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would he want to be curator? That was just a fund-raising position. Harvey didn’t want to have lunch at Southern Hills. He wanted to play with the toys.
    And Gilcrease had the best toys. Western art, yes—Remingtons and Carys and Morans, sculptures and paintings. But what Harvey really loved were the artifacts. Artifacts of the Old West, artifacts of Native American cultures. Great stuff. The museum’s holdings were so vast they couldn’t all be displayed at once. The artifacts in deep storage had to be maintained. Harvey took care of that. He loved working with the goods, and it gave him a legitimate excuse to take some of them home occasionally, just for a day or two. Which in turn gave him a great excuse to take them over to the Barretts. Show-and-tell for grown-ups.
    “Hey, Wally, look at this great kachina doll!” he’d say as he strolled in through the kitchen door. Actually, he wasn’t sure the mayor cared a bit about kachina dolls. He wasn’t sure he much cared for being called Wally, either. Didn’t matter. It got Harvey through the door, where he could keep an eye on things. That mattered.
    And if museum curios couldn’t do the trick, there was always home repair. One ruse he could count on—there was always something in the Barrett home that needed to be fixed. Back in Dill City, he had learned how to take care of most home emergencies himself, including the plumbing, because there was usually no one else to do it. These were useful skills, and skills that Wally had never managed to acquire, thus leading to another easy entrance into the Barrett home.
    “Harvey!” he remembered Caroline saying not too long ago, when he delivered himself to their kitchen, “what brings you over here?”
    “Well, the kids were tellin’ me there was a leak in the …” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, the …”
    “The shower?”
    “That’s right. The shower.”
    “You mean the shower drain.”
    “Right, that’s what I meant. Well, I brought my tools.”
    “So I see.”
    “I’ll just get to work. So how’s everything going?”
    Worked like a charm. Let him stay vigilant, maybe prevent a few knockdown-drag-outs, and maybe make Caroline’s life a little easier. Which was important.
    The truth was, Harvey harbored a secret, one he admitted only to himself. Sure, he cared about the kids, and he worried when their parents fought like cocks in the henhouse. But that was only half the story.
    Truth was, Harvey was in love with Caroline Barrett.
    It was nothing tawdry or unseemly or disgusting. He didn’t lust after her from afar or take pictures of her to bed or anything. He just loved her, that was all.
    Who wouldn’t? Caroline was a gorgeous woman, one of the most natural beauties God ever saw fit to put on the face of this earth. Tall, thin, well-dressed, with high cheekbones and long legs that went from here to forever. She was a knockout’s knockout. Why she’d want to get hitched up to some old jock-turned-politico he couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t resist the limelight, he supposed, such as it was. What could you say about a culture that made millionaires out of football players and paid museum curators twenty-two thousand a year?
    It wasn’t so much the fighting that worried him. All couples quarrel, though most didn’t do it as often, or as mean, as those two. But he had noticed that in the last six months or so, Caroline had occasionally taken to wearing sunglasses when she went outside, and the sun just wasn’t that bright. One afternoon when he caught her out in the garden, she had a bruise on her cheek so discolored no amount of makeup could hide it. She told him some lame story about bumping into the shelves in the attic.
    That worried him.
    One afternoon not too long ago, he’d been at the neighborhood block party and the Barretts were there too, and there was some jerk who had just moved into the area and had drunk too much for his own good who was hanging around Caroline, smirking and