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"Gas," he says, to nobody. "You get a pocket of it in a house that old, it'll do things to your eyes. I've seen it."

He hasn't. Nobody has. But he said it out loud in a crowd, and I watch three hundred people want to believe it.

By Sunday it'll be a gas leak. There'll be a version with fireworks, and a kid in a bedsheet telling his mother there was a lady down in the floor, and his mother telling him it was the smoke, and he'll let her have it. He's seven. He already knows which answers get you a ride home.

Not all of them take it. I count three who don't, and one of them is a girl of about nineteen at the edge of the drive, looking at Maren with respect.

She catches me watching her, nods once, and walks to her car.

Ansel comes up behind me in the doorway with a folding chair in each hand.

"Say it," I tell him.

"You were right and I was loud." He shifts the chairs. "Six of mine drove out here without asking me. I heard at ten and got in the truck behind them." He looks past me at the wax and the open piano and the wires still going somewhere in the dark. "I'll be loud about something else next month. Tonight I'm carrying chairs."

I smile and slap him on the back and walk over to see how Tobin is doing.

Tobin told me how it goes. A month of it, and one night nobody's behind you. But I have gained them back.

There are nineteen wolves on this lawn. I'm honored.

It takes an hour and ten minutes to get three hundred people off a lawn.

Cass works the whole of it with her forearm wrapped in someone's velvet cape and won't sit down until the last taillights are gone.

"It's a scratch."

"It's four inches."

"It's a four-inch scratch." She lets me look anyway. The cape comes away wet and goes back on. "Ansel's going to say I got it standing behind you."

"You did."

"I know." She grins at me with half her face. "That's the part I want in the story."

Evelyn leaves last, coat buttoned, like a meeting ran long.

"The council will want to see you."

"They can come to the shop tomorrow," Maren says. "We open at ten."

"Alone would be better."

"Bring all of them." Now she looks up. "I want to say it once."

Evelyn holds still for about a second and a half.

Then, "Ten it is," and she walks to her car.

Lila's on the bottom step with a coat someone put over her shoulders. One eye is swelling shut and there's wax in her hair, and she isn't asking anybody for anything, which is new.

Maren goes down to her. I stay in the truck. This one isn't mine.

I can hear it anyway. I always could.

"Are they going to arrest me?"

"For what? There isn't a word for what happened on any form in this county."