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and collapsed into a heap of jumbled mattress and shattered frame.
    Lucy screamed again and hugged her husband. They stared at the bed for a full five minutes before one of them dared to speak.
    “Do you think it’s over?” Lucy asked.
    “Jeez, I hope so.”
    “This was no tornado,” Lucy insisted.
    “I don’t know what it was.”
    The house was eerily silent, so quiet they could hear their hearts beat. Lucy got to her feet and walked around the bed, toward the bedroom door. After a second Ray followed. The two of them got to the bedroom door and looked outside, cautiously.
    The rest of the house appeared to be okay. Then they looked back into the bedroom just in time to see Lucy’s vanity table take off for the ceiling, shedding perfume and makeup bottles as it rose. Lucy screamed again as the sound of shattering glass mixed with the smell of perfume.
    “Let me have the card,” she said firmly.
    “Card, what card?” Ray asked nervously.
    “The man’s business card. The psychic investigator.”
    “You mean the nutcase who tore up our lawn? What do you want his card for?”
    “I think we need his services,” she said.
    “You got to be kidding me.”
    “Something is wrong in our house, Ray, and it’s nothing you or I can explain. Give me the card.”
    Stepping cautiously into the bedroom, Ray picked up the card from the side table. Just as he snatched it up the table itself flew into the air, shaking a small lamp and a clock radio onto the floor. The impact turned on the radio, and a man’s voice began reading the weather report.
    “There’s nothing about tornadoes,” Lucy said caustically.
    She hurried into the kitchen just in time for things to start happening there, too. The kitchen TV, the one she watched the news on while making dinner, switched itself on and flipped around the dial wildly before finally settling on a show called MTV Raps. The volume blared. Then other things happened. The toaster began spitting out toast—though no bread had been put in it. The coffeemaker switched itself on and began bubbling away, turning out a perfect cup of java despite not having so much as a single bean loaded in the hopper. And knives and forks began doing a brisk dance on the countertop. Stunned, Ray summoned up the courage to creep to the refrigerator and steal himself a beer only to have the can open by itself and spray him in the face. He took it and retreated to the kitchen door, a spot of relative safety, where he could watch his wife on the phone.
    She dialed the number nervously and drummed her fingers on the side of the phone while waiting for the ring.
    “Hello, Mr. Bannister?” she said when at last the man picked up.
    “Yes?” he replied.
    “Is this Frank Bannister?”
    “Yes, and I got to tell you, I’m sick and tired of you people calling me at home all the time. I told the last collection agent that I mailed the check in yesterday. Is it my fault that the U.S. Post Office sends its priority mail on the backs of garden slugs?”
    “Uh . . . Mr. Bannister, I’m not calling to collect a bill,” Lucy said, half-surprised and half-amused.
    “Oh, yes you are,” Ray said in the background. “You have to collect the bill for what that idiot did to our property.”
    Praying that Bannister didn’t hear her husband over the racket being made by the hyperactive kitchen appliances, Lucy continued, “I’m calling because I need your help.”
    “Oh, what’s wrong? Was there a death in the family?”
    “Not yet,” she snarled, glaring at Ray as he worked with pencil and paper to estimate the cost of Kentucky bluegrass and Chewings fescue.
    “What then?” Bannister asked.
    “I have . . . I think I have . . . I guess you would call it an infestation.”
    “Well, you’re calling me, so I guess you’re not talking about termites. Can you tell me what you’ve experienced?”
    “Listen,” she said, holding the phone to the coffeemaker, the dancing utensils, and the rap music. “We