“What do you bet she didn’t tell her boss the whole truth?” Rose suggests. “The candy striper probably thought I’d just walked in; she didn’t know I’d been to the lockdown. Karen doesn’t know why I was there, that I stole the files. I bet she woke up around four A.M. with a terrific headache, got scared, and never told a soul.”

“Afraid she’d get fired. I’d fire her. I’m hanging up now,” Marion says.

And she does.

Pacing in a teepee is not particularly satisfying, but Rose is managing it. Mel and Royal sit on the floor cross-legged amid the clutter of items Rose asked Mel to bring. They watch her, heads following as if viewing a truncated tennis game.

“We’ve got the knifeman’s information, but what do we do with it?” Mel muses.

“Give it to the police,” Royal says. Royal is a sensible boy. Rose likes him. During the medical triage and powwow the previous night, Rose learned his dad is an honest-to-gosh Secret Service agent working for Homeland Security. She suspects Royal of having inherited right-wing law-and-order tendencies. That might not serve her in the present crisis.

“No police,” she says, stepping over the wolf’s head. “They’ll bundle me off to some psych-evaluation institution and keep me there until I rot.”

“Gigi thinks women of a certain age are not given proper credence,” Mel says. It is a direct quote from one of Rose’s tirades.

“Old people are like sheep,” Rose grumbles. “Everybody wants to fleece us.”

“That’s because you’re so helpless and fluffy,” Mel says.

“I refuse to be fluffy,” Rose fumes. “Since guns are legal, there should at least be a law that you can only buy them if your Medicare supplement covers the expense.”

“Do you want me to get you a gun, Mrs. Dennis?” Royal asks. He sounds absolutely sincere.

Mel drops her jaw. A gesture identical to her mother’s, Rose notes with a stab of pain.

“You know where and how to buy a gun?” Mel asks incredulously.

“No,” Royal says. “But I could lend her one of Dad’s.”

This strikes Rose as hilarious, but she doesn’t laugh lest she offend. She knows nothing about the workings of the fourteen-year-old male mind. Or any male mind, for that matter. She was forty before she realized that when she asked a man what he was thinking and he said, “Nothing,” he wasn’t lying.

“No guns,” Rose says.

“She only poisons people,” Mel tells Royal in a stage whisper.

“Only when there is no other recourse,” Rose defends herself.

“Mr. Martinez was probably the hired help,” Royal says. Mr. Martinez—Rose does so admire his manners. “The police could find out who hired him.”

Such faith the boy has.

“I can find out who hired him,” Rose says.

“How?” Mel asks.

“I’m going to ask him.”

The kids exchange a look.