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desert?” grinned Freddie. He was very fond of watermelon pie.
    “Pull up a chair,” said Maddy. “We are just about to cut the pie. But this is your sister Tilly’s recipe, so it has strawberries mixed in.”
    “Strawberry-watermelon pie?” said Amanda. “That sounds interesting.” She was followed into the dining room by their adopted daughter Donna Ann, the latest addition to the Madison clan (not counting Tilly’s newest baby).
    “I did say it was Tilly’s recipe, didn’t I?” Maddy grinned. Tilly was not known as a cook. “But I promise you’ll like it.”
    “Whose black Toyota was parked in the driveway this afternoon?” asked Freddie. “I drove by on my way to clown practice.” After being horribly scarred in a n Atlanta fire, he’d returned to Caruthers Corners with his family to become a clown who entertained children at the Haney Bros. Zoo and Exotic Animal Refuge on the outskirts of town. The greasepaint may have covered his disfigured face, but it didn’t disguise his pleasure in entertaining the local kids.
    “A car in our driveway?” repeated Maddy.
    “Well, I was going to mention that,” said Beauregard Madison. “Just hadn’t got around to it.”
    “Was it anybody we know, dad?” pressed Freddie. “I didn’t recognize the car.”
    “No, no. It was just some quack. A field investigator for some witch-hunters organization. A real kook.”
    “Witch hunters?” said Aggie. “Is he hunting for Mad Matilda?”
    “H-has she come back to haunt people?” stuttered N’yen. The Vietnamese boy fervently believed in witches and spirits of the dead. In Asia they were known as vong hồ n, oan hồ n , or bách linh .
    “Beau, you’re frightening the children,” chastised his wife.
    “No, he’s not,” protested Aggie.
    “I’m not afraid of no ghosts,” parroted N’yen. But there was a quaver in his voice. He still thought Ghost Busters was a horror film.
    Beau Madison motioned everyone to calm down. “Take it easy,” he said. “ There’s no ghost of Mad Matilda running around Caruthers Corners. Just this guy from the Greater Midwest Occult Phenomena Association looking for information about the missing quilt.”
    “What kind of information?” Maddy wanted to know. Her suspicions were easily aroused.
    “Something about those symbols around the border of the quilt being a prophecy. Or a curse. Or something like that.”
    “A prophecy?” said Aggie. “What’s that?”
    “A prediction of the future,” her Aunt Amanda offered. “But nobody can really predict the future.”
    Freddie laughed. “What about your Uncle Bernie? He’s correctly predicted the Super Bowl winner for the last ten years.”
    “We don’t talk about Uncle Bernie – he’s a bookie. He handicaps sporting events based on stats and such. Nothing occult about that.”
    Maddy sliced the pie and served it on her special Blue Willow desert plates. She added a scoop of vanilla ice cream as she passed the pie around the table. “What kind of prophecy” she asked her husband.
    “Didn’t say. The guy was nuts. You could tell that just by looking at him. He could’ve been a character out of Plan 9 From Outer Space .”
    Amanda looked up from her strawberry-watermelon pie. “Isn’t that supposed to be one of the worst movies ever made?”
    “My point exactly,” said Beau. “The guy was downright creepy.”
    “I’ve seen that movie,” grinned N’yen. “There’s a zombie and a vampire and invaders from another planet.”
    “Thank goodness we only have a witch to worry about,” said Maddy, giving the boy another slice of pie.
     
     

 
    Chapter Eight
     
    The Visiting Professor of Runology
     
     
    T he drive to Indianapolis was uneventful. They only had to stop twice for N’yen to pee. Once at a service station, another time at a McDonald’s. Ronald was still serving breakfast, so everybody but Bootsie had an Egg McMuffin; she ordered the oatmeal. This week she was dieting.
    Visiting