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linen Victorian dress she'd had on in the gondola and replaced it with a tea-length chiffon dress in shades of peach and pink. It kind of made her look like a wood nymph, which was perfect, because she'd put her book away, and now she had a wicker basket over her arm as she collected long-stemmed flowers.
    Clearly, this was very important work that required too much concentration to greet her sister, who had come, at some personal inconvenience, to rescue her.
    I ran down the porch steps and across the lawn to the flower garden, and stepped directly in front of her. Despite her lack of enthusiasm, I was ready to throw my arms around her and hug her, but she still wouldn't make eye contact.
    “Emily!” I repeated, to show her how glad I was to see her. But she was deep into snipping the stem of a blood-red amaryllis with her sparkly scissors.
    She looked more annoyed than anything else, her expression similar to the one my mother uses when our neighbors' badly trained puppy barks and jumps on her and rudely sniffs where Mom doesn't want to be sniffed.
    Emily stepped around me as though I were a muddy spot on the path and reached for a yellow and orange daffodil. Then a spotted tiger lily. Then a purple and white gladiolus.
    I moved in front of her again. Though my heart was breaking, I repeated, in my most please-please-please voice, “Emily!”
    She made to sidestep me once again, and I threw my arms around her, basket and scissors and all.
    And she finally opened up to me.
    “Geez, Grace,” she complained, and disentangled herself. She didn't exactly push me away, but she made no attempt to hide how peeved she was that I'd crunched her basket. She picked up the gladiolus and frowned at the stem, which now bent at an angle. She snipped the broken part off, but this made it significantly shorter than the rest. “It probably won't work now,” she muttered in a disgusted tone.
    “Flowers here work?” I asked. Of all the things I could have said, this was not what I would have guessed would be my first question for her. But apparently we needed something more to connect than simply my being overjoyed to find her.
    Evidently, “Flowers here work?” was a stupid question.
    She sighed, then glanced at the flowers she'd gathered. This garden was a jumble, with an assortment of blooms. Our grandmother had been a gardener, both in Rochester and at her winter home in Gainesville, Florida, and I recognized that many of the flowers in this garden bloomed under different climate conditions and at different times of year from one another. Emily held up a finger—I guess to forestall my lunging into another hug and crushing some more of her precious flowers—then leaned over to clip a bluish-purple iris. She tossed the iris into the basket.
    And the iris disappeared. Along with the other irises that had been in there.
    Emily lifted the mass of remaining flowers to show me the gold coins accumulated at the bottom of the basket. “A coin,” she explained, “for every ten flowers of the same kind.”
    “Wow,” I said. “That's amazing.”
    I guess she picked up on the sarcasm.
    “What are you doing here, Grace?” she asked.
    “What am I doing here? I'm here to help you, you idiot. What are you doing?”
    “I'm gathering flowers,” Emily said, walking around me, as though that explained all and I could go home now.
    I followed her as she meandered down the path collecting blossoms. I wanted to say, “Mom's worried sick.” I wanted to say, “I've been worried sick.” But when it became obvious that Emily had finished explaining, I backed off from the Big Questions, such as “You don't want to die, do you?” Instead, I asked, “So what do you do with all those coins?”
    “Duh!” A black-eyed Susan apparently completed a set, for it disappeared as Emily added it to her basket. “You were in the house, weren't you?” she asked. “Wasn't that you in the kitchen? Tell me it wasn't that overbearing Ms. Bennett eating