There was no dog, had been no dog for twenty years, but they’d left behind a new dog brush, still in its original packaging, with a receipt of recent date taped to the plastic. It was fifteen years since the last cat they’d kept, but they’d left behind an unopened sack of cat litter. There was no place they needed to be at any particular time, but there were half a dozen alarm clocks in the dining room: two with radios, three in the shapes of various cartoon characters, and one that purported to be a Zen alarm clock, which struck, mechanically, a euphonious handcrafted chime. Charles and Amelia Baines had shared so close a bond all their married lives, they’d hardly needed to speak to one another once their children were grown and gone, and as far as Bob had been able to reconstruct his parents’ last year, they’d hardly been speaking to anyone else, but they’d bought several pairs of walkie-talkies. None of those had been popped out of their plastic packages, either. “Is there anyone they were on speaking terms with?” Bob Baines asked his sister as he cut one of the walkie-talkies free.

“How would I know? It’s not like they were speaking to me, except to lecture me on the phone about money whenever I asked for any.” Sophie stepped on one of the squeaky dog toys on her way across the consumer wreckage of the dining room to help him. “And the whole time, they were shopping themselves into oblivion. Figures. Do you really think they’d have brought a pet into this mess? It wouldn’t be right.”

“I no longer have any idea what they would have done. Look at this.” He held up a worn canvas tote bag silk-screened with the Metropolitan Museum’s logo. “Look in here.”

She waded a few more steps through the dining room and took the bag from him. “One, two, three, four…eight television remotes?”

“I wonder if we’ll find eight televisions.” It was a stately old house with too many rooms. Eight televisions could easily disappear into it.

Sophie sat down hard on an unopened case of birdseed. “Oh, Gods.”

“What?”

“What if the temple room’s like this, too?”

Bob slumped into the chair he’d managed to empty. “I can’t face the temple room. Soon, but not today. We need to call the coven.”

“Not the lodge?”

“If Mom and Dad had been on good terms with their lodge, they’d have called on the old crowd for help. All these fallings out Mom and Dad had-maybe some of them were for a reason.”

“We’ll have to tell Uncle Florebo the bad news sooner or later,” said Sophie.

“And then there’s the funeral.”

Sophie started to tear up. She pulled a tissue out of her coat pocket to daub her eyes. “Mom and Dad would have wanted it old school.”

Bob added yet another item to his to-do list. Call Theosophical Society, hire hall. “I still don’t think we should invite the fogies in until we have the place cleaned up some.”

“Agreed. You want to call the covenfolk, or should I?”

Bob said, “I’ll do it. I need some air. Oh, and here. Have a walkie-talkie.”

She blew her nose into the tissue. “We’ll need batteries.”

“Look in that box between the windows. I don’t think we’ll have to buy batteries for a year or two.” Eventually Bob made his way through the kitchen and out into the overgrown garden. Hellebore flowered red and yellow under an impenetrable thicket of rosebushes just in the first green of their spring leaves. Yellow Pages, find landscaper, Bob added to his list, then crossed it out. This garden required the care of a hard-core occultist, someone who knew horological astrology. It would have been important to his father.

So Ria was the first of his covenmates to get the call. Then Amber and Sebastian. Then Jane, who had troubles of her own. He would have liked to call his wife for comfort, but Ricki and the kids were still at church.

Ria arrived with her gardening tools, an astrological calendar, a ten year ephemeris, and a paperback that claimed to be the all-time definitive compendium of magickal herbalism-that last from a New Age press of very dubious reputation. After a quick greeting hug and a moment with the ephemeris to confirm the alignment of the planets, she put her hair up and got to work reining in the hellebore.

“The all-time definitive compendium?” said Jane when she arrived. “Ria, have some self-respect. Those people will print anything. Hey, Bob. You holding up okay?”

