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"Actually, Allie does have fewer boyfriends than you'd think; a lot of them are intimidated by her looks. Well, here's your blanket, and here's your room — holler if there's anything your heart desires."
    Again, the suggestion was innocent enough; but it brought the telltale flush back to his neck.
    My, oh, my, he really did take a hit, Meg thought, oddly dismayed.
    "Look, ah ... Meg ... I want you to know I'm grateful for the room. I know it's an intrusion."
    "Not at all," she lied. "What's another body, more or less?"
    His mouth curved upward in a dark smile. "Funny — I hear that line all the time in my work."
    Suddenly Meg remembered what he did for a living and wanted him out of the house. It was instinctive with her, like turning off the television if the twins were watching and the news was violent.
    "Good night, then," she said abruptly.
    Meg spent the rest of the evening answering inquiries and working up the numbers for the Inn Between's quarterly tax return. She kept one ear cocked to the hall, listening for strange footsteps, but the only sounds were the clicks and whirs of the calculator on her battered oak desk. The family was on its best behavior; the halls were unnaturally quiet. It was a school night, so the chances were good that Timmy was doing homework, and excellent that Terry was playing Nintendo. Comfort had retired to her room with her needlework; through the plaster walls Meg could hear the soft strains of a Barry Manilow tape.
    There was no sign of Lloyd, which probably meant that the furnace was resisting his amateur's efforts to make it hum. Meg would've liked to go down and see what was what, but she didn't want to give Allie, trapped in a tête-a-tête with their father, the chance to escape. Allie was best off where she was.
    Bleary-eyed by eleven, Meg changed into cotton pajamas and was brushing her teeth with cold water in the bathroom down the hall when she heard Allie say softly, "No, no, go back to sleep."
    Meg popped into the hall. "Go back to sleep who?" she asked her sister.
    Allie, smiling, shook her head and held an index finger to her lips, then continued on to Meg's bedroom. By the time Meg caught up to her, Allie was peeling away her blue jeans and tossing them on a wicker chair alongside the iron bed that Meg had brought back with her after her husband's death.
    "Tom was out like a light," Allie explained, pulling a man's white T-shirt over her head to sleep in. She blew a kiss to the cover of Newsweek that she'd tacked on the wall facing the bed. "Poor thing."
    "For Pete's sake, what were you doing in there anyway?" Meg could not keep the annoyance out of her voice.
    "Meg," her sister said, picking up on it at once. "I was just checking on him. He is hurt."
    "Hurt, schmurt. You can't go barging into a stranger's room. He's a cop. He might've had a gun."
    "He does have a gun. Hanging in a holster on the bedpost."
    "Oh, great."
    "What's the big deal? It's not as though we haven't all seen guns."
    Meg was fuming. "It's one thing to have a hunting gun stored under lock and key, and another to have a pistol hanging fifteen feet away from where a potential juvenile delinquent is sleeping. Have you ever heard the term 'attractive nuisance'?"
    Allie, stretching her locked arms in front of her, let out an enormous yawn. "You're making way too much of this, Meg," she said, pulling back the quilt and getting tiredly into bed. "God, I'm exhausted. This dollhouse thing has really set Dad off. We just went all through The Formative Years: 1942 — 1947. You should've been there, not me; you care so much more about ancient history. Who gets the wall?"
    "You do," Meg said, crawling in beside her sister. "At least that way I can keep an eye on you."
    "What if I have to get up to pee?"
    "Pee in your pants."
    "Oh, like the old days, when I was three and you were fifteen. Is this the same mattress?"
    "Very funny. I thought you were tired."
    Allie threw an arm around her sister and squeezed her