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quiet and the hours seemed endless. He would lie next to his wife and wonder: how had she known to come to the alley that night? Why had she walked those fifteen blocks with the pistol in her apron? How could she have arrived at that exact moment? She’d had to have left at least a quarter of an hour before Magnussen had even arrived in the alley. It was a deeply worrying mystery.
    But William never did ask his wife how she had come to be in the alley that night, for one very simple reason: deep down, he really did not wish to know the answer. The answer, he suspected, might be even more worrying than the mystery.
    Helen bore William four children. With the birth of their fourth—a son, to William’s great joy—they had finally saved up enough money to move out of the dingy warren of the wharf neighbourhood. William quit his job on the docks and bought a small farmhouse just south of Philadelphia where, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, he took up farming.
    There were lean years, and even in the best of times the family rarely had more than two dimes to rub together, but they were happy, and they were often rather fortunate. When neighbouring crops rotted in unusually wet springs, William’s managed to survive. When foxes decimated nearby hen houses, their chickens remained untouched. When drought scorched other fields, William discovered a spring in a rocky glen on the corner of their property and used it to irrigate his crops.
    It never occurred to him that these were unusual strokes of luck. Nor did it occur to him that they seemed to coincide with his wife’s somewhat charming eccentricities. Helen had developed a habit of walking through the fields in the mornings, talking softly to herself, or singing funny, lilting songs. William never heard her actual words. He was content to see her from a distance, meandering in the dawn sunlight, singing and petting the young plants with the flats of her hands as she went. He knew that other people might think her slightly crazy, but he knew better. Helen was a gentle, whimsical soul, and the farm life had been very good for her. It had awakened something in her, and that awakening made William glad.
    He never noticed that his soggy fields grew drier and healthier as she circled them each morning. Or that the colourful symbols she painted on the hen house might be more than senseless squiggles and interlocking patterns. Or that she had buried something in the rocky glen mere days before he discovered the spring there.
    But her son did.
    His name was Phillip. He’d been named after his grandfather, whom he had never known. He watched his mother carefully, as only a son can, both idolizing and studying her. He saw her circle the fields each morning, singing her funny little songs, but he knew that she wasn’t singing to herself. She was singing to the plants as they pushed toward the sun, even to the dirt itself, encouraging and coaxing the fields in her lovely, simple voice. She made up the songs as she went. Phillip knew this because he sometimes followed her from a distance, watching with wide eyes, transfixed by his secretly magical mother.
    His sisters didn’t believe him when he tried to tell them about their mother’s subtle magic. They were older and wiser than him, and reminded him of that at every opportunity. They laughed at him and scorned him and told him he was a silly baby. None of this dissuaded Phillip in the least. They were too old to recognize real magic, even if it lived in the same house with them.
    One morning, Phillip saw his mother leave the house with a small tin box under her left arm and a garden trowel in her right hand. The dew was still beaded on the grass and the sun was barely a rose-tinted promise on the lip of the horizon. Phillip followed her, stealing along the edge of the east field, his bare feet swishing through the wet, tall grass.
    His mother did not sing that morning. She walked silently, soberly, carrying the tin box and trowel