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Scott began, “when I was talking about the Welcome Home banner . . .” But he shook his head unhappily. “Maddy, damn it, how can they be real visions? What is this, some kind of—”
    â€œIt could have been like a psychic Instagram,” interrupted Madeline. “Like Aunt Amity recorded a message, a video, on that spider you looked at.”
    Scott grimaced. “So what are you saying . . . when we were kids, we really did see an actual guy on a boat open that folder and look at the Usabo spider?”
    Madeline had drawn up her knees, and all Scott could see were her wide eyes as she said, “We didn’t see him, we were him, remember?”
    Scott got stiffly to his feet. “I think Ariel was listening at the door.”
    Madeline straightened her legs and sighed. “Maybe.”
    For several seconds neither of them spoke.
    Then Madeline said, “She is awful mean, Ariel. Do you want to stay here for a week?”
    Scott was glad to abandon the disquieting spider topic. “Do you?”
    â€œI don’t know. We might inherit the place,” Madeline said, and continued even as her brother was shaking his head, “if we stay the week, like Aunt Amity put in her will. And it’s free food for a week, and a quarter off the month’s utilities at my apartment. That’s not nothing.”
    And I’ll have to at least split my week’s pay with Ellis for filling in for me at the Ravenna Apartments office, thought Scott. Better eat a lot of the free food.
    But, “True,” he said.
    â€œAriel liked you, when we first got here. Then she didn’t. What’s up with that?”
    Scott felt his face heating up again. “She was pretending, at first.”
    â€œYou think so? I don’t think so.”
    Madeline got up and crossed to the open window and knelt on the floor to look out at the rainy night. Scott knew that the view was of the long garden that sloped up to a row of garages at the top of the hill.
    The breeze blew Madeline’s curly dark hair away from her face, and the house creaked like an old ship at sea.
    â€œWe could look at all our old places, while we’re here,” she said. “The garden looks the same, as much as I can see. I can just make out the wall that’s got the Medusa mosaic on it, unless all the stones have fallen out by now.” She pursed her lips, perhaps finding that an uncomfortable subject, and went on quickly, “And we could check out the basements. I wonder if our scare-bat is still down there.”
    Scott smiled reluctantly and shook his head. In their childhood explorations of Caveat, they had not neglected the extensive cellars that stretched under all the buildings on the hill, and even under gardens and lawns. In a brick alcove under the main house their flashlights had found a gold-painted four-armed lug wrench stuck upright in a yard-wide square of lumpy concrete; Madeline had eventually stapled together scraps of cloth to make a coat and hat to hang on it, and Scott had painted a clown face on a plastic egg that somebody’s stockings had come in, and hung it under the hat. Madeline had decided that since no crows were ever likely to venture into the cellars, they should call the little figure a scare-bat. She had taken to dressing it for the seasons—red-and-white felt and a conical red hat in December, a witch’s hat and black dress in October . . .
    â€œIf we can still fit through all those passages,” he said.
    â€œSure, we weren’t little kids anymore by the time we found the basements.”
    Then she stiffened. “Scott,” she said sharply, “that cat is walking in midair.”
    Scott got up and crouched beside her.
    She pointed out the window. “There!”
    Off to the left, a white cat fifty feet away in the darkness was picking its way along in a straight line. It didn’t seem to mind the rain.
    â€œIt’s on that wall with