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bread and butter, veal stew with vegetables, lima beans, milk, and a strange confection called a raisin layer cake.
    “Sarah and I have been friends a long time,” Sam said as they each handed over a nickel. “But my sister could use a hand on the reins.”
    Americans were so blunt. “If Paris had met Anne instead of Helen,” Alex said, “there’d have been no Trojan War.”
    “I assume that means you think she’s pretty?”
    “An understatement.”
    Sam beamed and slapped Alex on the back again. He might end up with a bruise.
    Sarah and the Williams girls were already seated. Anne was regaling Emily with advice about her teachers, and Emily looked bored. Sarah had brought her own lunch, a sandwich and an apricot.
    “You don’t like the school food?” Alex asked.
    “My mother packs mine — religious dietary laws. I can’t eat milk and meat at the same time, or pork at all.”
    That made him think of the incident with the bully.
    “I hope what happened this morning isn’t a regular occurrence.”
    “It was just words,” she said. “I’m sorry you got in trouble.”
    “Boys can be mean.” He had a knife scar on his thigh to prove that. “They’re just as bad back home and we didn’t even have—”
    “Jews?” She giggled.
    Sam sat next to his sisters, but he kept glancing at Alex and Sarah.
    “I never knew any. My grandfather says everyone draws power from their own faith.”
    “That’s very enlightened.”
    “I’m not sure that’s the right word for him.” Alex smiled. “But Greeks have lots of rules, too. The faithful are advised to avoid olive oil, meat, fish, milk and dairy products every Wednesday and Friday, and to fast for forty days before Christmas, and forty-eight before Easter—”
    “No special restrictions for the third Monday in October?” She looked at his plate.
    “Probably some saint’s day. We haven’t followed all those since I was little.”
    “I was kidding,” she said.
    “It’s still hard for me to identify sarcasm in English,” Alex said.
    “We can offer you plenty of practice,” Anne said.
    Alex couldn’t help but laugh with the rest of them.
    Anne banged the table with both hands to get everybody’s attention — which, of course, she already had.
    “Lots of folk are going to the Willows on Thursday night. Let’s go while we can — it’s closing for the season soon, and there’s talk of instituting a curfew because of the murder.”
    Whatever the Willows was, it had to be more exciting than another macabre evening with Grandfather.

Eight:
    An Unusual Conversation
    Salem, Massachusetts, Wednesday, October 22, 1913
    A NNE HAD BEEN RIGHT about the funeral, Charles’ coffin was closed. He’d been Emily’s only friend in the youth group bible study, but he was finished studying now. Thinking about him gave her a peculiar sensation, not so different from riding down the big hill of the Willows water chute. It made her want to cry and at the same time pulled the corners of her mouth into a grin.
    Pastor Parris’ gaunt face was crowned by a slick of brown hair combed back from his high forehead. When he grew animated — as he always did when denouncing sin — this sheet often tumbled across his face, only to be swept back, immediately and compulsively, by one hand or the other.
    The pastor was always nice to her because she helped out around church. Sometimes he’d bless her with warm hands that made her skin crawl a little. But his sermons, even the hair-flipping kind, could be awfully repetitive. He seemed to take the whole hell thing very seriously. Emily had a fantasy about hell she liked. She was nude and a bunch of red-skinned demons cooked her up for dinner. It didn’t hurt. Usually they cut her open and stuffed her insides with fruit and stale bread. Sometimes they boiled her naked in a big pot. Thinking about it made the place between her legs buzz. Besides, she was going to heaven, so it really wasn’t an issue.
    The boring part done,