Jane went to the kitchen door. Beth had joined the kitchen crowd, Mimi had disappeared, and Pooky was standing at the butcher block workstation flipping through a magazine. "Pooky, where's your purse?" Jane asked her.

"Upstairs, I think."

"Would you mind getting it?"

In a few minutes Pooky came in looking spooked. "It's full of your things. Knitting stuff," she said to Avalon. "How did that happen? Where are my things?"

Crispy upended Avalon's purse on the coffee table. Beads, fabric scraps, little wads of yarns, and tiny scissors fell out. "Recognize anything?"

They sorted out their belongings while Jane and Shelley exchanged puzzled, and slightly alarmed looks. "One of your Ewe Lambs is a practical joker," Jane said quietly.

"I don't like this, Jane."

"What's not to like?" Jane said. "You're in a house, full of women on the brink of menopause, some of whom appear to have come here for the single purpose of tormenting each other, and there's a wolf in sheep's clothing in the bunch."

"Will you stop the puns?"

"I'll try, but they're pretty hard to avoid."

As Jane was helping Edgar clear the table after dinner, he called for everybody's attention. "Ladies, I'll be locking the house up like Fort Knox on the dot of ten-thirty. If you're going out after that, let me know now, and I'll give you a key. Otherwise, you'll have to wake up the whole house to get back in. And I'm a pretty cranky housemother if I have to come down all those stairs after I've gone to bed."

"How peculiar," Lila mused out loud. "To secure a house that doesn't even have locks on the bedroom doors."

Edgar drew himself up, offended. "We were not due to open until next month. The locksmith couldn't get here in time for your visit."