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know.”
    “No, she won’t. That’s the beauty of not having a phone. Annoying people can’t reach you except by letter, and you can throw those away.”
    This viewpoint hadn’t occurred to Amy before. She was thoughtful until we got back to my house.
    “I could really use a shower.” She picked up her knapsack and looked at me. “Would that be all right?’
    “Certainly.” I tried not to think about the hot water heater. It had only started acting up after I’d done what good homeowners are supposed to do and drained it. It seemed to miss all that rusty sedimentary fluid that had lurked in its depths for untold years. Now whenever I used hot water, it fired itself up with an angry roar, and then delivered water that varied from scalding to freezing in seconds. I warned Amy about that, and she went off to clean up.
    I turned my computer on, determined to finish editing a rough draft intended for Organic Gardening. It was hard to concentrate on the details of seed germination, though. And even harder to think about going back to census duty later on, facing a multitude of Renee-like people without being able to hang up on them.
     

Chapter 4
     
    "So where is she?” Claudia Kaplan shrieked over the din in Bridget’s living room.
    “Who?” I screamed back.
    Walking in the door, I’d been assaulted by the noise and the hunger-inducing smell of something barbecuing. Claudia, an imposing woman in her late fifties, semaphored her arms across the room toward the bank of audio equipment, causing the hibiscus blossoms on her caftan to billow.
    “Turn it down!”
    Her bellowed request was picked up by several other people in the room, and the scruffy-looking guy who’d commandeered the tape player finally obliged. There were audible gasps of relief.
    “Greg’s been experimenting with percussion as a background to his readings,” one of the women standing nearby explained in the relative silence.
    "That wasn’t percussion,” Claudia said, scowling across the room at Greg, who sheepishly tucked his tape into a pocket. "That was aural torment.”
    Bridget came bustling out of the kitchen. The crowd of people in there made a lot of noise, but nothing like it had been before. "That’s better,” she said, setting a stack of paper cups on the top shelf of a bookcase. “I was afraid for everyone’s eardrums.”
    “Where are the kids?” Claudia squinted into the kitchen.
    “I got rid of them,” Bridget said frankly. “They’re too young to worry about with so many people around.” She came over and gave me a hug. "I’m glad you could make it, Liz. Paul said you were pretty busy working two jobs.”
    I offered her the bottle of plum brandy I’d brought, made by my own fair hands with the millions of tiny little plums that had appeared on a tree in my backyard a couple of weeks before. “Don’t open this for a while,” I warned her. “It needs time to mellow.”
    “Don’t we all.” Claudia looked past me and around the room. “Where’s your niece? I don’t see anyone who matches Paul Drake’s rather fabulous description.”
    “She’s not coming.” I nipped a cube of cheese off the platter Bridget carried. “I told her she could, though I had my doubts, but she needed something from Walgreen’s. I got the impression she really wanted to check out the scene downtown."
    Bridget regarded me with worried eyes. She is one of the nicest people I know, and she mothers everyone. Four children ranging from seven years to nine months is enough to make a woman see the world through a haze of dirty fingerprints and skinned knees. “How are you going to cope with this, Liz?”
    “Hey, how hard can it be? She seems pretty levelheaded, and she’s going to get a job.”
    Bridget and Claudia exchanged the kind of look that unites those who are or have been parents in superior wisdom to those who haven’t.
    “Lots could go wrong,” Claudia said darkly. She looked into her paper cup. “Just thinking about it