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man sitting at a butcher block table against the far wall of the kitchen. He’s wearing a navy blue windbreaker emblazoned with a shield that reads ARCADIA FALLS SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. He looks up from a bowl of stew and smiles crookedly at me. His face is lined enough to mark him as a man in his forties, but the glint in his pale green eyes is boyish.
    “Dymphna’s like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Always trying to fatten you up.”
    “Aye, leave off, Callum Reade, why do you come out here if you’re not after my cooking. I know it’s not my beauty,” Dymphna says in an aggrieved voice, hiding the smile on her broad face by leaning down to smell the stew.
    “Ah, you underestimate your charms, Dymphna, you witch.” He lifts the bowl to his lips and tips the last bit down his throat, stands up, and brings the bowl over to the sink. I notice the glint of a sheriff’s badge under the jacket and, when he leans into the sink, the dull metal gleam of a pistol handle at his waist. “But I’m afraid I’m here tonight to see your boss. She free now?” He looks toward me and I realize he’s asking me, not the cook.
    “Um, she just called a student into her office,” I say, wondering why the town sheriff is on the campus. Has there been a crime?
    “Which student?” the sheriff asks.
    “Isabel Cheney.”
    “Really?” The sheriff exchanges a look with the cook. “What did she do? Tongue-lash the opposing team in debate club? Hack into the school’s computer and sabotage Chloe Dawson’s GPA?”
    “She and Chloe Dawson were supposed to clean my cottage and they didn’t. What is it between those two girls? They were at each other’s throats.”
    “Beats me,” the sheriff says, running his hands through his hair until it stands up straight from his scalp like fresh-mown wheat. “I’m just a small town sheriff, not an adolescent psychologist. But I’ll tell you this—I wouldn’t get between those two when they go at it.” He winks at me and shoulders his way out the swinging door.
    “Are the local police always so involved with the school?” I ask looking down at the large plastic vat of stew to hide the blush I can feel heating my face. I can’t remember the last time a man winked at me.
    “Well, there was some trouble at the First Night festival last year. Now the dean likes to enlist the cooperation of the sheriff beforehand. Besides, Callum Reade likes to keep an eye on things. Here.” She hands me the large container of stew.
    “That’s really too much,” I try to tell her again but she shakes her head.
    “You can freeze what you don’t eat tonight. You’ve got a growing girl and”—she gives me a quick up and down look and shakes her head again—“you look like you haven’t had a decent meal in a while yourself.”
    “I haven’t had much of an appetite since my husband died last fall,” I say, surprising myself with my own honesty. The only one in Great Neck who’d noticed the ten pounds I’d lost was a mother at a field hockey game who asked what my secret was. Grief, I’d wanted to tell her, and the stacks of bills I can’t pay, and finding out that my daughter’s college fund was spent a year ago without my consent. Instead I had told her I’d cut down on carbs. But to plump, motherly Dymphna I say now, “Everything just tastes like dust.”
    She clucks her tongue while pulling a loaf of bread out of a tin bread box. “That’s how Miss Vera took on when Miss Eberhardt died back when my mother was head housekeeper here. Wouldn’t touch nary a crust for a fortnight,” she said. She begins cutting thick slices of the brown, grain-flecked bread with a serrated knife in her right hand while using her left to slather each slice with butter from an earthenware crock: a balletic display of coordination I’m tempted to applaud. “My mothersaid that she nearly starved herself to death, and that she wasn’t really herself for a whole year—not until she got the news that