The next day, David talked Jennie into giving him some of the paperwork to do so that they could take in a movie. The day after, he dragged her off to Bell’s Amusement Park. The day after that, he varied the routine by kidnapping her for a picnic at lunch.

It all paid off handsomely. That worry-line was becoming fainter, and she had less of a pinched look about her. And there still was no talk of him moving out of the spare room.

In the meantime, he split his time between doing that “legwork” for her—which included, to his surprise and pleasure, being granted some of the surveillance she had been doing—and reading the books and private notebooks that “mysteriously” turned up in his room. Some of them surprised him; stuff he would have thought was far too much along the lines of what you’d find in a so-called “occult bookstore” for Mooncrow to have any respect for. But then he remembered that business about learning things from unlikely sources, and read what had been left him without comment.

When he wasn’t away from the house on one errand or another, he watched Mooncrow teaching the neighborhood kids without them ever realizing that they were learning anything. They just thought he told neat stories, and knew how to do excellent things. He’d even weaned them from Nintendo to real archery practice, and they liked it. Sometimes, David even helped the old man, when he could.

This morning, since Jennie didn’t have anything for him to do, Mooncrow had asked him to help with the lessons, and he’d been pleased to discover that he hadn’t lost his knack for the sport. He and Mooncrow were watching the kids practice their archery with a critical eye when the old man suddenly cleared his throat in a way that usually preceded a lesson. David gave him a glance out of the corner of his eye. Surely he couldn’t intend to say anything about Medicine in front of these kids!

But when the words finally came, they were not exactly what he’d expected.

“You and Kestrel have been getting along a lot better,” Mooncrow remarked, with such an expression of absolute innocence that David immediately suspected some deeper purpose in the comment.

“It didn’t hurt to apologize for some things I said when we broke up—and some more I said later,” he replied, very carefully. “I was out of line, both times, assuming things I had no business assuming. She overreacted, but—I can’t blame her, and I’d have done the same if our positions had been reversed.”