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    Samuel had called back, telling her that he’d been enjoying a nightcap on his back porch swing when he smelled smoke. The ground floor of Tilda’s house had been fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived, but they’d been able to quench the fire quickly. The exterior walls were still standing and the roof was mostly intact, but the flames had been impressive while they raged. Samuel was the youngest resident on Walnut Street. His neighbors had reached the time in life when they sometimes had trouble waiting for sundown to make it socially acceptable to go to bed. If he’d gone to bed even minutes sooner, the whole house would have been gone.
    And if Tilda had escaped even minutes sooner, she might not be dead. No matter how hard she tried, Faye couldn’t shake the image of a woman in her eighties, alone, fighting her way out of a burning house.
    Faye thanked Samuel for the information, saying, “It’s late and neither Amande nor I have had any sleep. We may not be at work on time tomorrow.”
    â€œTake your time. Tell me, Faye. Were you and Tilda close? I don’t mean to be rude, but she wasn’t big on leaving town. What on earth possessed her to drive to your hotel?”
    â€œI knew her well enough to know that she was agoraphobic, but I don’t have any idea why she came to me for help tonight. It sounds like she lived on a street full of people she knew much better, and they would have wanted to help.”
    â€œOf course, we would’ve wanted to help, but I wouldn’t say any of us knew her any better than you did. Tilda has always kept to herself. I’m sorry you’re mixed up in this terrible thing. Take your time getting to work tomorrow.”
    Faye thanked him and broke the connection. Then she dialed home. Joe answered so quickly that she imagined he’d been sleeping with the phone on his pillow.

Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:
An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism
in Rosebower, New York
    by Antonia Caruso
    There are people who think I’m a killjoy. Those people enjoy the antics of fakers. They say that séances and communing with the dead are, at worst, harmless entertainment. We pay our entertainers. Why shouldn’t we pay our fortune-tellers, even if they are fake?
    I think my idol, The Amazing Randi, explains it best when he says there is a real danger in believing people who claim that they can solve real problems—like, for instance, the energy crisis and environmental decline—by magic. For example, there are common illusions that give the impression of matter or energy springing into being from nothingness. One of them looks like a large faucet, suspended in mid-air, from which water flows unceasingly. To the eye, water is being made out of nothing and the illusionist responsible deserves a citation from the Reality Police for violating the Law of Conservation of Matter.
    If the illusionist is enterprising, a small water wheel is part of the apparatus, merrily turning in the flow of water being created from nothing. Thus, the illusionist is creating energy from nothing, and the Reality Police exact very high fines from people who build perpetual motion machines violating the Law of Conservation of Energy. Even worse, the size of the punishment dealt to those who defy entropy, the relentless killjoy that will eventually make motionless atomic particles of us all, is incalculable.
    So is it true? Can anyone build a faucet that creates water and energy? Of course not.
    In reality, there is a pipe running upward, hidden by the gushing flow of water that supports the faucet. Attached to this pipe is a submersible pump that recirculates the water so that it can flow out again. This pump requires electricity to do its magical work.
    Voila! Energy has not been created out of nothing, and neither has matter. Entropy continues uninterrupted in its quest to destroy us. The Reality Police can rest