“I still can’t believe they’re gone. I can’t believe they fell apart like this. I should keep a running list of all the things I can’t believe. What am I supposed to tell my kids about their grandparents? Ricki doesn’t want to tell them anything, because then we’d have to disagree out loud about the afterlife again. She doesn’t want the kids to see the house until it’s less scary, and I don’t blame her. I can’t believe how fast it all came unraveled. I should have done something. I should have known to do something. But just Winter Solstice before last, my folks were keeping vigil with my kids by the fireplace, same as they used to with Sophie and me. We only missed one Yule, and now it’s all over. What the hell happened?”

Jane lit a cigarette. “I brought you a casserole. It’s in a cooler in my car.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t let me forget to give it to you to take home to Ricki.”

“I won’t.”

She sat on the hood of her old Corolla and took a long drag. “Maybe no one will ever know what happened. Bob, I’m so sorry. It’s not fair they’re gone. It’s not fair you have to clean up the mess. Believe me, I know from unfair.”

“Sucks.”

“Does. What can I do to be useful?”

Bob flipped the pages of his to-do list. “There’ll be a lot in the next few weeks, I’m afraid. If we can dig a path from the dining room into the library today, tomorrow we can dig through to the filing cabinets. I’m hoping we’ll find the will so I can get it to a colleague before the weekend.”

“A colleague? You can’t do it yourself?”

“Estate law’s nothing like personal injury. Whole other world.”

“Fair enough. If you want a hand with the financial docs, too, feel free to ask.”

“Yes, your C.P.A.ness.”

Jane sucked in another breath of tobacco, and then reached back into her car to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray.

Once Jane was through the kitchen door, Ria started humming the song about the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz.
The last thing Bob needed was his coven sisters’ bickering. He hoped Jane and Ria could keep it to a low simmer, at least until the funeral. “I really appreciate this, Ria.”

“If it weren’t for the sad occasion, the gardening would be fun. Do you know if they’ve still got that asafoetida growing in the greenhouse?”

“Considering the mess everywhere else, I’ll be surprised if anything in the greenhouse survived. Help yourself to whatever you think you can keep alive.”

Ria started singing a Vernal Equinox chant about roots in wet soil, about waking the trees. Bob hummed along while he looked over his to-do list. It was four pages long. Find will. Phone utilities re billing. Crematorium?

Sebastian pulled into the driveway in Amber’s Miata. Amber herself was bandaged from wrist to shoulder, her pretty face pinched with discomfort.

“New ink?” Bob asked. “But you already had stuff on that arm.”

“Sebastian’s covering up that old hackwork.”

“It wasn’t bad,” said Sebastian. “She’s just running out of blank skin.”

Amber leaned over the gear shift to kiss him. “Yeah, but you’re twice the artist Big Mike is, any day of the week.”

Bob said, “I interrupted you mid-tattoo, didn’t I? Sorry.”

“When I said call anytime, I meant anytime.” Sebastian still had his work voice going-the slightly hypnotic cadence he used to soothe clients while they were under the needle. He came around the car to offer his girlfriend a hand out. “Whatever we can do.”

So Bob called all the members of Rugosa Coven into the dining room, where Jane and Sophie had started sorting things into piles: electronics, pet supplies, paper goods. Sophie had opened one of the thirty-odd boxes of tissues. Her eyes were red, and the tip of her nose, too. Bob gave his sister a squeeze around the shoulder.

“Oh, man,” Sebastian said as he crossed the threshold from the kitchen. “It looks like the Federation Starship Wal-Mart had a terrible transporter accident.”

Amber admired the Zen alarm clock. “There’s some nice stuff in here. Diamonds in the rough.”

Ria clutched her ephemeris. “They weren’t like this. The people I met at your wedding could not have lived this way. Charles and Amelia were…I had great admiration for your parents, Bob. The very greatest admiration. They were adepts of the first water.”

“Well,” Jane said quietly, “sometimes people change.”

By dinnertime, Rugosa Coven had dug their way to the library, and after pizza they surprised Bob by making it all the way to the cabinets. The path into the room had crisp edges, as if shoveled through a two-foot snowfall, beyond which masses of undifferentiated paper roiled. Bob and Sophie bade their covenmates good night and searched for the will.

