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said—”
    â€œWhatever Shelly said,” Dad interrupted, “Diane insists she’s due something because of some ancient obligation—”
    â€œWell, give it to her then!” I yelled, jumping up from the table. “Give it all to her, let her have everything Shelly left. Who cares?”
    â€œI do,” Dad said promptly. “I’ve already spoken to a lawyer—”
    â€œOh, no!” I bawled. “Are you all going to court over Shelly’s stuff? I can’t believe it! It’s disgusting! I can’t believe I belong to a family like that!”
    â€œSweetheart,” Dad said wearily, “ all families are like that. Deaths and funerals, they bring out the worst in people, even people who are normally pretty okay. Nobody’s at their best when they’re upset. Look at your mother; look how mad you’re getting right now, without even knowing the whole story.” He smiled at me, but sadly. “Death hurts people a lot, it shakes them up and scares the bejaggers out of them—”
    â€œYeah?” I gulped. “You’d never know it from the stuff you see on TV, with people getting blown away every five minutes. Nobody even says oops.” Low blow: Dad was working on an episode of Shakers and Breakers, which Mom didn’t like me to watch because of the violence on it. I felt my face get hot with shame over how I was acting, but I couldn’t stop.
    Dad, stubbly and scruffy in his old wool bathrobe, never flinched. He went right on in that reasonable tone that drove me crazy—I mean, why didn’t he break down and bawl? “When people stop feeling so awful about the person they’re missing, they calm down. If they’re lucky and everybody tries hard, things get back to normal again.”
    â€œFine,” I said. “Well, let me know when that happens, okay? If ever.”
    â€œAmy, Amy,” he groaned, “let up, will you? Look, you loved Shelly, I loved Shelly, but she’s not the first person who ever died in this family, and we still are a family.”
    â€œWell, maybe it’s a good thing we’re moving away,” I said. “If all anybody can think about is fighting over Shelly’s things, maybe it’s time the family broke up!”
    Dad said, “Did you walk in here this morning determined to make me wish I’d stayed in California?”
    No adequately blistering answer occurred to me. I stomped off into my room, got dressed, and left the apartment without saying a word more. As I walked past the living-room doorway, I heard Dad on the phone—with L.A. I could tell by the way he talked, faster than normally and laughing more.
    I wanted to go someplace where if people fought, it was against a terrible evil like the Bone Men. Nobody there was running off to talk to lawyers about their dead relative’s wills, either. I didn’t think Kevin would have bothered stocking the Fayre Farre with lawyers.
    And I hadn’t felt Cousin Shelly’s absence so much there, maybe because in Kevin’s dream world she had never existed.
    I slapped together a couple of sandwiches, pinned the rhinestone rose to the collar of my shirt, and headed for Central Park. Since Claudia’s book was too big to lug around, first I went to get a park map of my own at the Dairy.
    I was careful not to walk through any arches on the way there, which took some doing. The footpaths tend to lead you around a corner and into a tunnel with no warning, particularly in a rainy spring when everything is wildly overgrown so you can’t even see the bridges until you’re under them.
    It was a relief to find the Dairy where it belonged, within comfortable sight of the brick Chess and Checkers House and a striped arch called Playmates. I came back out of the Dairy and sat down on the huge black granite slab that slopes down from the chess house to study the map. I couldn’t help wondering