Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

-Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack.

 

Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.

He was down at the video, tanning, bait and tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann's hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.

He asked Hinzelmann.

"For real?" asked Hinzelmann.

"For real," said Shadow.

"Well," said the older man. "Sometimes they didn't survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard-they'd spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it has to do with the sunlight, how there isn't enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir crazy-winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn't tried to kill you by February she hadn't any backbone.

"Storybooks were like gold dust-anything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, they'd make the Germans tell them the stories.

"Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she'd not suffer them to take it from her." He shook his head meditatively, closed the fly cabinet with a click. "Bad business. You want a video rental card? Eventually they'll open a Blockbusters here, and then we'll soon be out of business. But for now we got a pretty fair selection."

Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television, and no VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann's company-the reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin of the old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him.

Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, and took out a tin box-by the look of it, it had once been a Christmas box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, "How many you want me to put you down for?"

"How many of what?"

"Klunker tickets. She'll go out onto the ice today, so we've started selling tickets. Each ticket is five dollars, ten for forty, twenty for seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we can't promise it'll go down in your five minutes, but the person who's closest stands to win five hundred bucks, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times aren't spoken for. You want to see the info sheet?"

"Sure."

Hinzelmann handed Shadow a photocopied sheet. The klunker was an old car with its engine and fuel tank removed, which would be parked out on the ice for the winter. Sometime in the spring the lake ice would melt, and when it was too thin to bear the car's weight the car would fall into the lake. The earliest the klunker had ever tumbled into the lake was February the twenty-seventh ("That was the winter of 1998. I don't think you could rightly call that a winter at all"), the latest was May the first ("That was 1950. Seemed that year that the only way that winter would end was if somebody hammered a stake through its heart"). The beginning of April appeared to be the most common time for the car to sink-normally in midafternoon.

All of the midafternoons in April had already gone, marked off in Hinzelmann's lined notebook. Shadow bought a thirty-minute period on the morning of March 23, from 9:00 A.M. to 9:30 A.M. He handed Hinzelmann thirty dollars.

"I just wish everybody in town was as easy a sell as you are," said Hinzelmann.

"It's a thank-you for that ride you gave me that first night I was in town."

"No, Mike," said Hinzelmann. "It's for the children." For a moment he looked serious, with no trace of impishness on his creased old face. "Come down this afternoon, you can lend a hand pushing the klunker out onto the lake."

He passed Shadow six blue cards, each with a date and time written on it in Hinzelmann's old-fashioned handwriting, then entered the details of each in his notebook.

"Hinzelmann," asked Shadow. "Have you ever heard of eagle stones?"

"Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that's Eagle River. Can't say I have."

"How about thunderbirds?"

"Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down. I'm not helping, am I?"

"Nope."

"Tell you what, why don't you go look at the library. Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn't I?"

Shadow nodded, and said so long. He wished he'd thought of the library himself. He got into the purple 4-Runner and drove south on Main Street, following the lake around to the southernmost point, until he reached the castlelike building that housed the city library. He walked inside. A sign pointed to the basement: LIBRARY SALE, it read. The library proper was on the ground floor, and he stamped the snow off his boots.

A forbidding woman with pursed, crimson-colored lips asked him pointedly if she could help him.

"I guess I need a library card," he said. "And I want to know all about thunderbirds."

Native American Beliefs and Traditions were on a single shelf in one castlelike turret. Shadow pulled down some books and sat in the window seat: In several minutes he had learned that thunderbirds were mythical gigantic birds who lived on mountaintops, who brought the lightning and who flapped their wings to make the thunder. There were some tribes, he read, who believed that the thunderbirds had made the world. Another half hour's reading did not turn up anything more, and he could find no mention of eagle stones anywhere in the books' indexes.

Shadow was putting the last of the books back on the shelf when he became aware of somebody staring at him. Someone small and grave was peeking at him from around the heavy shelves. As he turned to look, the face vanished. He turned his back on the boy, then glanced around to see that he was being watched once more.

In his pocket was the Liberty dollar. He took it out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, making sure the boy could see it. He finger-palmed it into his left hand, displayed both hands empty, raised his left hand to his mouth and coughed once, letting the coin tumble from his left hand into his right.

The boy looked at him wide-eyed and scampered away, returning a few moments later, dragging an unsmiling Marguerite Olsen, who looked at Shadow suspiciously and said, "Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing magic for him."

"Just a little prestidigitation, ma'am. Say, I never did say thank you for your advice about heating the apartment. It's warm as toast in there right now."

"That's good." Her icy expression had not begun to thaw.

"It's a lovely library," said Shadow.

