She briefly considered bringing in Mooncrow; he packed a lot of clout when he cared to use it—mostly he didn’t.

She knew why; he was saving that “clout” for a real emergency. This wasn’t; not yet, anyway. Burial sites were looted all the time. There was no proof that this one had been looted with malice and intent.

She pulled onto the interstate behind a long-haul trucker, and settled in to let him set the pace. Clout is only good so many times; Grandfather is right. It’s attacking, rather than persuading. We’d better save it for when we need it.

Given that—

On impulse, she took the Claremore turnoff. With luck, Dad would be home for lunch.

It felt kind of odd to be back here, sitting across from her father at the kitchen table, B.L.T. in both hands, windows wide open to the light breeze. The house had been built in the days when a lot of things went on in the kitchen; most of the social life of the family, in fact. The kitchen was one of the largest rooms in the house, big enough that one corner of it had been set up as her mother’s office, with a phone, a fax machine, and a computer, and there was still plenty of room left over.

The kitchen table stood under one of the windows, and it was nearly as old as the house, big enough to seat eight comfortably; a real farmhouse table. Right now she and her father were the only ones occupying it. Every time she came home, she got hit with nostalgia, of eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with her brothers, of family holidays all around the big table, some of which did not correspond with things like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. …

“You ought to eat that instead of staring at it,” her father said, after a few minutes of staring off into nowhere on her part. “Your grandfather says you don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive.”

She started, and grinned ruefully. “Grandfather doesn’t see me hitting the fast-food stands, either,” she admitted. “Man does not live by yogurt alone. There are also Frisco burgers, Rex chicken, and fry-bread and honey.”

Dad laughed, and she obliged him by starting in on her own sandwich. Mom had redecorated the kitchen, with new miniblinds on the windows, and refinished the old kitchen table and the cabinets, taking them down to the natural wood. So while it held a boatload of memories, at least it didn’t look the way it had when she was a kid.