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car disappear around the frontof the house. Barely five minutes later she heard her mother unlatch the main door and welcome the passenger into the hall.
    Oh, great
, she thought.
Another stupid mystery
.
    She sat still on the porch. She heard her mother’s scratchy alto welcoming the new tenant, asking for his coat, telling him to leave his bags at the foot of the stairs. Then Mona launched into her standard tour of the Darby-Jones, her voice drifting nearer as she made her way through the main communal rooms—the front hall, the dining room where Eleanor Roosevelt once drank a milk shake, the TV in the den, and the library; past the rear study (off limits to tenants, reserved as her daughter’s study space) and the kitchen.
    Her mother’s bare feet slapped against the original antique tile as she described how the right side of the pantry was divided into equal spaces for each tenant but the left was strictly for Mona’s personal use and house dinners. Had she mentioned that, for an extra two hundred a month, he could be included in the meals she cooked six days a week, excluding Fridays, when tenants pooled their money for take-out? The stove was gas; the left rear burner was finicky and needed to be lit frequently. The pots and pans were to be treated as though they were children, and if he was ever discovered using a metal scouring pad on anything Teflon, he would be lashed to a snowblower and dragged through town. Mona had a dry delivery, and when the mysterious new tenant didn’t laugh or even chuckle awkwardly, Oneida wondered if he or she thought her mother was actually serious.
    “And this,” Mona said, stepping onto the porch, “is the side porch. Where we keep the lawn darts, watering cans, and my daughter.” She smiled at Oneida and gestured for her to join them, which Oneida did, crossing her bony arms over her chest and leaning in as Mona hugged her shoulders. Her mother always smelled of flour and frosting, the result of years of mixing, baking, stacking, and piping sugar onto wedding cakes, and Oneida inhaled deeply. “Oneida,” Mona Jones said, gesturing to the man standing in the kitchen, “this is Arthur Rook. He’s taking the rooms over the garage.”
    Arthur Rook looked lost. He was very tall and thin, not skeletal like the tall boys at school, who had stretched the same amount of skin over bodies that grew half a foot taller in the space of a summer, but shecould picture him as one of those stretched-skin boys in the not-too-distant past. He was far younger than any of the other tenants, and she wondered what he was doing in Ruby Falls. He had dark hair and really needed a shave. His eyes were very dark and very bright, and he didn’t blink. He was looking at everything—no, he was studying. He traced the outlines of all the vague, inanimate lumps on the porch, as if he were searching for something he’d left there years ago but would only remember once he saw it again. Arthur Rook’s gaze finally made its way to Oneida, and when their eyes met she felt a strange tickle in her throat, like she was supposed to say something to this stranger, or he had something to say to her. He acted as though he knew something she didn’t, which, as always, annoyed her.
    A crack of thunder snapped Arthur from his trance. He shuffled forward and offered Oneida his hand, which she shook.
    “Nice to meet you.” His voice was uneven, as though he hadn’t used it in a while.
    “Where did you say you were from, Mr. Rook?” Mona asked.
    “Los . . . Angeles.” Arthur Rook shrugged, anticipating Oneida’s knee-jerk response, she realized, of
So what the hell are you doing here?
“I had to leave,” he said. “I was tired of it.” He shook his head. “You need a decoder ring to order a hamburger.”
    “Oh, come on,” said Mona. “Everybody knows about the secret menu at In-n-Out.”
    At that, Arthur Rook’s face turned ashen and his eyes lost their intense focus, flicked back and forth, shone.