Absolutely, Positively

the subject. You'll have to excuse me, Gordon. I've got a bus to catch.”

    Molly hurried up the remainder of the steps, crossed the street, and caught a crowded bus to Capitol Hill. There was one empty seat in the middle of the bus, but it was next to a bag lady who had stacked all of her worldly possessions on it. This being Seattle, none of the standing passengers stooped to the incivility of requesting that the woman move her things.

    The bus made its way past the eclectic collection of book-stores, cafés, body-piercing parlors, and leather clothing shops that gave the Capitol Hill district its colorful identity. When it lumbered into the old residential district beyond, Molly got off.

    She walked along the quiet, tree-lined streets to the Abberwick mansion. The sight of the sprawling old house beyond the iron gates filled her with an unexpected rush of affection. Kelsey was wrong, she thought. She could not sell the mansion. It was home.

    The massive front gates swung open when she keyed in the code. She walked up the drive, noting that everything seemed to be in order so far as the gardens were concerned. The perpetual sprinkling system that her father had designed had obviously been working without a hitch.

    She went up the steps and let herself into the hall. For a moment she stood there in the shadows, allowing memories to coalesce around her. There were ghosts in this house, but they were part of the family, part of her. She could not abandon them.

    After a moment Molly looked down. The wooden floor gleamed. The polishing robot had been at work. She walked into the front parlor. The bookcases had all been recently dusted by the dusting machine.

    She left the parlor and went up the massive staircase to the second floor. There, she turned and went down the hall to her bedroom.

    No, she definitely would not put the house on the market, Molly thought as she took fresh clothes out of the closet and stuffed them into a patented Abberwick Nonwrinkling Suitcase. The crazy old mansion would never sell, anyway, except possibly to a developer who would tear it down to make room for condominiums or apartments. Only someone who valued the unique and the bizarre would love it the way she did.

    She could live here by herself, Molly decided. Granted, the house was technically too big for one person, but her father's endless household inventions would take care of most of the work involved in maintaining the mansion.

    What it really needed was a family. A very special sort of family, one with an extraordinary father whose brilliant eyes were the color of ancient amber.

    The thought came out of nowhere. Molly stood very still in the center of the bedroom, clutching the red jacket she had just taken off a hanger.

    An image of two dark-haired, amber-eyed children materialized in the gloom. The pair, a boy and a girl, were laughing with gleeful anticipation. She sensed that they were eager to run downstairs to her father's old workshop. They wanted to play with the automated toys that Jasper Abberwick had invented years ago for Molly and Kelsey.

    For a few seconds Molly could not breathe.Harry's children .

    The vision faded, but the emotions it had generated inside Molly did not.

    After a while she adjusted the cleverly engineered clothes-folding mechanism inside the suitcase and shut the lid. She made a quick tour of the remainder of the rooms on the second floor to make certain that all was in order. Then she went downstairs.

    She left the suitcase in the hall while she toured the rooms on the first floor. Nothing was amiss. The only thing left to do was to make her way down to the basement to check the machinery that powered the household robots.

    She went down the steps into the windowless rooms below the house. The bright overhead lights winked on in the workshop when she opened the door. Across the room she saw the glowing lights on the control panel that regulated all the various mechanical and electrical systems in the house.

    Molly heard the faint creak just as she stepped into the workshop.

    Two thoughts struck her simultaneously. One was rational, intellectual, and based on common sense. It held that such creaks and groans were to be expected in an old house.

    The second thought was irrational and intuitive. It emanated straight from the most primitive part of her mind, the region charged with the tasks of survival. It told her with grave certainty that she was not alone in the mansion. She was