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poor old Moneywort, before he’d been murdered. The toad lived at that moment on the back porch, in a five-gallon bucket lidded with a copy of
Life
magazine. Andrew wouldn’t treat the creature shabbily. He
was
his brother’s keeper, after a fashion. His soul wouldn’t be worth a drilled-out penny if he abandoned the toad now. In the end he had set up the aquarium on the service porch just behind the kitchen and beside their bedroom.
    He and Rose slept in a downstairs room during the first two months they lived in the bungalow. One night late, a week after the setting up of the aquarium, there’d been a fearful clatter on the porch—a scuffling and sloshing and a banging of aquarium lids, and then the odd, Lovecraftian sound of something slurping across the floor of the kitchen. Rose had awakened in a sweat. It was a burglar; she was certain of it. The noise was unnatural—the noise of a fiend. Andrew had picked up a shoe, but he was thinking of the pig, making its racket seventy-five years ago on the back porch of an Iowa farm. He dropped the shoe, certain that he wouldn’t need it. In his nightshirt he peeked out through the half-open door. There was the escaped toad, scurrying across the linoleum floor toward the front of the house, toward the living room, chirping as it ran. He confronted it on the threshold of the kitchen, scooping it up and dropping it back into its aquarium, then weighting the lid with a brick before going back to bed.
    It wasn’t until dawn that it occurred to him that the toad must have had a destination. In the living room, against the far wall, sat the china cabinet in which lay the pig spoon. It seemed unlikely at first, then possible, then wildly likely that the toad had been bound for that china cabinet, that it, too, was caught up in the adventure of the spoon. Andrew lay for an hour thinking about it, and then, without waking his wife, he tiptoed out onto the service porch, scooped the toad out of the tank, and set it onto the floor. It sat there, pretending to be dead.
    Of course it
would
with him looking on and all. He’d missed his chance—bungled it. It might have been very different: the toad, thinking itself undiscovered, making away across the floor toward the hutch, wrestling it open somehow, plucking out the spoon, going out the mail slot with the spoon gripped in one of its webbed paws. Andrew might have followed it—to the sea, to a den beneath the old pier, into the back door of one of the derelict carnival rides at the Pike. It would have demonstrated, at the very least, a symphony of mysterious activity. At best—and not at all farfetched—it hinted at the sort of veiled, underlying order that bespoke the very existence of God.
    But the toad had sat mute. After long minutes had passed, Andrew plucked it up and returned it once again to its aquarium, where it sank innocently to the bottom and pretended to sleep. He hadn’t proved anything, but he was left with the uncanny suspicion that one foggy morning there would come a rattle at the door handle and a scuffling on the front porch. He would rise, wondering, and throw open the door. On the porch, giving him the glad eye, would be the pig, come round for the spoon. The toad would appear, yawning and stretching, and the two of them, the toad and the pig, would take the spoon and go.
    Andrew sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by open boxes of breakfast cereal. He scowled into his coffee. It had gone stale. He would mail-order another two pounds that very morning. Coffee shouldn’t sit in the refrigerator for more than two weeks.
One
week was plenty. The precious aromas were lost, somehow. He’d read about it. He’d compiled a notebook full of coffee literature and was toying with the idea of ordering a brass roasting oven from Diedrich. Rose wasn’t keen on it.
    She held her coffee mug in her hand, satisfied, not understanding his passion for brewing perfect coffee. She didn’t see that it
had
to be done just