“Last Wednesday, after breakfast, we went birding in the cove. Donna wasn’t there. That’s when we first suspected she was missing,” Damien said.

“Maybe she came earlier, fed them, and had already gone,” Anna suggested.

Damien shook his head portentously. “You don’t understand. The ducks were expecting her.” The boy was gone; the wizard was back.

“Did you ask Scotty where she was?”

“He said she’d had the flu and was home watching the soaps and drinking orange juice,” Tinker replied, as if that course of events was too farfetched to fool even a child. She folded the tips of long tapered fingers delicately around the lacquered bowl and raised it to her lips, not to drink but to inhale the sweet-smelling steam.

It crossed Anna’s mind that perhaps O.J. and The Young and the Restless were beyond the pale for Tinker. “Replace the soaps with old Jimmy Stewart movies and that’s what I’d do if I had the flu,” Anna said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“There is no flu going around,” Damien declared flatly.

Tinker said: “Donna had promised to cut my hair. In return I was going to teach her how to use some of the herbs here. Just for small things-nothing dangerous,” she reassured Anna who, till then, hadn’t needed it. “Just hair rinses and facials, decoctions for colds, that sort of thing. Then nothing. Not a word. Not a note. Then we…” She looked to her husband for assistance, clearly coming now to what she considered shaky ground.

“We conducted the surveillance warranted by the seriousness of the situation,” he said firmly. In his airy voice the statement reminded Anna of the sweet but implacable “Because I said so” that Sister Judette had used to such effect on the class of ‘69.

“You watched the house,” Anna said, careful not to sound judgmental. “And?”

“Nothing,” Damien echoed his wife. “Neither days nor nights. We never saw Donna.”

A moment’s silence was slowly filled with suspense, yet Anna did not doubt their sincerity.