“It’s made from all natural ingredients,” she said as she handed Anna a red lacquered bowl. “Damien and I gathered them here and on Raspberry.”

Eye of newt and toe of frog, Anna thought but she took a sip to be polite. The tea tasted of mint and honey with a woody undercurrent reminiscent of the way leaves smell when they’re newly fallen. Anna doubted she’d ask for a second cup, but not because the concoction was unpalatable. The strange brew, the black-cloaked boy, the candlelight, put her in mind of other rooms, heavy with incense and dark with Indian-print bedspreads, where the tea and cakes had been laced with more than wild raspberry leaves. She pushed her bowl aside and cleared the cobwebs of the bad old days from her mind.

“So. Scotty’s wife-Donna-hasn’t been around for a few days?”

“Seven,” Damien said, making the number sound like Donna Butkus’s death knell. Tinker nodded, her gossamer hair floating in the warm currents from the candles.

“Seven,” Anna repeated matter-of-factly.

“We went down to the water on the far side of the dock, down through the tangle of new-growth firs. There’s a little cove there where hardly anybody goes. Donna always fed the ducks there mornings,” Tinker said.

Anna raised an eyebrow. Feeding wildlife was strictly taboo.

“Yes, it was opportunistic,” Tinker agreed. “But sometimes Damien and I would go there later in the day to watch the birds she had attracted.” Again Anna was startled at her understanding. Tinker’s mind seemed strangely accessible. Either that or Anna was more transparent than she liked to think she was.

“We saw a red-necked grebe, and once a black scoter came to feed.” For the first time Damien sounded like a boy. Birds, then, were his passion.