Fortunately, Charles and Amelia Baines had bought several cases of Post-it Notes of various colors and sizes, with which the Baines siblings labeled the cabinets as they finished them. Financials, Bob wrote. Family Photos. Theosophical Memorabilia, 1881-1930. There had been a system, once. Its old logic showed itself in the drawers Charles and Amelia had used least since their children grew up, but in the more current cabinets, the logic crumbled. And it seemed that, for about a year, the elder Baineses had been throwing their mail unopened onto the library floor.

“Check it out,” said Sophie, leaning over an open file drawer. “Letters to Great-Grampa Frederick from Madame Blavatsky herself.”

Bob sneezed. Too much old dust. “We’d better label the file while we still know what it is.” The Zen alarm clock chimed nine. “I’m all in.”

“Yeah, me too. Give my love to Ricki and the kids. Tomorrow, nine a.m.?”

“I’ll bring donuts.”

Bob took the file of letters home to read. For all that Blavatsky’s life had been wild, he could usually count on her prose style to put him to sleep. And he had not slept well since identifying his parents’ bodies.

Since Wednesday, every time he made the drive between the old manse in Rumson and his suburban split-level in Holmdel, Bob reproached himself for letting his parents get so isolated. Fifteen minutes away, just fifteen minutes, and the most important year lost.

It was long past the twins’ bedtime when he got home, but Susan was still up, still in her Sunday church finery. She clumped down the stairs, her gangly eight-year-old form showing none of the grace she’d hoped to get from ballet. Bob hugged his daughter. “I’m sorry I missed Sunday dinner.”

“We should have brought Sunday dinner to you.”

“There was no surface to eat it on.”

“I can carry boxes as good as Aunt Sophie can.”

“As well as Aunt Sophie can. Take it up with your mom.”

Susan gallumphed away to sulk.

Bob found Ricki folding shirts in the laundry room. She wrapped him in her arms, and he bent to rest his head on her shoulder. They stood like that a long time. “How was church?”

“Susan had her solo with the children’s choir.”

“That was today? I wanted to go for that.”

“There will be other solos. She knows this isn’t forever.” Ricki took a deep breath. “There was an incident in Sunday school.”

“Does Susan think I’m going to Hell again?”

“The twins’ Sunday school teacher told them their grandparents are already there. I’ve had words with her. Reverend had words with her-it’s not for us to decide who God’s okay with. Your daughter had such nasty words with her, I had to ground Susan from the Internet for a week. But for the twins, damage done. They’re angry at God.”

“This part’s in your hands. I gave you my word. But if you want me to tell them what I think, just say so.”

“If they ask you anything, it’s in your court.” Ricki sighed. “Sooner or later, we all hit the first time we’re angry at God, but to hit it at four… I hoped the boys would have a few more years.”

Bob kissed her forehead. “It’ll all work out.”

“How was your day?”

“We didn’t find the will.”

“And after…” She checked her watch. “Twelve more hours. Why did they have to make it so hard for you? What were they thinking?”

“I wish I knew.”

Once they’d seen Susan to bed and turned in, Bob sat up beside his sleeping wife, reading Madame Blavatsky’s letters with the bedside lamp turned low. The Ascended Masters this, the Ascended Masters that. Bob had little patience for the Ascended Masters. In the fourth letter, old Helena Petrovna recounted to her disciple Frederick Baines how the ancient sage Koot Hoomi had caused a parchment of his observations about the afterlife to appear midair at one of her séances. Bob tried to picture the scene, but every time he came to the manifestation of the parchment, he couldn’t help imagining it with a cartoony popping sound, and then he’d crack up. Maybe he was cracking up. Rather than risk waking Ricki with his laughter, he turned the light out and lay staring at the ceiling until dawn.

After making breakfast for his family, he walked Susan to the bus stop. He kissed Ricki goodbye and wished her a good day at the social services office where she worked. Then he buckled his twin sons into their car seats in the SUV and dropped them off at day care on his way to Dunkin Donuts.

At last, he reached the house his thrice-great-grandfather Rodolph Baines had built with his Civil War telegraph profits, the house where his kin had lived ever since. Bob preferred the kitchen door over the grand marble entryway. He was early, so he left the donuts in the car and headed back into the garden.

