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He’s not answering their e-mails or phone calls, either.”
    “That sounds really bad,” I said baldly. “What do the police say?”
    “I haven’t told them. What would be the point?”
    I tried not to shout at her. “The point would be that they could be looking for your grandson. He’s been gone ten days now. No phone calls, right? No postcards or e-mails? No? Then we need to get the police looking for him.”
    “No!” she cried. “Just leave him alone. And don’t go calling the police, the police are worse than—never mind—but if you go to the police about my business, I’ll—I’ll sue you!”
    I looked at her in bewilderment. It was hard to believe an elderly white woman might be the victim of police harassment. Maybe it was a residue of Austria under Nazi control, when police declared open season on Jews, but her ferocity made me think she was guarding against a more immediate danger.
    “Ms. Binder, who are you afraid of? Has one of your daughter’s associates threatened you?”
    “No! I don’t want the police involved. What if they—” She cut herself off mid-sentence.
    “What if they what?” I demanded sharply.
    “People like you think the police are there to help, but I know different, that’s all. We solve our own problems in my family. I don’t need police, I don’t need Charlotte Herschel’s condescension, and I don’t need you!”
    I couldn’t budge her from that stance, even though I didn’t mince words about the danger her grandson might be in.
    “How did he leave? Car?” I finally asked, thinking that with the plate number I might get state police to help look for him.
    “Len bought him a used Subaru, when I—when we said—when Martin agreed that college would be a waste of time and money, but he didn’t take it; it’s still out front.”
    She couldn’t imagine how he’d gone; she thought she would have heard a taxi. He might have just walked to the bus stop.
    “What did he take with him?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I told you, I wasn’t really paying any attention.”
    “Have you looked in his room to see what might be missing?”
    She stared at me blankly, as if I’d suggested she sacrifice a sheep to predict the future. When she didn’t respond, I said, in the bright tone you reserve to mask your anger, “Why don’t we go to his room now, and you can tell me whether he took camping gear or a laptop, or what.”
    After fiddling with her hands and her sweater for another moment, Kitty got to her feet and stumped off toward the back of the house. I followed her through a dining room crammed with sideboards and more lace into the kitchen. This was where she lived; it held a television, bookshelves, and stacks of unopened mail.
    She opened a door to a set of open-backed stairs and led me down them, past the mechanicals, to a wall made of dark-stained wood with a door set in the middle.
    “I did most of this work,” Kitty said. “My dad was a builder and you knew when something broke he could fix it. He taught all us girls the same. When I married Len—we met in Vienna; he was working in the army motor pool—I thought he might be like my dad, but Len wasn’t a builder. He was good with machines, but he couldn’t do carpentry. I ended up doing all those kinds of things.” The words might have been part of an ongoing plaint, but it was clear from the way she looked at her knobby fingers that she was proud of her skills.
    She pushed open the door to her grandson’s room. A deep voice intoned, “Beware, mortal, you are entering Sovngarde, where Alduin has set a snare for your soul.”
    I jumped back and flung a protective arm around Kitty, but she wasn’t disturbed. She even produced a faint smirk at seeing me knocked off balance.
    “I’m so used to Martin’s gadgets, I don’t notice them. Martin is a clever boy with engineering projects, so if anyone besides him opens the door, they hear a warning. The message changes; he’s got five or six