In the House of Gingerbread

THE woodcutter came up the walk, and the ornate old house watched him through venetian-blinded eyes. He wore a redbrown tweed suit; his unmarked car was at the curb. The house felt his feet on its porch, his quick knock at its door. It wondered how he had driven along the path through the trees. The witch would split his bones to get the marrow; it would tell the witch.

It rang its bell.

Tina Heim opened the door, keeping it on the chain but more or less expecting a neighbor with coleslaw. She had heard you were supposed to bring chicken soup for Death; here it seemed to be slaw, though someone had brought Waldorf salad for Jerry.

“I’m Lieutenant Price,” the woodcutter said, unsmiling. He held out a badge in a black leather case. “You’re Mrs. Heim? I’d like to talk to you.”

She began, “Have the children—”

“I’d like to talk to you,” he repeated. “It might be nicer if we did it in the house and sitting down.”

“All right.” She unhooked the chain and opened the door.

He stepped inside. “You were busy in the kitchen.”

She had not seen him glance at her apron, but apparently he had. “I was making gingerbread men for school lunches,” she explained. “I like to put a few cookies in their lunches every day.”

He nodded, still unsmiling. “Smells good. We can talk in there, and you can watch them so they don’t burn.”

“They’re out already, it only takes a few minutes in the microwave. Can you—” It was too late; he had slipped by her and was out of sight. She hurried through the dark foyer and shadowy dining room, and found him sitting on a dinette chair in her kitchen. “Can you just barge into someone’s home this way?”

He shook his head. “You know, I didn’t think you could bake in a microwave oven.”

“It’s hard to get cakes to rise, but nice for cookies.” She wavered between hospitality and anger, and decided on the former. It seemed safer, and she could always get angry later. “Would you care for one?”

He nodded.

“And some coffee? Or we have milk if you’d prefer that.”

“Coffee will be okay,” he told her. “No, Mrs. Heim, we can’t just barge into somebody’s house; we have to get a search warrant. But once you let us in, you can’t stop us from going wherever we want to. I could go up to your bedroom now, for example, and search your bureau.”

“You’re not—”

He shook his head. “I was just giving you an example. That’s the way the law is, in this state.”

She stared down uncomprehendingly at the little mug with the smiley face on its side. It was full of black coffee. She had poured it without thinking, like an automaton. “Do you want cream? Sugar?”

“No, thanks. Sit down, Mrs. Heim.”

Tina sat. He had taken the chair she usually used. She took the one across from him, Jerry’s chair, positioning it carefully and feeling as though she had gone somewhere for a job interview.

“Now then,” he said. He made a steeple of his fingers. It seemed an old man’s gesture, though he looked no older than she. This is my house, she thought. If this is an interview, then I’m interviewing him. She knew it was not true.

“Mrs. Heim, your husband died last year. In November.”

She nodded guardedly.

“And the cause of death was—?”

“Lung cancer. It’s on the death certificate.” The covers of a thousand paperbacks flashed past in her imagination: Murder on the Orient Express, Fletch, The Roman Hat Mystery. “You said you were a lieutenant—are you on the Homicide Squad? My god, I’m in a mystery novel!”

“No,” he said again. “This isn’t fiction, Mrs. Heim. Just a little inquiry. Your late husband was a heavy smoker?”

She shook her head. “Jerry didn’t smoke.”

“Maybe he’d been a heavy smoker, and quit?”

“No,” she said. “Jerry never smoked at all.”

Price nodded as though to himself. “I’ve read that sidewise smoke gets people sometimes.” He sipped his coffee. “Are you a smoker, Mrs. Heim? I didn’t see any ashtrays.”

“No. No, I don’t smoke, Lieutenant. I never have.”

“Uh-huh.” His right hand left the handle of the smiley mug and went to his shirt pocket. “As it happens I smoke, Mrs. Heim. Would it bother you?”

“Of course not,” she lied. The ashtrays for guests were put away in the cabinet. She brought him one.

He got out a cigarette and lit it with a disposable plastic lighter. “I’m trying to quit,” he told her. He drew smoke into his lungs. “Was your husband a chemist, Mrs. Heim? Did he work in a chemical plant?”

She shook her head. “Jerry was an attorney.” Surely Price knew all this.

“And his age at death was—?”