"It's a beautiful building. But the city needs something more efficient and less beautiful. You going to the library sale downstairs?"

"I wasn't planning on it."

"Well, you should. It's for a good cause."

"I'll make a point of getting down there."

"Head out into the hall and then go downstairs. Good seeing you, Mister Ainsel."

"Call me Mike," he said.

She said nothing, just took Leon's hand and walked the boy over to the children's section.

"But Mom," Shadow heard Leon say, "It wasn't pressed igitation. It wasn't. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it."

An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged: paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out.

Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number painted in white on the spine. "You're the first person over in that corner all day," said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open metal cashbox. "Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the children's books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that." The man was reading Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. "Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar."

Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy of Herodotus's Histories bound in peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperback copy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox.

"Buy one more, it's still a dollar," said the man. "And if you take another book away, you'll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space."

Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Dave's Finest Food brown paper sack.

Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way back. He could even see his apartment building, like a doll's house, up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake.

"March the twenty-third," Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. "Nine A.M. to nine-thirty A.M." He wondered if the lake or the klunker could hear him-and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could. He doubted it.

The wind blew bitter against his face.

Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadow's apartment when he got back. Shadow's heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front seat.

He walked over to the car, carrying his paper sack of books.

Mulligan lowered his window. "Library sale?" he said.

"Yes."

"I bought a box of Robert Ludlum books there two, three years back. Keep meaning to read them. My cousin swears by the guy. These days I figure if I ever get marooned on a desert island and I got my box of Robert Ludlum books with me, I can catch up on my reading."

"Something particular I can do for you, Chief?"

"Not a darn thing, pal. Thought I'd stop by and see how you were settling in. You remember that Chinese saying, you save a man's life, you're responsible for him. Well, I'm not saying I saved your life last week. But I still thought I should check in. How's the Purple Gunther-mobile doing?"

"Good," said Shadow. "It's good. Running fine."

"Pleased to hear it."

"I saw my next-door neighbor in the library," said Shadow. "Miz Olsen. I was wondering..."

"What crawled up her butt and died?"

"If you want to put it like that."

"Long story. You want to ride along for a spell, I'll tell you all about it."

Shadow thought about it for a moment. "Okay," he said. He got into the car, sat in the front passenger seat. Mulligan drove north of town. Then he turned off his lights and parked beside the road.

"Darren Olsen met Marge at U.W. Stevens Point and he brought her back north to Lakeside. She was a journalism major. He was studying, shit, hotel management, something like that. When they got here, jaws dropped. This was, what, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She was so beautiful...that black hair..." he paused. "Darren managed the Motel America over in Camden, twenty miles west of here. Except nobody ever seemed to want to stop in Camden and eventually the motel closed. They had two boys. At that time Sandy was eleven. The little one-Leon, is it?-was just a babe in arms.

"Darren Olsen wasn't a brave man. He'd been a good high school football player, but that was the last time he was flying high. Whatever. He couldn't find the courage to tell Margie that he'd lost his job. So for a month, maybe for two months, he'd drive off early in the morning, come home late in the evening complaining about the hard day he'd had at the motel."

"What was he doing?" asked Shadow.

"Mm. Couldn't say for certain. I reckon he was driving up to Ironwood, maybe down to Green Bay. Guess he started out as a job hunter. Pretty soon he was drinking the time away, getting stoned, more than probably meeting the occasional working girl for a little instant gratification. He could have been gambling. What I do know for certain is that he emptied out their joint account in about ten weeks. It was only a matter of time before Margie figured out-there we go!"

He swung the car out, flicked on the siren and the lights, and scared the daylights out of a small man in a car with Iowa plates who had just come down the hill at seventy.

The rogue lowan ticketed, Mulligan returned to his story.

"Where was I? Okay. So Margie kicks him out, sues for divorce. It turned into a vicious custody battle. That's what they call 'em when they get into People magazine. Vicious Custody Battle. She got the kids. Darren got visitation rights and precious little else. Now, back then Leon was pretty small. Sandy was older, a good kid, the kind of boy who worships his daddy. Wouldn't let Margie say nothing bad about him. They lost the house-had a nice place down on Daniels Road. She moved into the apartment. He left town. Came back every six months to make everybody miserable.

"This went on for a few years. He'd come back, spend money on the kids, leave Margie in tears. Most of us just started wishing he'd never come back at all. His mom and pop had moved to Florida when they retired, said they couldn't take another Wisconsin winter. So last year he came out, said he wanted to take the boys to Florida for Christmas. Margie said not a hope, told him to get lost. It got pretty unpleasant-at one point I had to go over there. Domestic dispute. By the time I got there Darren was standing in the front yard shouting stuff, the boys were barely holding it together, Margie was crying.

