“How does it work?”

“Anybody steps on it, it sends a signal to my recorder, which plays a little tape and that’s what you hear over the speaker.”

“ ‘Come in’?”

“Yes.”

“It greets everyone by saying, ”Come in‘?“ I asked.

“Sure.”

“But what if you don’t want someone to come in?”

“Why, you just lock the door,” he said. “That’s all.”

Unwilling to argue the possible shortcomings of that system, I said, “Maybe you should eat dinner in another room.”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully, and led the way to the kitchen.

The kitchen was far less cluttered than the rest of the house, but I had a feeling his sister and Laurie were responsible for its relative state of cleanliness. I set the bag down on the table as he went to a cupboard. I was wondering what story I should tell him to get him talking to me on subjects other than toilet seats and doormats when he said, “Sit down, Irene, I’ll get you a glass of my special power drink.”

But I stayed standing, and didn’t loosen my grip on the bag. “How do you know my name?”

He laughed, but didn’t answer right away. I watched him warily as he set two tumblers on the table and moved to the refrigerator. “Let’s see,” he said, pulling out a pitcher of something that had settled into several layers that were various shades of red. He walked over to a blender, poured the contents of the pitcher into it, put the lid on the blender, then stood back and clapped his hands. The blender began whirring.

“I put one of those doodads on its power supply,” he said, speaking up over the whine of the blender, “so you could start and stop it from anywhere in the room.”

I didn’t bother to point out that remote control of a blender was not worth much if you were already forced to stand next to it to fill it and empty it. I just nodded, watching the liquid in the blender turn a single shade of bright red.

But when he clapped a second time, the blender kept going. “Dag nab it!” he said. Given his father’s virtuoso swearing, it surprised me. He tried clapping again, and still it whined on. Finally he went over and pushed a button on the machine. That stopped it. He clapped again, and nothing happened. He pushed a button, and nothing happened. He took the lid off and peered down into it. “Wonder if the dang thing’s jammed?” he said, reaching for a knife.

“Uh, shouldn’t you unplug it first?” I said.

He turned and smiled at me-a big, immensely pleased smile. “That’s it!” he said, banging his hand on the counter.

The blender started up again. I quickly ducked beneath the table, while Mr. DeMont received an object lesson in the power of centrifugal force as the blender sprayed red juice everywhere. He fumbled blindly with the machine, finally turning it off. There was an eerie silence.

I crept up from my sheltered position. Other than a few spots here and there on my clothing I was, for the most part, unscathed. But Robert DeMont looked like he had been doing surgery in a MASH unit.

He reached for a dish towel and wiped the red liquid from his face. He looked over at me, grinned, and then began laughing. It was contagious. When we had brought ourselves back under control, he quickly made me lose it again by asking, quite innocently, “What happened?”

Once I had calmed myself, I said, “I don’t think the device could pick up the sound of your clapping while the blender was on. So you turned the blender off at the machine itself. The power to the blender was still on, the machine was off. You clapped again, and this time, without the noise of the machine to interfere, the power was turned off, too. You pushed a button, then, but without power, the blender wouldn’t start. That’s when you took the lid off. The button was still depressed. You smacked the counter-”

“And turned the power back on! Yes, yes! Now I remember! I smacked the counter because when you said, ”Unplug it,“ I realized what the problem was. I just chose an unfortunate way to express my excitement.”

He gathered a handful of paper towels and wet them down, I grabbed a sponge and together we managed to wipe up the worst of it. I looked up at the ceiling and winced.

“Don’t bother,” he said, following my gaze. “I’ll bring the ladder in and work on it later. Or maybe I’ll leave it as it is. It’s more interesting this way.” He looked down at himself and laughed again. “I’d better clean myself up a little, though. This stuff is a little sticky. I’ll be right back, Irene.”

“Not so fast! How do you know my name?”

The sly smile was back. “Over there, by the phone,” he said, pointing. Then he hurried out of the room.

I looked through the papers near the phone, and was nearly certain that he was simply stalling again, when I saw an envelope that made me feel a sharp sense of disappointment in a man who only moments ago seemed to be nothing more than a hapless gadgeteer.

It was a stiff nine-by-twelve manila envelope, the name “Robert De-Mont” handwritten across its face in large block letters. But it was the return address that caught my eye: Richmond and Associates. There were no stamps.

Walking slowly back to the table, I opened the already unsealed envelope and pulled out a good-sized stack of eight-by-ten color photos. There was a page of text, but for the moment, I ignored it. My attention was fully concentrated on the first photo: Briana, leaving her apartment in San Pedro.

Disappointment gave way to anger. There was no longer any doubt in my mind as to who had hired Harold Richmond. Robert DeMont had a lot to answer for.

I stared at the image of my aunt. I saw her as I had not seen her in life. In photo after photo, here was Briana: Briana walking down the street, cane in hand; Briana coming out of the Reyeses’ small grocery store; Briana going into St. Anthony’s Church; Briana getting out of a cab in front of St. Mary’s Hospital in Las Piernas. My fury rose with each piece of evidence that my aunt had been followed, spied upon. A lonely, shy old woman, vulnerable to the likes of Harold Richmond. Then came the worst of them all, the most intrusive-a photo of her weeping, leaning on Father Chris’s arm at a graveside. I heard myself make a strange little choking sound; my eyes blurred. I moved the heel of my hand across them and went on.

The next group were all taken outside my home. Rachel, Travis and me, getting out of Travis’s truck. There were photos of the camper, the house and the street, taken from different angles.

The camper-which was only in front of my house for a few hours before it was destroyed.

An odd set of noises I couldn’t quite make out seemed to come from several parts of the house all at once. I waited, but heard nothing more. I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to sit around chatting with Robert DeMont. I could look at the other photos later. For my own safety, I needed to get the hell away from him-and as fast as I could. What insane notion had led him to reveal the existence of the photos, I’d never guess, but I gathered them together now, stuffed them into the envelope and, taking it with me, hurried to the front door.

No sign of DeMont. I counted my blessings. I reached for the doorknob, turned and pulled. Nothing. Repeated the action, twice again, in the way of a person whose world isn’t working the way it should. I looked for some sort of deadbolt. Nothing.

Having once spent a few days having the tar beat out of me while being held captive in a small room, I don’t do well with locked doors. Claustrophobia and I have since had an ongoing unpleasant relationship, and DeMont’s locked door brought it on in a hurry.

I felt a kind of hysteria rising within me, and fought hard to keep it in check. I turned, telling myself to calm down, to try to find a back door, even as I heard my breath coming in short, quick gasps, as if I been running a race.

Blocking the hallway door was Robert DeMont. He was smiling.