Strangers

leave one bone in every fish?"
        "And a bit of hoof in every order of beef Bourguignon," she said.
        "One antler in every chocolate mousse?"
        "And one shoemaker's nail in every apple cobbler."
        "One old maid in every apple pandowdy?"
        "Oh, God, I hate puns."
        "Me too," he said. "Truce?"
        "Truce. I'll grate the cheddar for the omelet."
        Together they made breakfast.
        At the kitchen table, Marcie colored moons. And colored moons. And murmured that one word in monotonous, mesmeric, rhythmic chains.
        

        
        In Monterey, California, Parker Faine had almost fallen into the lair of a trap-door spider. He counted himself fortunate to have gotten out alive. A trap-door spider - that was how he thought of the Salcoes' neighbor, a woman named Essie Craw. The trap-door spider constructed a tubular nest in the ground and fixed a cleverly concealed hinged lid at the top. When other hapless insects, innocent and unsuspecting, crossed the perfectly camouflaged lid, it opened and dropped them down to the rapacious arachnoid beast below. Essie Craw's tubular nest was a lovely large Spanish home far more suited to the California coast than the Salcoes' Southern Colonial manse, with graceful arches and leaded-glass windows and flowers blooming in large terra cotta pots on the portico. One look at the place, and Parker was prepared to encounter charming and exquisitely gracious people, but when Essie Craw answered the door he knew he was in deep trouble. When she discovered that he was seeking information about the Salcoes, she virtually seized him by his sleeve and dragged him inside and slammed the lid of her tubular nest behind him, for those who sought information often had information to give in return, and Essie Craw fed on gossip as surely as the trap-door spider fed on careless beetles, centipedes, and pillbugs.
        Essie did not look like a spider but rather like a bird. Not a scrawny, thirmecked, meager-breasted sparrow. More like a well-fed sea gull. She had a quick birdlike walk, and she held her head slightly to the side in the manner of a bird, and she had beady little avian eyes.
        After leading him to a seat in the living room, she offered coffee, but he declined, and she insisted, but he protested that he did not want to be a bother. She brought coffee anyway, plus butter cookies, which she produced with such alacrity that he suspected she was as perpetually prepared for drop-in guests as was the trap-door spider.
        Essie was disappointed to hear that Parker knew nothing about the Salcoe family and had no gossip. But since he was not their friend, either, he offered a fresh pair of ears for her observations, tales, slanders, and mean-spirited suppositions. He did not even have to ask questions in order to learn more than he wanted to know. Donna Salcoe, Gerald's wife, was (Essie said) a brassy sort, too blond, too flashy, phony-sweet. Donna was so thin she was surely a problem drinker who survived on a liquid diet-or maybe she was anorexic. Gerald was Donna's second husband, and although they had been married eighteen years, Essie did not think it would last. Essie made the sixteen-year-old twin girls sound so wild, so unrestrained, so nubile and licentious, that Parker pictured packs of young men sniffing around the Salcoe house like dogs seeking bitches in heat. Gerald Salcoe owned three thriving shops - an antiques store, two art galleries - in nearby Carmel, though Essie could not understand how any of these enterprises showed a profit when Salcoe was a hard-drinking libertine and a thick-headed boob with no business sense.
        Parker drank only two sips of his coffee and didn't even nibble at the butter cookies, because Essie Craw's enthusiasm for malicious gossip went beyond the limits of ordinary behavior into a realm of weirdness that made him uncomfortable and unwilling to turn his back on her - or consume much of what she provided.
        But he learned a few useful things, as well. The Salcoes had taken an impromptu vacation - one week in the wine country, Napa and Sonoma - and had been so desperate to escape the pressures of their various enterprises that they had not wanted to reveal the name of the- hotel where they could be reached, lest it get back to the very business associates from whom they needed a rest.
        "He called me Sunday to tell me they were off and wouldn't be back until