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tell you! What the hell did I tell you! Stay away from the Mrazes! All that side of the family! So Essie Spivak spoke in fear and loathing of her own relatives, for she knew them, Essie said, as few others did, from the inside out.
    In Bayhead Harbor, none of that mattered. Spivak, Mraz—these south Jersey/Pine Barrens names meant nothing. Waking early before dawn in this new bed, Katya's first thought was, No one knows me here, which should have been a consolation but in fact left her feeling adrift, bereft. Homesick?
    It was seagulls that woke her so early. Piercing cries confused her dreams. Cries of hunger that sounded like cries of pain, rage. As in Vineland often she was wakened by crows at the landfill nearby, where raw garbage was dumped. A crow is weirdly human, Katya thought. You can hear crows laughing with one another, rowdy and jeering like drunken men. At the dead end of County Line Road, where the Cumberland County landfill sprawled across several acres, you could see swarms of crows, red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures, descending from the sky, flapping their fake-looking wings like oversized bats. Katya's brothers, Dewayne and Ralph, shot their . 22 -caliber rifles at these garbage birds, as they called them, popping them out of the sky. In the landfill Katya had tramped eagerly after her long-legged brothers, searching for treasure when she'd been a little girl.
    Katya, here! Somethin for you.
    A big baby doll with wide-open glass eyes, a rosebud mouth.
    Propped atop a mound of refuse. Before Katya could run to it, the baby doll's rubber head burst and disappeared into nothingness when the rifles discharged.
    Hey, Katya, don't cry. That wasn't no clean baby doll, that was a damn dirty ol' doll some nigger girl cast out.
    Now Katya was in Bayhead Harbor, and here treasure was everywhere. In the glittering store windows of Ocean Avenue, in the gleaming luxury vehicles cruising the shaded streets, glimpsed through openings in privet hedges. You could see it at a distance, you could admire and envy it, and yet you dared not touch it; such treasure is forbidden to you.

4
     
    H ERE WAS A SURPRISE : Mr. Kidder was not only an artist but a writer. Of children's books, at least.
    Only after they'd returned from their tea-time at Mr. Kidder's house and Katya had found time to sit down with Tricia and read Funny Bunny's Birthday Party to her did she discover that Mr. Kidder had given Tricia his own book: that is, Marcus Cullen Kidder was both the author and the illustrator.
    Katya was embarrassed. She hadn't so much as glanced at the name on the colorful book cover when she'd taken it from Tricia. It was like Mr. Kidder—modesty and vanity so mixed, you could not distinguish one from the other—not to have hinted that the book was his. Katya turned to the title page, where in a flowing script in purple ink Mr. Kidder had inscribed the book To Tricia, in the fervent hope that she will never change. Mr. Kidder's signature was such a flourish of the pen you'd have had to know that the scrawled name was Marcus Cullen Kidder to decipher it.
    Tricia adored Funny Bunny. Tricia could not get enough of Funny Bunny. Tricia insisted that Katya read it to her again and yet again. The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes. Katya had to concede that Funny Bunny was a wonderfully cuddly plump white rabbit with upright pink ears, a pink nose, appealing shiny brown eyes. As the artist depicted him, Funny Bunny was funny without knowing it; you could laugh at Funny Bunny, though not meanly. Funny Bunny had many worries and all of them were imaginary. His greatest worry was that everyone had forgotten his birthday, but in fact all of his brothers and sisters