“That’s wise,” said the man in the yellow suit. “I’ll be as brief as possible.” He took off his hat and laid it on the mantel, and then he stood tapping his foot on the littered hearth, facing them. His face was smooth and empty. “I was born west of here,” he began, “and all the time I was growing up, my grandmother told me stories. They were wild, unbelievable stories, but I believed them. They involved a dear friend of my grandmother’s who married into a very odd family. Married the older of two sons, and they had two children. It was after the children were born that she began to see that the family was odd. This friend of my grandmother’s, she lived with her husband for twenty years, and strange to say, he never got any older. She did, but he didn’t. And neither did his mother or his father or his brother. People began to wonder about that family, and my grandmother’s friend decided at last that they were witches, or worse. She left her husband and came with her children to live at my grandmother’s house for a short while. Then she moved west. I don’t know what became of her. But my mother still remembers playing with the children. They were all about the same age. There was a son, and a daughter.”

“Anna!” whispered Miles.

Mae burst out, “You got no call to come and bring us pain!”

And Tuck added roughly, “You got something to say, you better come to the point and say it.”

“There, there, now,” said the man in the yellow suit. He spread his long, white fingers in a soothing gesture. “Hear me out. As I’ve told you, I was fascinated by my grandmother’s stories. People who never grew older! It was fantastic. It took possession of me. I decided to devote my life to finding out if it could be true, and if so, how and why. I went to school, I went to a university, I studied philosophy, metaphysics, even a little medicine. None of it did me any good. Oh, there were ancient legends, but nothing more. I nearly gave it up. It began to seem ridiculous, and a waste of time. I went home. My grandmother was very old by then. I took her a present one day, a music box. And when I gave it to her, it reminded her of something: the woman, the mother of the family that didn’t grow old, she had had a music box.”

Mae’s hand went to the pocket of her skirt. Her mouth opened, and then she shut it again with a snap.

“That music box played a very particular tune,” the man in the yellow suit went on. “My grandmother’s friend and her children—Anna? Was that the daughter’s name?—they’d heard it so often that they knew it by heart. They’d taught it to my mother during the short time they lived in the house. We talked about it then, all those years afterward, my mother, my grandmother, and I. My mother was able to remember the melody, finally. She taught it to me. That was nearly twenty years ago now, but I kept it in my head. It was a clue.”