They made wishes, threw in the clay dogs, and watched them sink and bump in the shallow, calm waves. No Lemon galloped out of the Sound. They made their way back through the ravine and were just short of the witch’s house when a door or a window or some piece of wood on the property slammed. They stopped and waited. Polly felt as if her heart were lifting through her ribs, splitting into slices. A keening sound, a rustle. Edmund put his hand on Polly’s back and pushed her forward, up the hill, and they were almost past the house when they heard the wail again and turned to see Lemon on the witch’s porch. She was sitting there, not running, not looking at them.

Edmund called and Lemon didn’t move until he walked onto the porch and took her by the collar. For a minute Polly worried they had the wrong dog. They trotted toward their yard, through the gate by Dee’s greenhouse, and there was Dee, gaping at them.

“Where?” she asked.

“She was on the witch’s porch,” said Polly. “She acts like she doesn’t know us.”

But Lemon was waking up. She’d flopped over on the hard, dry mud of the ruined lawn, showing her stomach. Dee walked toward her slowly.

“Who is Mrs. Maw?” asked Edmund, finally.

“We’ve never asked,” said Dee. “If people don’t want to be seen, we don’t force them.” She bent down shakily and ran her hand down the dog’s stomach. Dee left the hand there and they all looked: Lemon’s long tail was now a stub, stitches dark against her blond and white fur.

When Papa came home and saw the dog’s stump and looked at his wife and granddaughter drinking wine early in the day, he walked down the hill, and they all waited on the porch, listening, until he returned.

They spoke through a crack in the door. Mrs. Maw told Papa she’d found Lemon on the beach, tied to a log below the tidemark, as if someone was trying to drown her. Mrs. Maw hadn’t recognized the dog, or at least known she belonged to Papa’s house. She’d given Lemon a drug for pain, to make her sleep, and finished taking the tail off, and sewed it up.

“The woman’s name is Mag,” Papa said. A small smile: “Mag Maw, a witch name.” Did he believe her? He wasn’t sure.

It’s true, it’s true, said the parrot.

The next day, Merle started a fence around the property, despite a cherry-colored nose from his head cold. He would do it right; he’d grown up in Michigan, knowing how to do things. Knobbed posts, a pretty old-fashioned wire. He praised the chained dog as he worked unless she put her paws up on a post or the wire, and then he beat her.