around any time anyone has sex?”

“About ninety percent. And usually more than one.”

“Kind of off-putting,” said Owen.

“To say the least,” she said.

They headed downtown, bounding down the center of the street as Owen had done the night before.

10

THE WEATHER WAS MUCH nicer that night, a soft breeze instead of a driving wind and rain. The sky was clear and the constellations looked like illustrations in a star chart. As Owen and Melody bounded along past the Busy Bee, toward the center of town, he remembered how he’d seen the miasma at a distance the previous night. When he told her, Melody said, “You were probably better off being on your own last night. Look how well you handled all of it. You need more nights like that and then I can leave you to explore alone.”

“The incident with the cutters was almost fatal,” he reminded her, feeling a pang that one day, she’d no longer travel the night world with him. He felt it might be too lonely to endure solo.

When they reached downtown, he showed her Margrave Street, and upon seeing the entrance to it off Cobb, the main street of Westwend, she mentioned that she once had a friend who’d lived in the house on the corner.

“What did you have in mind for when we get there?” asked Melody.