"Pierce! She's in here!"

He got out of bed, too late, the front door had opened and Mousie was talking. Come on now git y'all's grits. 'Fore they's cold. And the door closed as she left.

He looked into Bird and Hildy's room just as Bobby uncovered herself, having made herself small amid an artful tumble of bedclothes on Bird's bed. She climbed out, refreshed, unapologetic, pulling at her tangled locks with both hands: their charge now, and satisfied to be so it seemed, though still wary in the depths of her closed face.

While they dressed and washed, they tried to lay plans, but Pierce's were so outrageous--involving disguises, illusions, huge lies rapidly changed--that Hildy said she wouldn't be part of it, and Bobby got nervous and cried out over their altercation Y'all don't tell don't tell don't TELL, which they had no intention of doing: she was amid expert secret-keepers, and safe.

At breakfast they filled their pockets with bread and fruit as Hildy told them to do, which Mousie did notice but didn't ponder; there was no time for Bobby to eat it, though, for Sister was on her way.

"Whose sister?"

"Sister. From the hospital."

"But whose?"

They got her into her coat and filled her pockets from theirs, and Pierce tugged her by the hand out through the schoolroom and out the back door. Just in time, for as they crept along the far side of the bungalow ducking under the windows (Gene and Smiley did it that away, duck beneath the windows, peek up to see the badguys unaware within), they heard Sister Mary Philomel arriving, and Mousie delivering Warren to be schooled.

A dash across the open space of the breezeway and around the backside of the house, Pierce afraid to let go of her hot hand for fear she'd bolt, and to the bulkhead doors leading to the cellar.

"Ain't gone go down there."

"It's just for a second," Pierce said. "We'll go up inside."

She looked around her, up the hillside, cold smoke coming from her mouth. She had nowhere to go. She went down the bulkhead stairs into darkness with Pierce.

Base-born, born in a basement? At St. Simon Cyrenean the toilets had been in the basement, and a request to go to the basement elicited giggles. Sister may I go to the Basement, thighs shut tight together.

His daddy too had wronged his mam, somehow; Pierce didn't know how or why, but somehow.

The light switch was near the interior stairs, so they crossed the cellar in the dark, she willingly holding his hand now and silent. She froze when the automatic stoker spilled coal into the furnace--the automatic stoker which it was Joe Boyd's job to fill daily with coal, he'd be coming down here any minute.

"It's nothing."

"Somebody shoveled."

"No, it's nothing. Come on."

They climbed the narrow stair pressed close together, Pierce half aware of Bobby's strange strong odor, rough as her speech. What Axel called a hum. Pierce opened the door an inch.

The house was silent. Mousie might have gone back to bed, or gone out, or into the bathroom with Baby Henry. Pierce pulled Bobby unwilling out the door and around to the stairs upward. Once in the house, though, Bobby wanted to linger and see things, and Pierce had to whisper urgently to her; even more than in the bungalow, Bobby seemed uncontrollable, a source of catastrophe here, in Sam's house. Sam, though, was gone.

Gone.

He pushed her up the stairs, his ears huge to hear Mousie with Henry. Nothing. He urged Bobby over against the hallway wall, showing her where to step along the outermost floorboards that didn't creak.

"Go on. Go on."

At length she pushed back, having had enough, and turned to look at him in defiant contempt, arms akimbo. Pierce made urgent hand signals: that door, that one. Bobby walked to it with deliberate steps, on her own, a guest here.

Sam's bedroom was more silent than the silent house. Pierce's heart beat hard, conscious of the outrage he was committing. "Stay here," he said to Bobby, who was looking around the room from the threshold, her eyes alone moving, almost unwilling to step up on the carpet. "Just stay here." He pointed to the little clock on the bedside table, next to the phone that now and then woke Sam in the middle of the night. "When it says twelve, I'll come back. Twelve."