Among the oaks, owls expressed their curiosity to one another.

At last Ed leaned back in his chair, though his scowl did not relent. His luxuriant eyebrows were still interlaced, as if engaged in copulation.

From the porch floor beside his chair, he picked up a package that Jeffy had not previously noticed. The twelve-inch-square white pasteboard gift box was discolored by time and soiled. The matching lid had been secured with a length of string.

Ed placed the item on his lap and held it in both hands. As he stared at the package, his solemn scowl seemed to shade into dread. Occasionally he was afflicted by a benign tremor in his left hand, and now the pads of his fingers tapped spastically against the box.

He raised his head and met Jeffy’s eyes again and said, “This contains the key.”

After an ensuing silence, Jeffy said, “What key?”

“The key to everything.”

“Sounds important.”

“They must never get their hands on it.”

“They who?”

“Better you don’t know,” Ed said again. “I’m giving it to you.”

Jeffy raised his hands, palms toward his guest in a gesture of polite decline. “That’s kind of you, Ed, but I can’t accept. I’ve got a house key, a car key. That’s all I need. I wouldn’t know what to do with a key to everything.”

Snatching the box off his lap and holding it against his chest, Ed declared, “No, no. You must do nothing with it! Nothing! You must not open it. Never! ”

Previously just quaint and quirky, Ed seemed to be crossing a mental bridge from eccentric to a condition more disturbing.

3

Mr. Spooky wasn’t scary, just odd, and Amity had no concern that he would attack them with a chain saw or hack them to pieces with a meat cleaver or anything like that. She didn’t need to lock the front door, but Daddy was paranoid in a nice way, always looking out for her. She figured that, even after seven years, he hadn’t gotten over losing his wife and half expected to lose his daughter, as well. He would probably forever be overprotective. Amity would be forty and married to Justin Dakota—who lived three doors away and might one day develop into suitable husband material—and they would have three kids of their own and be living in a fabulous house on a hill overlooking the sea, and because Justin would be a movie star or a rich technology wizard, and because Amity would be a famous novelist, they would have beaucoup security, like a squadron of bodyguards, but Daddy would still show up every night to check that all the doors and windows were locked, tuck her into bed, and warn her not to take candy from strangers. He was the dearest man, and she loved him with all her heart, really and truly. But she knew that the day was coming, a few years from now, when she would need to sit him down and patiently explain that too much concern on his part could be suffocating and could put a serious strain on their relationship. Already, this was somewhat true; after all, she was closer to twelve than to eleven.

After locking the door and turning on the lights, she passed the living room with its big armchairs and its shelves containing the fantasy novels they enjoyed. She followed the hallway that was lined with original Art Deco posters for products like Taittinger champagne and Angelus “white shoe dressing” and the 1934 Plymouth automobile, and a 1925 nightclub show starring Josephine Baker in Paris. Beyond her father’s workshop, in which he restored function and luster to beautiful old Bakelite radios and other collectible Art Deco–period objects, she came to her bedroom at the back of the house, where Snowball waited for her.

At night and when she and her father went to a restaurant, Snowball lived in a cage. This wasn’t cruel, because the cage was large, with an exercise wheel. Snowball was a white mouse, small enough to sit in the palm of her hand. He was very well behaved. She could take him anywhere in a jacket pocket, and he would not come out on his own, but only when she retrieved him. He never even once peed or pooped in her pocket. Even if eventually he had an accident, it wouldn’t be a catastrophe, considering that he weighed like four ounces and didn’t generate a humongous amount of end product.

His coat was white, his eyes as black as ink, his tail pale pink. He was cuter than the kind of mice you didn’t want in your house, an elegant little gentleman. If Amity were Cinderella, Snowball would morph into a magnificent stallion to pull her carriage. That’s the kind of special mouse he was.

Now, after she turned on her TV and streamed an animated Disney movie that she had seen many times and that didn’t have a cat in it, she took Snowball out of his cage. She sat in an armchair, and for a while he ran up and down her arms and across her shoulders, pausing now and then to stare at her with what she believed was affection. Then he settled in her lap, on his back. She rubbed his tummy with one finger, and he relaxed into an ecstatic trance.

With Snowball, she was practicing for a dog.

She wanted a dog, and Daddy was willing to buy a puppy, but she needed to find out if she could be a good mother. What if she got a dog, which could live twelve or fourteen years, and then discovered, after a year, that she didn’t want to walk the poor thing any longer or exercise it or even just hang out with it. People changed, didn’t want the same things anymore, and then they broke hearts. If she failed a dog, broke its heart, Amity would hate herself, she really would, totally and forever.

The man at the pet store had said that Snowball, a unique breed with a glossy coat, would live maybe four years. She’d had him two years, and she wasn’t the least bored with him yet. She loved him to the extent that a person could love a mouse that didn’t have a big personality like a dog.

Before she risked getting a dog, she also had to find out how she would deal with the loss of Snowball when he died. If losing a mouse wrecked her, then a dog’s death would absolutely destroy her, no doubt about it, none at all. She’d been only four, much too little to understand what was happening, when her mother walked out. She hardly remembered Michelle. Yet the loss was still with her, not really a pain, more like an emptiness, as if something that ought to be inside of her were missing. She worried that more losses would leave other empty spaces in her, until she would be as hollow as a shell from which the egg had been drained through a pinhole.

Sometimes, like now, she couldn’t remember what her mother looked like, which kind of scared her. A few weeks ago, in a mood, she had taken the framed photograph of Michelle off her desk, where Daddy encouraged her to keep it, and put it in a bottom drawer. Maybe the time had come to display the photo again.

On her lap, Snowball had closed his eyes. His mouth hung open. He was a picture of bliss as she stroked his belly.

His chisel-edged teeth were bared. The teeth of mice never stopped growing. Snowball had to gnaw at something for a significant part of every day to keep his teeth from becoming so long that they inhibited his ability to eat, which was why his cage featured three gnawing blocks.

No living thing on the earth was without its burdens.

Daddy said our burdens made our spirits stronger and therefore were blessings. He knew a lot and was right about most things, but this burdens-as-blessings business was bullsugar, really and truly, at least based on her experience. Daddy probably believed it. He said that beyond every darkness, dawn approached. He was crazy patient and rarely got angry.

Amity wasn’t as patient as her father, though she wanted to be. A lot of things pissed her off. Recently, she’d made a list of what pissed her off, so she wouldn’t forget anything and go all squishy like one of those morning-TV kid-show puppets that always wanted you to be “nicer than twice as nice as nice.” The list looked stupid, so she tore it up and threw it away. But she remembered everything on it, including that it pissed her off, really and truly, not to have a mother. When you were angry about something, you couldn’t at the same time be crushingly sad about it, which was a blessing.

As she continued to stroke Snowball’s tummy, she wondered what bullsugar Mr. Spooky was spouting out there on the porch with her patient father.

4

The eerie ululation of coyotes on the hunt issued from the farther end of the canyon, and a scrim of cloud diminished the moon, so that the silvered yard grew tarnished.

“I’m leaving this with you,” Ed solemnly intoned, holding forth the soiled, string-tied box, “because the fate of humanity depends on it never falling into the wrong hands and because, of everyone I have known in my life, I trust no one more than you, Jeffrey Wallace Coltrane.”

“That’s very sweet, but you hardly know me,” Jeffy said.