“Can you . . . You can’t change anything?” I asked. “When you see something that’s going to happen?”

“I cannot,” she said, with absolute finality. “I don’t have a bit of responsibility. But people make decisions, and that can change what I’ve seen.” Quiana’s golden skin flushed as we all stared at her.

“Right now,” said Sam, getting from the bigger picture to the smaller, “do you think you can help us with the problems in this house?”

Quiana looked down. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to try,” she said. “When I figure out what to do.” She looked at each of us questioningly. None of us had a helpful idea, at least not at the moment.

I said, “I’m hoping that the funny feeling in the house will sort of wear away, myself. Sam opened the wall, we’ve found the hammer, so we know Albert did kill Isaiah. Surely that should set it all to rest.”

JB said, “Is that the way it works?” He didn’t seem to have a doubt in the world that I would know the answer.

“Friend, I don’t know,” I said. “If it doesn’t work that way, maybe we should call the Catholic priest.” One came to Bon Temps’s little church from a nearby town.

“But this isn’t a demon that needs to be exorcised,” Quiana said, outraged. “It’s not a devil. It’s just real unhappy.”

“It has to go be unhappy somewhere else,” JB said. “This is our house. These are our babies. They can’t go on crying all the time.”

As if he’d pressed a cue button, we could hear Robbie start to wail in the house. We all sighed simultaneously, which would have been funny if we’d had a clue what to do. But further conversation didn’t trigger any plan, so we figured we might as well go back to the job that had brought us there.

Sam and I picked up the painted shelves and went inside to put them up. Quiana followed, and she returned to the stove to stir the spaghetti sauce, her face tense with distress, her brain concentrating on fighting the unhappiness that flowed through the house like invisible water.