“No, my mama was a witch. I’m just a woman with a unique gift who enjoys her solitude. If dressing like a sideshow Gypsy and hanging chicken bones around my house keeps people away, I’m happy to do it.” She patted his hand. “That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a little company from time to time, and yours in particular. Anyway, I don’t wear a pointy hat, I don’t cook supper in a cauldron, and I certainly don’t fly around on a broomstick.”

“So what do you call these gifts? Like what you did to my hand, and what you did to Coodles?”

“I call them healing the injured and bringing the dead back to life.”

“How often do you use your powers?”

“Only when there’s good reason.”

“And your cats? How many of them are . . .”

“Only a handful are BA.”

“BA?”

“Born again.” She leaned back and thought for a moment. “Let’s see … yes, only three of my cats are BA at the moment: Fluffy, Hitler, and Wishbone. Of course, Coodles makes four.”

“Hitler?”

“A black Persian. Mean little bastard, but he keeps the snakes away.”

“Ever had any mishaps?”

“What kind of mishaps?”

“Like was there ever a case when a resurrection didn’t quite take the way it was supposed to?”

“Did Coodles look all right to you yesterday?”

“Yes,” Cole admitted. “He looked fine.”

A proud smile cracked her lips. “Mama taught me well.”

Cole tapped another Winston on the tabletop, packing the tobacco. Mona took another for herself. When both were lit, he peered through the smoke and said, “What other things have you, you know … brought back?”

“Oh, hummingbirds, jackrabbits, armadillos. Years ago I brought back a gerbil for a little boy in the neighborhood. Napoleon.”

“That was his name?”

“The gerbil’s, not the boy’s. Napoleon got hold of a Hershey bar, croaked from a caffeine overdose.”

Cole wasn’t sure how to ask the real question he wanted to pose, although he sensed that she was expecting it. He decided on a roundabout approach. “Forgive me, but I know that your husband passed on some time ago. I was just wondering . . .”

“Why I didn’t bring him back?”

“Yes. Could you have brought him back?”

“Well, him I was glad to see dead. Good-for-nothing bastard is what he was. And it’d have been tricky to bring him back even if I’d wanted to—he met his end with a tree shredder. Damn thing got hold of his shirttail and just kept chewing.”

“But would it work? On humans, I mean.”

“Don’t see why not. Just might take a little more dead animal flesh to summon the forces.”

“Animal flesh?”

“You know, for the”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“procedure.”

“Right. The procedure. Can I ask you something else?”