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weave cloth the way Abigail Grellier had done, re-creating the Freedmen’s school Etienne Grellier started in 1863 and coaxing the Lawrence schools into sending their classes to see it one spring.
    Her latest enthusiasm was for organic farming. “We can all do our part to make our carbon footprint smaller,” she announced. “Farms are terrible energy users, and if we could farm organically our profit margins would be so much better.”
    Jim had argued about it with her for over a year, wary now of Susan’s enthusiasms. His wife could accomplish anything, and he loved her for it, but she didn’t have staying power and that was a problem when you had such a cost-sensitive business as a farm. Besides, the climate in eastern Kansas wasn’t great for organic farming. The plains, unsheltered by mountains, were swept by winds as cold as northern Canada’s in the winter and burned by heat as warm as northern Mexico’s in the summer. Crops were too vulnerable to drought and pests in such weather extremes. You had to be able to fall back on some chemical interventions.
    In the end, Jim agreed to let Susan experiment with fifteen acres across the tracks south of the house. The Fremantle children had sold off their parents’ farmland after Liz Fremantle died, keeping just ten acres around the house. The X-Farm was part of the land that Jim had bought. It was a triangular plot, with a point sticking into Peter Ropes’s field at the south; the hypotenuse of the triangle ran along the western boundary of the land the Fremantle children had kept with the house.
    Susan had stayed with the X-Farm for three years, a record in a way, although Lara, who’d been cautious at first—Susan’s withdrawal from the co-op market still festering—had done a great deal of the day-to-day work. They’d get their organic certification this coming summer if everything went well.
    Jim wasn’t going to tell his brother any of that history. To be fair, Doug had never criticized Susan again, once she and Jim were married, but he always tightened in his sister-in-law’s company. Even her small projects, like learning how to peel an orange in a single beautiful spiral, rubbed him the wrong way. Jim wasn’t going to say he worried whether Susan could stick with the X-Farm long enough to show a profit on her crop.

Four
FIRE BOMB
    T HE SATURDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING, while Chip drove Janice, Lara, and little Nate into Kansas City to watch the tree lights turn on in the Plaza, the four adults went over to scrub down the Fremantle house.
    When Jim unlocked the door to the kitchen, Mimi wrinkled her nose at the odor. Despite Jim’s embargo, the cats’ urine and spraying lingered, so that the house smelled faintly like the lion enclosure at the zoo.
    Doug said, “Someone’s been doing dope in here, little bro. Who uses this place?”
    Jim sniffed deeply. Sure enough, mixed in with mold and cat was the sweet smell of marijuana. Faint but unmistakable.
    “Maybe Junior Schapen’s been breaking in,” Susan suggested.
    “Arnie’s kid?” Doug asked.
    “Arnie’s three-hundred-pound gorilla, is more like it,” Jim grunted. “He’s way more aggressive than Arnie was at that age. Myra seems to like it, seems to egg him on, all in the name of Jesus, of course.”
    The brothers scouted the ground floor, but couldn’t see any signs of broken windows or forced locks.
    “Chip?” Doug suggested.
    “Certainly not!” Susan flushed. “That would mean Etienne had stolen the keys behind our backs, which he’d never do. Besides, Etienne wouldn’t be so—so idiotic. He’s an athlete, baseball is his life. He wouldn’t do something that jeopardized his playing. Anyway, where would he get it?”
    Mimi laughed. “Susan! Athletes use drugs all the time—it’s all over the news every day.”
    “Why do you call him ‘Etienne’?” Doug demanded, distracted from the main argument.
    “It’s his name.”
    “He hates it. You should know that by