For a full century, the garden had been a meditation on the zodiac made manifest in stone and growing green. He clambered over the Aquarius patch to reach the yew tree at the far end of the property. The yew was unperturbed by the chaos in the flowerbeds. It bent its branches to form a dome of shade and quiet. Bob ducked and crept in. When he was a child, this place had been his cathedral. Now, he could just stand at his full height in the shelter of the branches. The clay god and goddess figures Sophie had made back when she took up pottery were rainworn and serene, tucked among the roots of the yew. “Lady of the Woodlands,” Bob greeted them, “Horned One.” He should have brought them something. A donut, at the very least. He had half an hour before he expected his sister, so, for the first time since the terrible phone call from the hospital, there was time for him to tell his troubles to his Gods. He sat himself down in lotus position among the yew needles and let the words come.

“Wisdom,” he said, when he’d told them the story he knew they knew. “That’s what I need. Common sense is no substitute. What am I supposed to do?”

“Ow! Dammit!” said Sophie, from somewhere in the sidereal clock of the flowerbeds. She limped the rest of the way to the yew tree, her long cotton skirt catching on briars as she came. “Thought I’d find you under here.” She sat next to him and slid off her Birkenstocks. “I hope Ria can do something with those rosebushes.” She pulled a thorn from the sole of her foot. “Blood offering, anyone?” she said to her little clay sculptures. They didn’t take her up on it. “Did you remember the donuts?”

“Yep. To work?”

They took the donuts into the library, and regretted it the moment they broke them out. “Sticky fingers,” said Sophie, dismayed.

“Not good with important papers,” Bob agreed. Fortunately, their parents had left them a gross of pre-moistened hand wipes. Around noon, he and Sophie found a threatening letter from the IRS about unpaid taxes, a lively anthill, and several files of old newspaper clippings about international art theft.

Buy ant traps, Phone IRS, Bob added to his to-do list when they’d retreated to the living room. “Whatever fallings out Mom and Dad had with their friends, I’m thinking they were irrational,” he said. “I’m ready to call in the old crowd. How about you?”

“I think there’s an ant in my hair.”

“Right. I’m calling Uncle Florebo.”

Sophie sat on the floor and pulled a hairbrush out of her battered purse. Bob took that for agreement and dialed.
There was an answer at the first ring. “Smith and Watanabe residence.”

“Hi, Uncle Florebo.”

“Robert! So good to hear from you. I take it you got my message after all. Your parents might have returned my call while they were thinking about it, but no matter.”

“Message?”

“Kiyoshi and I are celebrating our fifth anniversary by registering a civil union with the state. Just when we were thinking we’d move to Boston, New Jersey finally came around. We wanted to invite you and Sophronia, but we never did get your grown-up addresses. You must come. It’ll be fabulous.”

“I’ll be there. But about my parents.” Bob had no idea how to go on.

He could hear Florebo’s voice catch on the other end of the line. “Something’s happened, then.”

“They had simultaneous heart attacks while they were out shopping at Target. The manager tried defibrillating them, and everybody knew CPR, but…”

“When?”

“Wednesday night. I’m on leave from the firm, trying to sort things out, and Sophie’s between jobs, so we’re doing nothing but trying to put things in order back at the old place. We want to arrange the funeral the way Mom and Dad would have wanted it, but we can’t find anything in writing to tell us what that would have been. We’re hoping you or maybe Aunt Pasca can help us out.”

“Simultaneous heart attacks.”

“Yes. The county medical examiner said he’d never seen a case like it.”

“They were lucky, then. There’s nothing worse than outliving your mate.”

Bob would have liked to say something about how fondly he remembered Florebo’s late lover Simon, but the awful thought of outliving Ricki stole Bob’s words.

Florebo sounded awful. “If you need anything, Robert, you just name it.”

“We could use your help making sense of the house.”

“When’s good?”

“Would now be too soon?”

“I’ll be right over.” Florebo hung up unceremoniously. It was probably the only unceremonious thing he’d ever done.

Sophie said, “So he’s coming?”

“Right away.”

She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the living room. “Mom would have been mortified.”