“Forty-one.”

“That’s very young for a nonsmoker to die of lung cancer, Mrs. Heim.”

“That’s what Jerry’s doctor said.” Not wanting to cry again, Tina poured coffee for herself, adding milk and diet sweetener, stirring until time enough had passed for her to get her feelings once more under control.

When she sat down again he said, “People must have wondered. My wife died about three years ago, and I know I got a lot of questions.”

She nodded absently, looking at the little plate on the other side of the dinette table. The gingerbread man had lain there, untouched. Now it was gone. She said, “They X-rayed Jerry’s lungs, Lieutenant. The X-rays showed cancer. That’s what we were told.”

“I know,” he said.

“But you don’t believe Jerry died of cancer?”

He shrugged. “And now your little boy. What was his name?”

Tina tried to keep all emotion from her voice, and felt she succeeded. “It was Alan.”

“Just last month. Must have been pretty hard on you.”

“It was. Lieutenant, can’t we be honest with each other? What are we talking about?”

“All right.” He took another sip of coffee. “Anyhow, you’ve still got two more. A boy and a girl, isn’t that right?”

Tina nodded. “Henry and Gail. But Henry and Gail aren’t actually mine.”

For the first time, he looked surprised. “Why’s that?”

“They’re stepchildren, that’s all. Of course, I love them as if they were my own, or anyway I try to.”

“I didn’t know that,” he told her. “But Alan was—?”

“Our child. Jerry’s and mine.”

“Your husband had been married before. Divorce?”

“Yes. Jerry got full custody. Rona doesn’t—didn’t—even have visiting rights.”

“Like that,” he said.

“Yes, like that, Lieutenant.”

“And now that your husband’s dead?” Price flicked ashes into the salad plate that had held the gingerbread man.

“I don’t know. If Rona tries to take them, I’ll go to court; then we’ll see. Won’t you tell me what this is about?”

He nodded. “It’s about insurance, really, Mrs. Heim. Your husband had a large policy.”

She nodded guardedly. “They paid.”

Price was no longer listening, not to her. “Did Henry or Gail stay home from school, Mrs. Heim? It’s only one-thirty.”

“No, they won’t be back until after three. Do you want to speak to them?”

He shook his head. “I heard footsteps upstairs. A kid’s, I thought.”

“Henry’s eighteen, Lieutenant, and Gail’s sixteen. Believe me, they don’t sound like kids stamping around up there. Do you want to go up and see? You don’t need an excuse—so you said.”

He ground out his cigarette in the salad plate. “That’s right, I don’t need an excuse. Alan was poisoned, wasn’t he, Mrs. Heim? Lead poisoning?”

She nodded slowly, pretending there was a lovely clay mask on her face, a mask that would be dissolved by tears, broken by any expression. “He ate paint chips, Lieutenant. In his closet there was a place where the old paint was flaking off. We had repainted his room, but not in there. He was only two, and—and—”

“It’s okay,” he told her. “I’ve got two kids of my own.”

“No, it will never be okay.” She tore off a paper towel and stood in a corner, her back to him, blowing her nose and dabbing at her tears. She hoped that when she turned around, he would be gone.

“Feeling better now?” he asked. He had lit another cigarette.

“A little. You know, it’s not fair.”

“What isn’t?”

“Your smoking like that. But you’re still alive, and Jerry never smoked, but Jerry’s gone.”

“I’m trying to quit.” He said it mechanically, toying with his cigarette. “Actually, some insurance people pretty much agree with you, Mrs. Heim.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Your husband had a policy with Attica Life, a hundred thousand dollars.”

Automatically she shook her head. “Two hundred thousand. That was what they paid.”

He inhaled smoke and puffed it from his nostrils. “It was a hundred thousand, but it had a double indemnity provision for cancer. A lot of them do now, because people are so worried about it. Cancer generally means big hospital bills.”

This was it. She waited, fists clenched in her lap.

“Not with your Jerry, of course. Or anyway, not so much. He was dead in what? Three weeks?”

“Yes,” she said. “Three weeks after he went into the hospital.”

“And anyway he had hospitalization insurance, didn’t he? With his law firm?”

She nodded.

“And you’d taken out policies on the kids too, and on you, naturally. Twenty-five thousand on each kid, wasn’t it?”