"I told Darren he was shaping up for a night in the cells. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but he was sober enough not to do that. I gave him a ride down to the trailer park south of town, told him to shape up. That he'd hurt her enough...Next day he left town.

"Two weeks later, Sandy vanished. Didn't get onto the school bus. Told his best friend that he'd be seeing his dad soon, that Darren was bringing him a specially cool present to make up for having missed Christmas in Florida. Nobody's seen him since. Noncustodial kidnappings are the hardest. It's tough to find a kid who doesn't want to be found, y'see?"

Shadow said that he did. He saw something else as well. Chad Mulligan was in love with Marguerite Olsen himself. He wondered if the man knew how obvious it was.

Mulligan pulled out once more, lights flashing, and pulled over some teenagers doing sixty. He didn't ticket them, "just put the fear of God in them."

***

That evening Shadow sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to transform a silver dollar into a penny. It was a trick he had found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions, but the instructions were infuriating, unhelpful and vague. Phrases like "then vanish the penny in the usual way," occurred every sentence or so. In this context, Shadow wondered, what was "the usual way"? A French drop? Sleeving it? Shouting "Oh my god, look out! A mountain lion!" and dropping the coin into his side pocket while the audience's attention was diverted?

He tossed his silver dollar into the air, caught it, remembering the moon and the woman who gave it to him, then he attempted the illusion. It didn't seem to work. He walked into the bathroom and tried it in front of the mirror, and confirmed that he was right. The trick as written simply didn't work. He sighed, dropped the coins in his pocket and sat down on the couch. He spread the cheap throw rug over his legs and flipped open the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. The type, in two columns, was so small as to be almost unreadable. He flipped through the book, looking at the reproductions of the photographs of the period, at the several incarnations of the Lakeside City Council therein: long side whiskers and clay pipes and battered hats and shiny hats, worn with faces that were, many of them, peculiarly familiar. He was unsurprised to see that the portly secretary of the 1882 city council was a Patrick Mulligan: shave him, make him lose twenty pounds and he'd be a dead ringer for Chad Mulligan, his-what, great-great-grandson? He wondered if Hinzelmann's pioneer grandfather was in the photographs, but it did not appear that he had been city council material. Shadow thought he had seen a reference to a Hinzelmann in the text, while flipping from photograph to photograph, but it eluded him when he leafed back for it, and the tiny type made Shadow's eyes ache.

He put the book down on his chest and realized his head was nodding. It would be foolish to fall asleep on the couch, he decided soberly. The bedroom was only a few feet away. On the other hand, the bedroom and the bed would still be there in five minutes, and anyway, he was not going to go to sleep, only to close his eyes for a moment...

Darkness roared.

He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people.

They looked at him with dark, proud eyes.

"Tell me about the thunderbirds," said Shadow. "Please. It's not for me. It's for my wife."

One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky.

"Ask them yourself," she said. Summer lightning flickered, momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon.

There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. It's bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. It's old dry bone.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower.

It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the eggshells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor.

Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face.

He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spire-enormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air.

They were circling the spire.

They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, thought Shadow.

Then the first bird swung out of its glide toward him, blue lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice of skulls, hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe.

Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into his arm.

He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wing-for if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbird's feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a man-but the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb.

There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings.

He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to...

The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls...

The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up.

"What the fuck," shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, "what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at?"

"I was asleep," said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly.

"What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a hiding place like Lakeside, if you're going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it?"

"I dreamed of thunderbirds..." said Shadow. "And a tower. Skulls..." It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.

"I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What's the point in hiding you, if you're going to start to fucking advertise?"

Shadow said nothing.

There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. "I'll be there in the morning," said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. "We're going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional." And the line went dead.

Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. It was 6:00 A.M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake. And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing was insistent and low and heartbreaking.

Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking a lost child.

***

San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow's neck. Wednesday was wearing a deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an entertainment lawyer.

They were walking along Haight Street. The street people and the hustlers and the moochers watched them go by, and no one shook a paper cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.

Wednesday's jaw was set. Shadow had seen immediately that the man was still angry, and had asked no questions when the black Lincoln Town Car had pulled up outside the apartment that morning. They had not talked on the way to the airport. He had been relieved that Wednesday was in first class and he was back in coach.

Now it was late in the afternoon. Shadow, who had not been in San Francisco since he was a boy, who had only seen it since then as a background to movies, was astonished at how familiar it was, how colorful and unique the wooden houses, how steep the hills, how very much it didn't feel like anywhere else.

