Dead Reckoning

cleaning,” he said. “Is there a special occasion?”
    “Yes,” I said, smacking myself on the forehead. “I’m so sorry I forgot to tell you. I’m giving Tara Thornton—Tara du Rone—a baby shower tomorrow. She’s expecting twins, Claude believes. Oh, she got that confirmed.”
    “Can I come?” he asked.
    “It’s all right with me,” I said, taken aback. Most human guys would rather have their toenails painted than come to such a party. “You’ll be the only man there, but I assume that won’t bother you?”
    “Sounds great,” he said, smiling that beautiful smile.
    “You’ll have to keep your ears covered and listen to about a million comments about how much you look like Jason,” I said. “We’ll need to explain you.”
    “Just tell them I’m your great-uncle,” he said.
    For one fun moment, I envisioned doing just that. I had to give it up, though with some regret. “You look much too young to be my great-uncle, and everyone here knows my family tree. The human part of it,” I added hastily. “But I’ll think of something.”
    While I vacuumed, Dermot looked at the big box of pictures and the smaller one of printed material that I hadn’t yet had a chance to go over. He seemed fascinated by the pictures. “We don’t use this technology,” he said.
    I sat beside him when I’d put the vacuum away. I’d tried to arrange the images in chronological order, but it had been a hasty task, and I was sure I’d have to redo it.
    The pictures at the front of the box were very old. People sitting in stiff groups, their backs rigid, their faces, too. If the backs were labeled, it was in spidery formal handwriting. Many of the men were bearded or mustached, and they wore hats and ties. The women were confined in long sleeves and skirts, and their posture was amazing.
    Gradually as the Stackhouse family rolled along in time, the pictures became less posed, more spontaneous. The clothing morphed along with attitudes. Color began to tint faces and scenery. Dermot seemed genuinely interested, so I explained the background on some of the more recent snapshots. One was of a very old man holding a baby swathed in pink. “That’s me and one of my great-grandfathers; he died when I was little bitty,” I said. “That’s him and his wife when they were in their fifties. And this is my grandmother Adele and her husband.”
    “No,” Dermot said. “That’s my brother Fintan.”
    “No, this is my grandfather, Mitchell. Look at him.”
    “He is your grandfather. Your true grandfather. Fintan.”
    “How can you tell?”
    “He’s made himself to look like Adele’s husband, but I can tell it’s my brother. He was my twin, after all, though we were not identical. Look here at his feet. His feet are smaller than those of the man who married Adele. Fintan was always careless that way.”
    I spread out all the pictures of Grandmother and Grandfather Stackhouse. Fintan was in about a third of them. I’d suspected from her letter that Fintan had been around more than she’d realized, but this was just creepy. In every picture of Fintan-as-Mitchell, he was smiling broadly.
    “She didn’t know about this, for sure,” I said. Dermot looked dubious. And I had to admit to myself that she had suspected. It was there, in her letter.
    “He was playing one of his jokes,” Dermot said fondly. “Fintan was a great one for jokes.”
    “But . . .” I hesitated, not sure how to phrase what I wanted to say. “You get that this was really wrong?” I said. “You understand that he was deceiving her on a couple of different levels?”
    “She agreed to be lovers with him,” Dermot said. “He was very fond of her. What difference does it make?”
    “It makes a lot of difference,” I said. “If she thought she was with one man when she was with another, that’s a huge deception.”
    “But a harmless one, surely? After all, even you agree she loved both men, had sex with both of them willingly. So,” he asked again, “what difference does it make?”
    I stared at him doubtfully. No matter how she felt about her husband or her lover, I still thought there was a moral issue here. In fact, I knew there was. Dermot didn’t seem to be able to discern that. I wondered if my great-grandfather would agree with me or with Dermot. I had a sinking feeling I knew.
    “I better get back to work,” I said, with a tight smile. “Got to mop the kitchen. You going to get back to work in the attic?”
    He