“It still is. We have a very good agent, Lieutenant; I’ll introduce you.”

“It still is on Henry and Gail, right? Twenty-five thousand with double indemnity for accidental death. When little Alan died, that was accidental death. A little kid, a baby, swallows paint chips—they call that accidental poisoning.”

“You think I killed him.” If only my eyes could blast, she thought, he’d be frying like bacon. He’d be burning in Hell. “You think I killed my husband and my son to get that money, don’t you, Lieutenant?” She tried to picture it, his brown suit blazing, his face seared, his hair on fire.

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t, Mrs. Heim. Not really.”

“Then why are you here?”

He ground out the new cigarette beside the last. “Your insurance company’s making waves.”

He paused, but she said nothing.

“Do you blame them? Two claims, big claims, double indemnity claims, in less than two years.”

“I see.” She felt drained now; the fire had gone out. “What do you want me to do—take a lie detector test and say that I didn’t murder my husband? That I didn’t poison Alan? All right, I will.”

“I want you to sign something, that’s all. This will most likely be the end of it.” The hand that had fumbled for his cigarettes was fumbling again, this time in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. “You can read it if you want to. Or I’ll tell you. Either way.”

It was fine print on legal-length paper. Her eyes caught the word exhumation. “Tell me,” she said.

“This will let them—the Coroner’s Office—check out your husband’s body. They’ll check his lungs, for example, to see if there really was cancer.”

Gravediggers working at night, perhaps; men with shovels methodically, stolidly, resurrecting those same lumps of earth. Yes, surely by night. They would not want the funeral parties to see that—Rest in Peace. They would have lights with long, orange cords to help them work, or maybe only battery torches. “Can they do that?” she asked. “Can they actually tell anything?” She remembered the woman in the Bible: Lord, it has been four days now; surely there will be a stench. She said, “It’s been more than a year, Lieutenant.”

He shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Your husband was embalmed, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Yes, he was.”

“Then there’s a good chance. It depends on how good a job they did on him, the soil temperature, and how tight the box is. It depends on a lot of things, really, but there’s a good chance. Then there are some tests they can always run—like for arsenic or lead. You can look at a body a hundred years later and still find those things.”

“I understand. Do you have a pen?”

“Sure,” he said. He took it from the same pocket and handed it to her, first pressing the little plastic thing at the top to extend the point. Like a salesman, she thought. He’s just like a salesman who’s made the sale.

She took the pen and signed, and he smiled and relaxed. “You know, I didn’t think they used those lead-based paints any more.”

“They don’t.” She pushed the paper back. “This is an old house, and that was old paint. One doctor said it might be from the twenties. Do you want to see it? The closet, I mean, not the paint. I repainted it, so that—”

“So that it couldn’t happen to somebody else’s kid,” he finished for her. “Sure, let’s go up and have a look.”

As they went up the stair, he said, “From outside I wasn’t really sure this was an old house, even if it does have all that fancy millwork. It looks like it might have been built new in the old style, like they do at Disneyworld.”

“It was built in eighteen eighty-two,” she told him. “We had a contractor paint the exterior; we were doing the interior ourselves.”

She led the way down the upstairs hall and opened the door. “I haven’t gone in here since I painted the closet. I think it’s time I did.”

He nodded, looking appreciatively at the walls and the oak moldings. “This was a maid’s room, I guess, in the old days.”

“No, this has always been the nursery. The maids’ rooms were upstairs under the eaves.”

She fell silent. Newspapers daubed with dark paint were still spread over the floor. A can stood where she had left it, its interior hard and cracked. The caked brush lay beside it. She began to say, “I didn’t clean up. I suppose it shows.”

Before the first word had left her lips, there was a sound. It was a faint sound, yet in the stillness it seemed unnaturally loud—a scraping and shuffling that might have been a small dog scrambling to its feet, or merely some small, hard object sliding from a collection of similar objects, a baby’s rattle leaving the top of a careless pile of toys.

So that in place of what she had intended, Tina said, “There’s a child in there!”

“There’s something in there,” Price conceded. He went to the closet and twisted the old-fashioned china knob, but the door did not open. “It’s locked.”

“I didn’t lock it.” Though she had not been conscious of moving them, her right hand had clasped her left arm, her left hand her right arm. It was cold in the nursery, surely colder than it was outside. Had she shut the vent?

