To avoid any trouble for Toni, she pitched in on the daily “decontamination” chores. She couldn’t call it “cleaning”; the space shuttle went through less thorough scrubdowns! It soon became clear that all this ultracleanliness was at Rod’s insistence. Only the childrens’ rooms and the kitchen and laundry were allowed to look “lived-in.” Everything else must look as if it was ready for a “House Beautiful” tour. At all times, regardless of anything else.

Toni’s explanation was that Rod might have to bring a client in at any moment, and that client had to be impressed from the moment he walked in the door. But Jennie figured that even Toni knew better than that, just from the hesitant way in which she offered the rather lame explanation. This was just one more way that Rod controlled his wife and proved his control to others.

Only one room was off-limits; the locked office. Toni didn’t even have a key to it. Every time she came, Jennie surreptitiously checked the door, but it always remained locked, and behind that door there was nothing to Medicine Senses but a black hole.

Frustrating.

Very frustrating.

Still, if she could not get into the office, she nevertheless had the mission of getting Toni and her kids out of Rod’s influence so that the mi-ah-luschka would leave them alone. She had a foreboding feeling that the Little People were losing what little patience they possessed, and would start something soon. Toni started at every odd sound, and kept looking for something out of the corner of her eye. She might just have started to see them … which would mean they were preparing to work some revenge.

Slowly, she began planting hints. How “normal” husbands might lose their tempers once in a while, but they didn’t blame their wives for everything that went wrong. And that adult human beings did not take out their frustrations on other humans beings. When Toni seemed, tentatively, to be receptive, she planted a few more hints, describing the Women’s Shelter and some of the women she had taken there for help.

She began planting other hints as well; especially after she learned that Toni had some remote Cherokee blood in her. She told stories over coffee, about spiritual or supernatural experiences of any number of people she’d known. Harmless stories, mostly, involving brief glimpses into the Spirit Worlds and the like, and stressing how people who might think they were hallucinating could very well actually be seeing things that those with less open minds could not.

Jennie was reminded irresistibly of the winter that Mooncrow taught her how to make wild birds eat out of her hand. She had spent hours at a time, sitting in the snow, with a handful of sunflower seeds. Not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe, while the cardinals, titmice, and chickadees ventured nearer and nearer.