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evening,” she added, as though it was against the rules to have more than two visitors a week. A Mr. and Mrs. Cedric Fairweather. Are they your parents?”
    “No,” said Spence.
    “Yes,” said Zoe, stepping on his big toe. “That is, my parents. Jack here is my half brother, you see. He has a different mother.”
    The woman looked sympathetic, and pointed to a stairway in the center of the room. “Three flights up and no elevator,” she complained. “But you children have young legs.”
    “We’ll tell them to put in an elevator, too,” said Spence, and smiled sweetly at the woman. She patted him on his carroty head.
    “How’re we going to get Thelma out past her?” he hissed as they climbed the steep steps.
    “You’ll have to distract her.”
    “How?”
    “You’ll find a way.” Zoe jumped up on a bench on the second floor landing and balanced there for a moment. “Just practicing,” she said when Spence glared up at her.
    She paused at the door of room 304, and then pushed it wide. It creaked horribly.
    “Get out!” cried a voice.
    “Aunt Thelma Fairweather?” said Zoe. “Don’t you remember us? We’re Alice’s friends. We brought you your black sweater.”
    “And some Fig Newtons,” added Spence, holding them out.
    “I’m not Aunt Thelma Fairweather,” said the voice, “and I said to get out. So get out!”
    Zoe saw that there were three women in the room: all seated on a black horsehair sofa. The television was shrieking: on the screen a woman’s stomach was ballooning in and out. “I’ve seen that commercial,” whispered Spence. “The lady has gas. And always right at our dinner time.”
    “Get out,” the voice repeated.
    “I’m Thelma Fairweather,” said the woman on the end of the sofa. “I say they stay. You can get out,” she told the first woman.
    “Then I will,” said the woman, and shuffled out of the room in dirty pink slippers, and then back in again. “But there’s nowhere to go in this place.”
    “Then sit down and keep quiet,” said Thelma. She motioned the children over to a bed in a corner of the room. They perched on the edge while Thelma got up and put on the sweater Zoe had brought. “Did they tell you to bring it? That Cedric and Chloe? That pair of phonies? I’d never in my life heard of a Cedric and Chloe until they showed up, and I’ve lived on this earth seventy-six years.”
    “They didn’t tell us,” said Zoe. “We thought of it ourselves. Alice wanted to come,” she explained, “but her mother stayed home from work and wouldn’t let her out of the house. I mean, no one knows we’re here.”
    Thelma squinted at Zoe through round gold spectacles. She was a plump woman with fuzzy white hair that surrounded her crinkly pink face like a halo around the sun. “You were the one who tried to help when they took me away,” she said. “Thank you for that. They say I’m losing my mind. And it might happen if I have to live one more day with that pair.” She pointed at the two frazzled-looking women on the horsehair sofa.
    “You won’t have to,” said Spence. “We’re taking you out of here tonight.”
    “Maybe,” said Zoe. “That is, we won’t take you without your permission. We just need to know a few things. You see, we’re trying to find out who put the herbicide in your sister’s pea soup. And when you were kidnapped, well, we figured the two cases are connected. So Alice let us into your house, and we found...this.” She held up the small gold key. It shone in the dim light of the single ceiling bulb. “They were looking for it,” she said, “that Cedric and Chloe. And we need to know why.”
    Aunt Thelma took the key in her pale veined hands. “So that’s it,” she exclaimed, as though she’d just discovered the answer to a difficult math problem. “It’s the key to my safe deposit box in the Branbury National Bank. Now what on earth would those two want to get into that for?” Her forehead wrinkled with the