“Sure, you locked it,” he told her. “It’s a very natural thing to do. That’s okay, I don’t have to see it.”

He’s looking at the evidence as a favor to me, she thought. Aloud she said, “I don’t even have a key, but we’ve got to get it open. There’s a child inside.”

“There’s something in there. I doubt if it’s a kid.” He glanced at the keyhole. “Just an old warded lock. Shouldn’t be any trouble.”

The paint can had a wire handle. He pulled it off, bending it with strong, blunt fingers.

“I suppose you’re right—there can’t be a child in there. I mean, who would it be?”

He squatted before the keyhole. “You want my guess? You’ve got a possum in the wall. Or maybe a squirrel. This place doesn’t have rats, does it?”

“We’ve tried to get rid of them. Jerry set traps in the basement—” There was a faint scrabbling from the closet; she spoke more rapidly to cover the sound: “He even bought a ferret and put it down there, but it died. He thought Henry’d killed it.”

“Oh?” Price said. The lock squeaked, clicked back, and he rose, smiling. “Probably never been oiled. It was a little stiff.”

He twisted the knob again. This time it turned, but the door did not open. “Stuck too. Did you paint the frame?”

She nodded wordlessly.

“Well, you locked it before the paint was dry, Mrs. Heim.” He took a big utility knife from the right pocket of his jacket and opened the screwdriver blade.

“Call me Tina,” she said. “We don’t have to be so formal.”

Only a moment before, she had seen him smile for the first time; now he grinned. “Dick,” he said. “No Dick Tracy jokes, please. I get enough at the station.”

She grinned back. “Okay.”

The screwdriver blade slipped between the door and the jamb. He turned the knob again as he pried with the blade, and the door popped open. For an instant it seemed to her that there were eyes near the floor.

He swung the door wide on squealing hinges. “Nothing in here,” he said. “Jerry didn’t believe in lubrication.”

“Yes, he did—he was always oiling things. He said he was no mechanic, but an oil can was half a mechanic.”

Price grunted. He had a pen light, its feeble beam playing over the closet walls. “Something’s been in here,” he said. “It was bigger than a rat; a coon, maybe.”

“Let me see,” she said. She had been picking up the paintsmeared newspapers and stuffing them into the can. Now she came to the closet to look. There were scratches on the walls, tiny scratches that might have been made by little claws or fingernails. Flakes of plaster and paint lay on the closet floor.

Price snapped off the pen light and glanced at his watch. “I ought to be going. Thanks for signing the permission. I’ll phone you and let you know how the tests came out.”

She nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”

“Okay, I will. What’s that book you’ve got?”

“This?” She held it up. “Just an old children’s book. Jerry found it when he was exploring the attic and brought it down for Alan. It was under the newspapers.”

She led the way back down the narrow hall. The new, bright paper she and Jerry had hung decked its walls but could not make its way into her mind. When she took her eyes from it, the old, dark paper returned.

Behind her Price said, “Careful on those stairs.”

“We were going to get them carpeted,” she told him. “Now it hardly seems worth all the trouble. I’m trying to sell the house.”

“Yeah, I noticed the sign outside. It’s a nice place, but I guess I can’t blame you.”

“It is not a nice place,” she muttered; but her words were so soft that only the house heard them. She opened the door.

“Goodbye,” he said. “And thanks again, Tina. It was nice meeting you.” Solemnly, they shook hands.

She said, “You’ll telephone me, Dick?” She knew how it sounded.

“That’s a promise.”

She watched him as he went down the walk. A step or two before he reached his car, he patted the side pocket of his jacket—not the right-hand pocket, where he had put his knife, but the left one. For the laboratory, she thought to herself. He’s taking it to some police lab, to see if it’s poisoned.

She did not look down at the book in her hand, but the verses she had read when she lifted the newspapers that had covered it sang in her ears:

That evening the house played Little Girl. The essence, the ectoplasm, the soul of the child seeped from the cracked old plaster that had absorbed it when new. Watching television in the family room that had once been the master bedroom, Henry did not hear or see it; yet he stirred plumply, uncomfortably, on the sofa, unable to concentrate on the show or anything else, cursing his teachers, his sister, and his stepmother—hoping the phone would ring, afraid to call anyone and unable to say why he was afraid, angry in his misery and miserable in his rage.

