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gasolier hung over a damask-upholstered ottoman, the two creating a sort of static carousel that blocked traffic and devoured space.
    "Who decorated the house?" he had to know. "Parker and Stine, I believe."
    That explained a good deal; Parker and Stine's specialty was ostentation and pretense. Still, even they had to have had an accomplice in the homeowner to commit an atrocity this flagrant.
    She showed him the dining room and the conservatory, billiard room and smoking and sitting rooms, halls and salons. His favorite was Cochrane's combined office and trophy room, a truly horrible menage of stuffed ram and stag heads, a collection of vicious-looking medieval weapons, hunting prints of stunning mediocrity, leopard and bear and tiger skin rugs, hanging snowshoes, dead birds mounted on stalks—all against a background of black walnut woodwork, Beauvais tapestries, Oriental ceramics, Renaissance Revival bric-a-brac, and anything else that could possibly be crammed into the big, dark, stupendously depressing chamber. Even Mrs. Cochrane couldn't disguise her distaste for this room, and hung back in the doorway until he had looked his fill.
    They wandered dispiritedly back toward the first drawing room, both pensive and silent. As they crossed the entry hall, the front door burst open and a small, yellow-haired boy barreled in. "Mum!" he shouted, then skidded to a comical halt at the sight of a strange man with his mother.
    Alex's first thought was that the Cochranes must have two children, for this could hardly be seven-year-old Michael. This boy looked closer to five than seven, with his spindly body and his big, intelligent head on a neck so thin Alex could have wrapped one hand around it. He was a tow-head blond with pale skin the color of skim milk, bony-shouldered, and sharp-kneed. But it was Michael because Sara said, "Hullo, darling, come and meet Mr. McKie. This is my son, Michael."
    They shook hands solemnly. The boy had a pair of roller skates tied over his shoulder; the wheels left dust marks on the short jacket he wore over a white Russian blouse with knickers and black stockings. He'd come from the Lenox Lyceum, he told Alex politely but breathlessly, where he'd learned how to skate backwards. "You wouldn't care to see me do it now, would you?" he asked tentatively, then threw caution to the winds and yanked on his mother's sleeve, begging, "Oh, come out and watch me, Mummy, do, I'll stay on the sidewalk, I promise!"
    A woman's irritable voice came through the open door—"I told you to
wait"
—just before its owner stepped over the threshold. She broke off when she saw the three in the hall, and Alex took note that her ill-humored face matched her voice perfectly. Short, going soft as she approached middle age, she had gray-streaked blond hair that she wore in braids pinned on top of her head. "He ran ahead of me all afternoon," she informed Sara in aggrieved tones, pulling off a woolen scarf that was much too warm for the day and probably accounted for the perspiration beading her pink, discontented countenance.
    The boy looked at his feet, whether with contrition or sullenness Alex couldn't tell. "That was naughty of you, Michael," Sara said evenly, "you must mind Mrs. Drum. Come and have your tea now, and after—"
    "But don't you want to see me skate? I can do it, Mum, really I can, come and look—"
    "He'll have to wash before his tea," Mrs. Drum interrupted imperiously. "He's covered with grime. I've never seen a child for dirt like this one. Come upstairs, young man, and get changed."
    Sara put a light hand on the back of Michael's head. "You know, I think just this once he'll have his bath later. Thank you, Mrs. Drum, I'll send him up to you in half an hour."
    Alex and Michael looked back and forth at the locked gases of the two women, both fascinated by the undercurrent of war going on between them. The battle was swift but bitter. Mrs. Drum's round hazel eyes turned muddy with resentment and her