"It's almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside," he said.

Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, "It's not. San Francisco isn't in the same country as Lakeside anymore than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis."

"Is that so?" said Shadow, mildly.

"Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers-money, a federal government, entertainment-it's the same land, obviously-but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's." They were approaching a park at the end of the road. "Be nice to the lady we are visiting. But not too nice."

"I'll be cool," said Shadow.

They stepped onto the grass.

A young girl, no older than fourteen, her hair dyed green and orange and pink, stared at them as they went by. She sat beside a dog, a mongrel, with a piece of string for a collar and a leash. She looked hungrier than the dog did. The dog yapped at them, then wagged its tail.

Shadow gave the girl a dollar bill. She stared at it as if she was not sure what it was. "Buy dog food with it," Shadow suggested. She nodded, and smiled.

"Let me put it bluntly," said Wednesday. "You must be very cautious around the lady we are visiting. She might take a fancy to you, and that would be bad."

"Is she your girlfriend or something?"

"Not for all the little plastic toys in China," said Wednesday, agreeably. His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have been invested for the future. Shadow suspected that anger was the engine that made Wednesday run.

There was a woman sitting on the grass, under a tree, with a paper tablecloth spread in front of her, and a variety of Tupperware dishes on the cloth.

She was-not fat, no, far from fat: what she was, a word that Shadow had never had cause to use until now, was curvaceous. Her hair was so fair that it was white, the kind of platinum-blonde tresses that should have belonged to a long-dead movie starlet, her lips were painted crimson, and she looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty.

As they reached her she was selecting from a plate of deviled eggs. She looked up as Wednesday approached her, put down the egg she had chosen, and wiped her hand. "Hello, you old fraud," she said, but she smiled as she said it, and Wednesday bowed low, took her hand, and raised it to his lips.

He said, "You look divine."

"How the hell else should I look?" she demanded, sweetly. "Anyway, you're a liar. New Orleans was such a mistake-I put on, what, thirty pounds there? I swear. I knew I had to leave when I started to waddle. The tops of my thighs rub together when I walk now, can you believe that?" This last was addressed to Shadow. He had no idea what to say in reply, and felt a hot flush suffuse his face. The woman laughed delightedly. "He's blushing! Wednesday, my sweet, you brought me a blusher. How perfectly wonderful of you. What's he called?"

"This is Shadow," said Wednesday. He seemed to be enjoying Shadow's discomfort. "Shadow, say hello to Easter."

Shadow said something that might have been Hello, and the woman smiled at him again. He felt like he was caught in headlights-the blinding kind that poachers use to freeze deer before they shoot them. He could smell her perfume from where he was standing, an intoxicating mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle, of sweet milk and female skin.

"So, how's tricks?" asked Wednesday.

The woman-Easter-laughed a deep and throaty laugh, full-bodied and joyous. How could you not like someone who laughed like that? "Everything's fine," she said. "How about you, you old wolf?"

"I was hoping to enlist your assistance."

"Wasting your time."

"At least hear me out before dismissing me."

"No point. Don't even bother."

She looked at Shadow. "Please, sit down here and help yourself to some of this food. Here, take a plate and pile it high. It's all good. Eggs, roast chicken, chicken curry, chicken salad, and over here is lapin-rabbit, actually, but cold rabbit is a delight, and in that bowl over there is the jugged hare-well, why don't I just fill a plate for you?" And she did, taking a plastic plate, piling it high with food, and passing it to him. Then she looked at Wednesday. "Are you eating?" she asked.

"I am at your disposal, my dear," said Wednesday.

"You," she told him, "are so full of shit it's a wonder your eyes don't turn brown." She passed him an empty plate. "Help yourself," she said.

The afternoon sun at her back burned her hair into a platinum aura. "Shadow," she said, chewing a chicken leg with gusto. "That's a sweet name. Why do they call you Shadow?"

Shadow licked his lips to moisten them. "When I was a kid," he said. "We lived, my mother and I, we were, I mean, she was, well, like a secretary, at a bunch of U.S. embassies, we went from city to city all over northern Europe. Then she got sick and had to take early retirement and we came back to the States. I never knew what to say to the other kids, so I'd just find adults and follow them around, not saying anything. I just needed the company, I guess. I don't know. I was a small kid."

"You grew," she said.

"Yes," said Shadow. "I grew."

She turned back to Wednesday, who was spooning down a bowl of what looked like cold gumbo. "Is this the boy who's got everybody so upset?"

"You heard?"

"I keep my ears pricked up," she said. Then to Shadow, "You keep out of their way. There are too many secret societies out there, and they have no loyalties and no............