Bent over her schoolbooks upstairs, Gail heard it. Quick steps, light steps, up the hall and down again: Gioconda is the model of the brilliant young sculptor, Lucio Settala. Although he struggles to resist the fascination that she exercises over him, out of loyalty to his witch, Sylvia, he feels Gioconda is the true inspiration of his art. During Lucio’s illness, Tina arouses Gioconda’s fury and is horribly burned by the model and her brother.

I’ll remember that, Gail thought. She wanted to be a model herself, like her real mother; someday she would be. She balanced the book on her head and walked about her bedroom, stopping to pose with studied arrogance.

Tina, drying herself in the bathroom, saw it. Steam left it behind as it faded from the mirror: the silhouette of a child with braids, a little girl whose head and shoulders were almost the outline of a steeply pitched roof. Tina wiped the mirror with her towel, watched the phantom reform, then thrust it out of her mind. Jerry should have put a ventilating fan in here, she thought. I’ll have to tell him.

She remembered Jerry was dead, but she had known that all along. It was not so much that she had forgotten, as that she had forgotten she herself was still living and that the living cannot communicate with the dead, with the dead who neither return their calls nor answer their letters. She had felt for a moment that though dead Jerry was merely gone, gone to New York or New Orleans or New Mexico, to someplace new to see some client, draft some papers, appear before some Board. Soon she would fly there to join him, in the new place.

He had given her perfumed body powder and a huge puff with which to apply it. She did so now because Jerry had liked it, thinking how long, how very long, it had been since she had used it last.

The steam specter she had been unable to wipe away had disappeared. She recalled its eyes and shuddered. They had been (as she told herself) no more than holes in the steam, two spots where the steam, for whatever reason, would not condense; that made it worse, since if that were the case they were there still, watching her, invisible.

She shivered again. The bathroom seemed cold despite the steam, despite the furnace over which Jerry had worked so hard. She knew she should put on her robe but did not, standing before the mirror instead, examining her powdered breasts, running her hands along her powdered hips. Fat, she was too fat, she had been too fat ever since Alan was born.

Yet Dick Price had smiled at her; she had seen the way he had looked at her in the nursery, had felt the extra moment for which he held her hand.

“Then it was cancer after all, Lieutenant?” Gail asked a few days later. “Don’t stand please.” She crossed the wide, dark living room that had once been the parlor and sat down, very much an adult.

Price nodded, sipping the drink Henry had mixed for him. It was Scotch and water, with too much of the first and not enough of the second; and Price was determined to do no more than taste it.

Henry said, “I didn’t think it could go that fast, sir.”

“Occasionally it does,” Price told him.

Gail shook her head. “She killed Dad, Lieutenant. I’m sure she did. You don’t know her—she’s a real witch sometimes.”

“And you wrote those letters to the insurance company.” Price set his drink on the coffee table.

“What letters?”

Henry grinned. “You shouldn’t bite your lip like that, Goony-Bird. Blows your cover.”

Price nodded. “Let me give you a tip, Gail. It’s better not to tell lies to the police; but if you’re going to, you’ve got to get your timing right and watch your face. Just saying the right words isn’t enough.”

“Are you—?”

“Besides, a flat lie is better than a sidestep. Try, ‘I never wrote any letters, Lieutenant.’”

“They were supposed to be confidential!”

Henry was cleaning his nails with a small screwdriver. “You think confidential means they won’t even show them to the police?”

“He’s right.” Price nodded again. “Naturally they showed them to us. They were in a feminine hand, and there were details only somebody living here would know; so they were written by you or your stepmother. Since they accused her, that left you. Once in a while we get a nut who writes accusing herself, but your stepmother doesn’t seem like a nut, and when she signed and dated the exhumation papers for me the writing was different.”

“All right, I sent those letters.”

The screwdriver had a clip like a pen. Henry replaced it in his shirt pocket. “I helped her with a couple of them. Told her what to say, you know? Are you going to tell her?”

“Do you want me to?” Price asked.

Henry shrugged. “Man, I don’t care.”

“Then why ask me about it?” Price stood up. “Thanks for the hospitality, kids. Tell Tina I’m sorry I missed her.”

