Tony wound Rivera up to the point of spontaneous combustion while Angie tried to concentrate on the directions she had downloaded off the Internet. The Parkway was as wide as a four-lane highway with an island of trees and shrubs running down the median strip. Houses stood far back from the street overshadowed by palm trees and oaks draped with moss. A carriage house roof was all but lost in a great mass of vines covered with bright orange-red flowers; Angie saw box hedges sculpted into the shape of urns and dogs; a pale pink stucco house surrounded by rose gardens. The air was different down here: wetter, heavier, hotter, and filled with smells that settled on the tongue. Sugary flowery smells and sharper, herby ones, green things growing and rotting, river water.

Rivera had been nursing her irritation for the last ten minutes and it erupted quite suddenly. “And if Julia Roberts did come from Ogilvie, what then? A shrine in front of her birthplace?”

“Maybe she’ll come visiting at Christmas. Southerners are big on family.”

“Cliché number eighty-seven,” Rivera said. “If you speed it up you might make a hundred before we get where we’re going.”

“Too late,” Angie said, pulling up to the redbrick security kiosk at the main gates of the university. “We’re here.”

A wisp of steam rose from the hood, snakelike. “And not a minute too soon.”

According to the guard, the director of housing was waiting for them in her office rather than at the English department. That piece of news was so welcome that Angie couldn’t even find it in herself to worry about the van, which they left in the kiosk parking lot, twitching like a dog with fleas.

“Five on a Friday afternoon in the summer,” Angie said aloud, because she liked the sound of it. Unlikely that there would be anybody around.

“Sure is quiet,” Tony said.

“As the grave,” Rivera agreed.

Just visible to the far right between the trees were glimpses of another street, this one lined with stores. “I think that’s Main Street,” Angie said.

“Let’s go look.” Rivera would have jogged off, but Angie caught her elbow and turned her back toward the building in front of them.

“One mountain at a time.” She looked at the sheet of paper in her hand. “This particular mountain is called Harriet Darling, and she’s behind that door.”

It’s the very nicest house we’ve got and it’s so convenient, we thought since y’all will be working together it made sense to have you share? I think you’ll be comfortable …”

Over Harriet Darling’s big head of hair Angie caught Rivera’s look: she was mesmerized by the patter, horrified and fascinated, and completely at a loss.

Tony, on the other hand, had latched onto Harriet and was doing everything in his power to encourage her.