Merle promised he’d get to a fence, but not during a head cold or in the middle of a heat wave or when there’d be a Tigers game on television. Lemon got loose several times—Rita was incapable of shutting a door or a mayonnaise lid—and one morning Lemon was picked up down by the docks, having nearly been killed by several cars. Two nights later, when Rita went out for her nightly session in the greenhouse, Lemon bolted into the darkness. Polly went to bed crying and could hear Edmund crying, too, and Jane and Merle arguing. Jane slept on the couch.

They got up early the next morning, but Jane and Merle and Papa had no luck finding Lemon before they left for classes. Dee made Edmund and Polly waffles and said she had a plan. They were going to make little Lemons. She dropped lumps of clay in front of them and formed a third into the shape of a dog. “Like this,” she said, pinching until she came up with something that looked like a pointer. “Yours can look like a hippo, Edmund. It doesn’t matter. The point is to believe it’s a dog, and to go out and call for her.”

Rita came through the kitchen and made a piece of toast without saying a word. She was painting again in the greenhouse, stacks of small oils tilted against every bench, ignoring the new canvases upstairs. Dee did not give ground and kept working there, too, but she said that Rita was at least quiet and the paintings were good. This stage would last about ten days.

“Now go down to the Sound, and wish for her to run home, and throw them in,” said Dee. “Mine, too. And start calling for her on your way back.”

Dee didn’t say, This is a spell, this is magic, but what were they to think, and why would they doubt? They set off, feeling jumpy, and Edmund broke into a run.

“I see the witch,” he said. “She’s standing in the upstairs window, watching us.”

Polly wouldn’t look.

“I think she’s my mother as a ghost,” said Edmund.

Polly gave a shuddering skip and they ran through the skunk cabbage ravine. When they reached the sand, the tide was almost out. They hopped past marooned jellyfish, trying to land on bare sand rather than a mussel or a tiny crab. All this time they held the clay Lemons, and when they reached the water they were left with their errand.

“Does she know how to do things like this?”

“I don’t know,” said Polly.