Gail rose too. “I’m sure she’s just been delayed somewhere, Lieutenant. If you’d like to stay a little longer—”

Price shook his head.

Henry said, “Just one question, sir, if you know. How did Dad get lung cancer?”

“His lungs were full of asbestos fibers. It’s something that usually happens only to insulators.”

In the kitchen, Tina pictured the furnace—its pipes spreading upward like the branches of a long-dead tree, tape peeling from them like bark, white dust sifting down like rotten wood, falling like snow upon Jerry’s violated grave.

It’s the gingerbread house, she thought, recalling the grim paper they had painted over in the nursery. It doesn’t eat you, you eat it. But it gets you just the same.

She tried to move, to strike the floor with her feet, the wall with her shoulders, to chew the dish towel Gail had stuffed into her mouth, to scrape away the bright new duct tape Jerry had bought when he was rebuilding the furnace.

None of it worked. The door of the microwave gaped like a hungry mouth. Far away the front door opened and closed. “She Used to Be My Girl” blasted from the stereo in the family room.

Fatly, importantly, Henry came into the kitchen on a wave of rock, carrying an almost-full glass of dark liquid. “Your boyfriend’s gone. Could you hear us? I bet you thought he was going to save you.” He took a swallow of the liquid—whisky, she could smell it—and set the glass on the drainboard.

Gail followed him. When the door had shut and she could make herself heard, she asked, “Are we going to do it now?”

“Sure, why not?” Henry knelt, scratching at the tape.

“I think it would be better to leave that on.”

“I told you, the heat would melt the adhesive. You want to have to swab her face with paint thinner or something when she’s dead?” He caught the end of the duct tape and yanked it away. “Besides, she won’t yell, she’ll talk. I know her.”

Tina spit out the dish towel. It felt as though she had been to the dentist, as though the receptionist would want to set up a new appointment when she got out of the chair.

Gail snatched the damp towel away. “You fixed up the microwave?”

“Sure, Goony-Bird. It wasn’t all that hard.”

“They’ll check it. They’ll check it to see what went wrong.” Tina tried to speak, but her mouth was too dry. Words would not come.

“And they’ll find it.” Henry grinned. “They’ll find a wire that came unsoldered and flipped up so it shorted the safety interlock. Get me an egg out of the fridge.”

She knew she should be pleading for her life; yet somehow she could not bring herself to do it. I’m brave, she thought, surprised. This is courage, this silly reluctance. I never knew that.

“See the egg, Stepmother dear?” Gail held it up to show her. “An egg will explode when you put it in a microwave.”

She set it inside, and Henry shut the door.

“It’ll work now whether it’s open or closed, see? Only I’ve got it closed so we don’t get radiation out here.” He pressed a button and instinctively backed away.

The bursting of the egg was a dull thud, like an ax biting wood or the fall of a guillotine blade.

“It makes a real mess. We’ll leave it on for a while so it gets hard.”

Gail asked, “Is the music going to run long enough?”

“Hell, yes.”

Tina said, “If you want to go back to Rona, go ahead. I’ve tried to love you, but nobody’s going to stop you.”

“We don’t want to live with Rona,” Henry told her. “We want to get even with you, and we want to be rich.”

“You got a hundred thousand for Dad,” Gail explained. “Then all that for the baby.”

Henry said, “Another fifty thou.”

“So that’s a hundred and fifty thousand, and when you’re dead, we’ll get it. Then there’s another fifty on you, double for an accident. We get that too. It comes to a quarter of a million.”

The oven buzzed.

“Okay.” Henry opened it. “Let’s cut her loose.” He got the little paring knife from the sink.

“She’ll fight,” Gail warned him.

“Nothing I can’t handle, Goony-Bird. We don’t want rope marks when they find her.”

The little knife gnawed at the rope behind Tina’s back like a rat. After a moment, her lifeless hands dropped free. The rat moved to her ankles.

Gail said, “We’ll have to get rid of the rope.”

“Sure. Put it in the garbage—the tape too.”

A thousand needles pricked Tina’s arms. Pain came with them, appearing out of nowhere.

“Okay,” Henry said. “Stand up.”

He lifted her. There was no strength in her legs, no feeling. “See, you’re cleaning it. Maybe you stick your head in so you can see what you’re doing.” He thrust her head into the oven. “Then you reach for the cleaner or something, and your arm hits a button.”

