Tommy was tall, narrow shouldered, seventeen now—or was it eighteen?—and his coloring was nothing like his sister’s. He had her eyes, perfectly round and black as pitted olives, but his hair was a sort of neutral brown, whereas Nancy’s was so unrelievedly black you would have thought she was an Indian. Or a gypsy. He was nice enough, she supposed, a good kid, but no one would mistake him for a genius. “I don’t know,” he said, looking to his mother, then back to her again, “—the people, you know, the ones we’re like all supposed to hide from?”

“You kids don’t have to hide,” Susannah said, but they did. Nobody wanted to pay seventy-five dollars and upward for a mystic retreat and see a sneering contingent of adolescents slinking around. The kids were to stay strictly to themselves, out of sight, out of earshot. Tim had ordained it so and Dick had set them up in the house out back called the Bowling Alley, which had plenty of room for all of them and, as its name indicated, sported its own bowling alley in the basement to help keep them entertained.

Just then, a face appeared in the window over the kitchen table. She saw a man there, a stranger, mid-thirties, gray fedora, gray herringbone overcoat with the collar pulled up, white shirt, blue tie. He began rapping at the glass. Where, he mouthed, do we park?

She gave him an abrupt wave, then turned to Tommy. “Can’t one of the men take care of it?”

Tommy—he was already picking at the relish tray, folding a piece of bologna into his mouth—just shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody’s around.”

“They can’t be here already,” Paulette said, all evidence to the contrary.

“All right, all right,” she heard herself say. “I’ll do it.”

She went to the door, where somebody’s jacket—one of the kids’?—was hanging on a hook there and she shrugged into it, all the while making conciliatory gestures to the man in the window, who seemed to be pressing his face to the glass now. She was just about to open the door when she realized that she’d have to talk to him, which would spoil the whole illusion, as if his seeing her there in the steamed-over kitchen mashing potatoes wasn’t demystifying enough, and so she held up her palm to stall him while she ran out the other door and through the dining room to the front hall, where she snatched up half a dozen sheets of the instructions she’d typed up and mimeographed herself. There was no one around. “Dick!” she shouted up the stairs. “Fitz!” No answer. So she hurried out the front door, thinking to cut round the side of the house.