Mallory walked in, and all conversation stopped. The cat trotted up to her, eyes fixed on the one it clearly adored.

Mallory cut the small animal dead with a look. In tacit understanding, the cat backed up a few steps to sit down and love her from a safe distance. The purr was audible all over the room.

The purring stopped when the square wooden pencil caddie on the desk began to rock. The cat was under the couch before the caddie fell over on its side. A fury of color flushed Robert Riccalo’s face. His hand gripped his son’s arm, and the boy winced with the pain.

‘Not so fast,’ said Mallory, walking over to the desk. It was a command, and Riccalo seemed stunned to see his hand obey her, as it released the boy’s arm and fell back to his lap.

Mallory picked up the pencil caddie and righted it. ‘We’re accustomed to objects flying around the office. Aren’t we, Charles?’

And now a pencil came flying out of the caddie and aimed at Charles’s throat. Mallory’s hand shot out and intercepted it.

Charles swallowed. ‘Well, some of us are more accustomed to that sort of thing than others.’ Oh, fine. Now Mallory had added flying pencils to her private arsenal.

‘It happens all the time.’ Mallory was staring at the boy, who only showed curiosity. She walked behind Charles’s chair and another pencil flew out of the caddie and neatly into her hand. ‘Nothing to it.’

The boy was showing no reaction any more. Apparently he had grown bored with airborne pencils.

‘So it is a trick!’ said Riccalo, turning on the boy with a look which promised something nasty when they were alone again.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Charles. ‘But you see, so many things in the area of psychokinetics can be duplicated with illusion. That’s why it’s so difficult to test for a gift. It’s going to take a while is all my partner meant by that demonstration.’

He looked up to Mallory, willing her to nod and smile in agreement. Fat chance, said her eyes. He turned back to Riccalo. ‘We’re looking for something we can test. Come back after Christmas, and we’ll get into this in more detail.’

When goodbyes were said, a new date set, and the Riccalo family was through the door and gone, Charles turned around to find Mallory standing close behind him.

And this was another trick of hers which unsettled him. There was never any warning noise of footfalls. Sometimes he wondered if she just liked to see him jump outside his skin for a second or two. Nose trotted into the room to sit at her feet. When Mallory was around, he could at least keep track of the cat by the purring.

Mallory ignored the sound of the small, contented engine, and settled into a wingback chair with dancing Queen Anne legs. She nodded to the couch, beckoning Charles to sit down with her. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how I made the pencil fly?’

‘No, let me guess, all right?’ He was smiling as he sat down. ‘Every now and then I see a street vendor who still sells the Wonder Widow, a black rubber spider on a nearly invisible nylon string. When the vendor works the string, it looks like the spider is crawling along by itself. When a large crowd gathers, he makes the spider fly to the face of a victim, who invariably screams and then buys ten of them. Did you ever have a spider like that?’

Mallory nodded. ‘Riker gave me one when I was a kid. He said it was a souvenir from his last round of the DTs. And if I liked that one, he knew where he could get a million more.’

‘So you took a nylon thread from a stocking, attached it to something sticky, but not too sticky – maybe a small bit of tape dusted with lint or talc. Then you attached this sticky sliver of tape to the pencil. When you jerked the thread, the pencil was aloft and the sliver of tape came loose. So whoever picked up the pencil would find no evidence of the method. You maneuvered the direction of the pencil by angling the thread around my chair.’

‘Right. So, now at least we know how it’s being done. A kid could do it.’

‘Mallory, you’d make a terrible paranormal investigator. When I accepted the case, I let go of my preconceptions. Just because you duplicated the flying pencil, that doesn’t mean that was how it was done. This type of investigation must be conducted by gathering facts, and with no preconceived ideas about guilt or method.’

‘You’d make a bad cop, Charles. While you’re dicking around with empirical evidence, someone is going to get hurt or dead.’

‘Now you see, you’re doing it again. You develop a hunch and hang the evidence. Damn anyone who gets between you and your preconceived solution.’

Charles watched the cat curl up in a patch of sunlight at her feet. ‘However, you’re probably right about one thing. There’s an unhealthy dynamic in that family. I have no idea which one of them is doing it.’

‘Well, yesterday, the pencil flew at the stepmother. That’s something.’

‘It is easiest to make the pencil fly in your own direction, isn’t it?’ Though Mallory had rather neatly sent a pencil toward his own throat.

‘I wouldn’t rule out the stepmother. But with two women down, it seems more likely that she’s the new target. Either that or she wants to frame the boy.’

‘But for what reason? What a mess.’

‘What are you complaining about? You started out with a set of suspects and a walking, talking victim. I had to work at the park murder.’

‘Solved it yet?’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said, rising to a stand and placing one hand on the hip of the blue jeans, the soft material of the blazer falling back from the gun. ‘When is Henrietta coming?’

Before he could respond, the cat stood up on its hind legs. Charles watched Nose turn gracefully in a perfect circle, and then another. From Mallory’s expression, he gathered she had seen this trick before.

‘I think you’re supposed to give Nose a reward when he dances. He might have been trained that way. The dancing is in the novel.’

He walked over to the reception room desk, pulled the thick manuscript from the center drawer, and quickly thumbed through the first chapter. ‘Here – “He taught my cat to dance.” Seems he did that during a four-day weekend, early on in the relationship. You can’t take a work of fiction literally, of course. But the cat does dance.’

‘Four days? I thought it took longer to teach an animal tricks. Especially a cat.’

‘Not if you know what you’re doing and you don’t mind being ruthless with the animal. I expect he withheld food from Nose.’

Mallory turned her back on the cat, who was dancing still. ‘Well, he doesn’t have to do that for food any more.’

The cat dropped softly to ground as though she had commanded him.

‘So, Mallory, you were also right about the manuscript. It’s a matter of weeding the truth out of the fiction. Listen to this:

“When New York is covered with snow, it’s beautiful for all the minutes before you’re mugged, shot in the crossfire of a drug war, run down by a drunk, attacked by a psychotic who has forgotten to take his medication, sued by your landlord, threatened by the tax collector, bullied by the mouthy neighbor, bitten by the pet pit bull, surprised by rats running across your path with full-grown house cats clenched in their teeth, dive-bombed by pigeons, infested with mice and roaches, shorted by a payroll clerk… When the baby comes, I will take her away from here to a safe place where it’s beautiful all the time.”

‘The baby is in the last few chapters of the book. The female character doesn’t seem to have any emotional involvement with the man. The child is everything to her, all she cares about.’

Mallory nodded. ‘The baby might argue for Harry Kipling or Judge Heart. They’re both fertile. Maybe I should scratch the blind man off the list.’

‘You’re not serious? A blind man?’

‘He was blinded on the job. He was working for a newspaper then – huge settlement.’