Indeed, when Gerda and I go to the Laymon house for dinner, we sometimes wonder if Ann is really the gentle lady she seems to be or if she is engaged in a masquerade as clever as her husband’s. When she’s cooking, I pop into the kitchen unannounced—just to be sure that she’s adding only herbs and spices to each dish and not anything lethal. When she picks up a carving knife, I ease to the edge of my chair, prepared to leap away from the table and throw myself out of the nearest dining-room window if she should move in my direction instead of toward the turkey or roast. Several times, I’ve been a bit too edgy, misjudged her intention, and hurled myself through a pane of glass, only to look back into the house from the lawn and see her standing over the roast, looking astonished and bewildered. Too embarrassed to admit my suspicions, I always claim to have been catapulted out of the room by a catastrophic muscle spasm, and I think she buys that story because she keeps giving me the names of medical specialists who might be able to help me—though lately they have all been psychiatrists.

I keep a sly watch on Kelly, too. When she was a tiny little girl, she was so cute that you could have dangled her from one of the branches of a Christmas tree, and everyone would have been so dazzled by her that they wouldn’t have noticed any of the other decorations—yet she always had an unexpected wit that was more sophisticated and astringent than the average child’s sense of humor. One night, when six of us adults sat around the Laymon dinner table, having a grand good time, Gerda realized that Kelly was standing in the doorway, in her pajamas, quietly commenting on our conversation; Gerda nudged me, and when I tuned out the adults and tuned in Kelly, she was funnier than any of us—even though we thought ourselves reasonably amusing.