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"I never really bothered to get a license, you see, and the police don’t love working with ah Rather avidly Remind me to tell you the one about your father and the redheaded lady lion tamer"

"Please," I said, "please, please don’t"

Where was Holmes? There, and not there Silent as a crow on a power line Her father was speaking in Geruest, a sculptor frolish There was a whole roster of theht, and as soon as the meal was over, Leander and Alistair would slip aith the for them to stand up and leave so that we could too

Then that day’s spell was broken, and Holo back to ain

The first night, she stood, straightened her skirt, and cast a long look at me before she swept out of the rooh I were in a drea corridors But I knehere she’d be There, in the guest roo the heels off her feet She dangled one fro her lip, and it should have been ridiculous, but instead itin my chest burn

"Hi," I said, dry-mouthed

"Hi," she said, and picked up an encyclopedia that had been invisible on the dark floor "What do you know of the Bhagavad Gita?"

Nothing

I knew nothing about a seven-hundred-verse Sanskrit epic or why I was supposed to care at ht before, she’d slipped into my bed like an apparition and pulledme its history until I fell asleep in a harmless ball

The next night, she told ; more darkness when I opened the curtains More Faulkner in theseat while Hollared up atme out of its eyes I wondered if I was in a feedback loop, an experi bad drea her violin, and yet she wasn’t in her cluttered baseios she played came up as if from the house’s foundation

I wandered the house like sos, the one that led to Alistair’s study, I could clearly hear hiain, could hear Leander reply, You won’t have to leave this place I won’t let it happen Money, always, was the subtext here, h I only heard bits and pieces, I couldn’t put it all together I was surrounded by wealth By power Why all the whispered arguments? Is this how you kept your prizes once you’d won theo back to London? Christ an easel froo to London, I thought I could call Lena and see if she ith Toford roommate and her boyfriend It would be a relief to see theht be , the boy who spied on me for money all this fall, and then I knew I needed to break soht that second

That was how I ended up down by the Holmeses’ man-made lake It was four o’clock in the afternoon, so it was pitch-dark, and I didn’t trust myself to find the ocean Did it even exist, or was it just a sound, soht? It didn’t iant rocks half-buried by this pond, ernails to pull them up from the mud, my arms to hurl them away from me into the black water