“They’ve already done so much—maybe they’ll be satisfied for a while,” Toni replied, voice tight with unshed tears. Jennie’s stomach twisted; bad enough that the poor woman had gone through losing her child—the rest of this was torture of the innocent. But the mi-ah-luschka had no hearts. “And maybe they’ve seen how much Rod thinks of me and the other two kids. Anyway, if I can, I’d like to do something.” She frowned for a moment, as if she had suddenly recalled something. “You know, there used to be a couple of cardboard boxes full of some strange things in his office; they used to give me the creeps. … That was just before all this stuff, the strange accidents, started happening.”

“Is the stuff there now?” Jennie asked quickly, hope rising. For that, and the chance that the “strange things” might come from Watches-Over-The-Land’s grave, she’d break down the damn office door and to hell with legalities.

But Toni shook her head. “No,” she replied, dashing Jennie’s hopes again. “No, he took it out right about the time he started locking the door, and I haven’t seen it since. I still don’t know what was in those boxes. All I know is, they were really dirty, and they weren’t the kind of thing I ever thought he’d have around.”

“If it was artifacts, he’s probably sold them by now,” David said, sotto voce. Jennie grimaced, but he was probably right.

“Don’t risk your own safety, but when it comes to information on Rod Calligan, we could use the inside help,” Jennie told her, after a moment. “Every leg up we can get on this case is something we didn’t have before. I’d be interested, and so would the cops. It would be nice to be able to prove he booby-trapped his own land. I’m not sure that he could be charged with manslaughter, but at the least, he could get reckless endangerment, and it would leave things wide open for civil suits by the survivors.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Toni Calligan replied, her chin up, with a look of determination in her eyes that belied the black eye, the bruises, the swollen lip. “I promise.”

David took the city bus back to the house to tell Mooncrow what had been happening; at least now they had a good theory that made all the pieces fit. If Rod Calligan were systematically robbing gravesites and caching the artifacts at the mall to be dug up in the course of excavation, it explained just about everything anomalous.

And it explained the anger of the Little People.