Someone screamed, shrill and terror-stricken. I won’t, she told herself. I won’t scream. She set her lips, clenched her teeth.

The screaming continued. Henry yelled and released her, and she slid to the floor. Flames and thick, black smoke shot from the microwave.

She wanted to laugh. So Hansel, so little Gretel, cooking a witch is not quite so easy as you thought, nicht wahr? Henry jerked a cord from the wall. Tina noted with amusement that it was the cord of the electric can-opener.

Gail had filled a pan with water from the sink. She threw it on the microwave and jerked backward as if she had been struck. The flames caught the kitchen curtains, which went up like paper.

On half-numb legs, Tina tried to stand. She staggered and fell. The kitchen cabinets were burning over the microwave, flames racing along dark, varnished wood that had been dry for a century.

The back door burst inward. Henry fled through it howling, his shirt ablaze. Stronger, harder hands lifted her. She thought of Gretel—of Gail—but Gail was beside them, coughing and choking, reeling toward the open doorway.

As though by magic, she was outside. They were all outside, Henry rolling frantically on the grass as Dick beat at the flames with his jacket. Sirens and wolves howled in the distance, while one by one the dark rooms lit with a cheerful glow.

“My house!” she said. She had meant to whisper but found she was almost screaming. “My home! Gone … No—I’ll always, always remember her, no matter what happens.”

Dick glanced toward it. “It doesn’t look good, but if you’ve got something particularly valuable—”

“Don’t you dare go back in there! I won’t let you.”

“My God!” He gripped her arm. “Look!” For an instant (and only an instant) a white face like a child’s stared from a gable window; then it was gone, and the flames peered out instead. An instant more and they broke through the roof; the house sighed, a phoenix embracing death and rebirth. Its wooden lace was traced with fire before its walls collapsed and the fire engines arrived.

Later the fire captain asked whether everyone had escaped. Tina nodded thankfully. “Dick—Lieutenant Price—thought he saw a face at one of the attic windows, but we’re all here.”

The captain looked sympathetic. “Probably a puff of white smoke—that happens sometimes. You know how it started?”

Suddenly Henry was silent, though he had voiced an unending string of puerile curses while the paramedics treated his burns. Now the string was broken; he watched Tina with terrified eyes. More practical, Gail edged toward the darkness under the trees.

Tina nodded. “But what I want to know is how Dick came just in time to save us. That was like a miracle.”

Price shook his head. “No miracle. Or if it was, it was the kind that happens all the time. I’d come at eight, and the kids said you were still out. Somebody I’d like to talk to about a case I’m on lives a couple of blocks from here, so I went over and rang the bell; but there was nobody home. I came back and spotted the fire through a side window as I drove up.”

The captain added, “He radioed for us. You say you know how it started, ma’am?”

“My son Henry was cooking something—eggs, wasn’t that what you said, Henry?”

Henry’s head moved a fraction of an inch. He managed to answer, “Yeah.”

“But the oven must have been too hot, because the eggs, or whatever they were, caught fire. The kitchen was full of smoke by the time Gail and I heard him yell and ran in there.”

The captain nodded and scribbled something on his clipboard. “Cooking fire. Happens a lot.”

“I called Henry my son a moment ago,” Tina corrected herself, “and I shouldn’t have, Captain. Actually I’m just his stepmother, and Gail’s.”

“She’s the best mother in the whole world!” Henry shouted. “Isn’t that right, Goony-Bird?”

Nearly lost among the oaks and towering hemlocks, Gail nodded frantically.

“Henry, you’re a dear.” Tina bent to kiss his forehead. “I hope those burns don’t hurt too much.” Gently, she pinched one of his plump cheeks. He’s getting fat, she reflected. But I’ll have to neuter him soon, or his testicles will spoil the meat. He’ll be easier to manage then.

(She smiled, recalling her big, black-handled dressmaker’s shears. That would be amusing—but quite impossible, to be sure. What was it that clever man in Texas had done, put some sort of radioactive capsule between his sleeping son’s legs?)

Dick said loudly, “And I’m sure Henry’s a very good son.”

She turned to him, still smiling. “You know, Dick, you’ve never talked much about your own children. How old are they?”