She passed through the high keyhole doorway into the front hall, and then she stopped 
and put her hands on the frame, as Oncle Julien had done in so many old pictures, in this 
door or the other, and she just felt the silence and bigness of the house around her, and 
smelled its wood.
  
  That other smell. There it was again, making her... what? Almost hungry. It was 
delicious, whatever it was. Not butterscotch, no, not caramel, not chocolate, but 
something thick like that, a flavor that seemed a hundred flavors compressed into one. 
Like the first time you bit into a chocolate-covered cherry cordial. Or a Cadbury Easter 
egg.
  
  No, she needed a better comparison. Something you didn't eat.
  
  What about the smell of hot tar? That tantalized her, too, and then there was the smell 
of gasoline that she just couldn't tear herself away from. Well, this was more like that.
  
  She moved down the hall, noting the winking lights of other alarm devices, none of them 
armed, all of them waiting, and the smell became strongest when she stood at the foot of 
the stairs.
  
  She knew Uncle Ryan had investigated this entire area, that even after all the blood 
had been washed away, and the Chinese rug in the living room had been taken out, he had 
come with a chemical that made lots of other blood glow in the dark. Well, it was all 
gone now. Just gone. He'd seen to that before Michael came home from the hospital.  And 
he'd sworn he detected no smell.
  
  Mona took a deep breath of it. Yes, it made you feel a kind of craving. Like the time 
she was riding the bus downtown on one of her escapades, all alone and reckless and 
loaded with dough, and she'd smelled that delicious barbecue from the bus and actually 
gotten off to find the place from which it was coming, a little French Quarter restaurant 
in a ramshackle building on Esplanade. Hadn't tasted half as good as it smelled.
  
  But we're back to food again and this isn't food.
  
  She looked into the living room, startled again, as she'd been earlier, to see how 
Michael had changed things after Rowan left. Of course the Chinese carpet had been taken 
out. It was all bloody. But he didn't have to abolish the old scheme of double parlors, 
did he? Well, he had.  Mayfair Blasphemy.
  
  It was one vast room now, with a giant soft sofa beneath the arch against the inside 
wall. A nice scattering of French chairs-all Oncle Julien's to hear him tell it, now 
tricked out in new gold damask or a striped fabric, wickedly rich looking, and a glass 
table through which you could see the dark amber colors of the enormous old rug. It must 
have been twenty-five feet, that rug, to stretch through both rooms as it did, embracing 
the floor before both of the hearths. And how old it looked, like something out of the 
attic upstairs, most likely. Maybe Michael had brought it down with the gilded chairs.
  
  They'd said the only orders he'd given after he came home were to change that double 
parlor. Put Julien's things down there. Make it look entirely different.
  
  Made sense. He'd obviously wanted to erase all traces of Rowan; he had wanted to 
obliterate the rooms in which they spent their happiest moments. Some of the chairs were 
faded, wood chipped here and there.  And the carpet rested right on the heart-pine floor, 
thin and silky looking.
  
  Maybe there had been blood all over that other furniture. Nobody would tell Mona 
exactly what had gone on. No one would tell her anything much except Oncle Julien. And in 
her dreams, she seldom had the presence of dream-mind to ask a question. Oncle Julien 
just talked and talked or danced and danced.
  
  No Victrola in this room now. What a stroke of luck it would have been, if they'd 
brought it down too with all this other stuff. But they hadn't. She hadn't heard anybody 
say a thing about finding a Victrola.
  
  She'd checked out the first floor every time she'd come. Michael listened to a little 
tape machine in the library. This room lay in stillness, and its great Bosendorfer piano, 
at an angle before the second fireplace, seemed more a piece of furniture than a thing 
which could sing.
  
  The room was still beautiful. It had been nice earlier to flop on the big soft sofa, 
from which you could see all the mirrors, the two white marble fireplaces, one to your 
left, one to your right, across from you, and the two doors directly opposite to 
Deirdre's old porch. Yes, Mona had thought, a good vantage point, and still an enchanting 
room. Sometimes she danced on the bare floors of the double parlor at Amelia, dreaming of 
mirrors, dreaming of making a killing in mutual funds with money she'd borrow from 
Mayfair and Mayfair.
  
  Just give me another year, she thought, I'll crack the market, then if I can find but 
one gambler in that whole stodgy law firm! It was no use asking them now to fix up Amelia 
Street. Ancient Evelyn had always sent carpenters and workmen away. She cherished her 
"quiet." And then what good was it to fix up a house in which Patrick and Alicia were 
simply drunk all the time, and Ancient Evelyn like a fixture?
  
  Mona had her own space, as they say, the big bedroom upstairs on the Avenue. And there 
she kept her computer equipment, all her disks and files, and books. Her day would come. 
And until then she had plenty of time after school to study stocks, bonds, money 
instruments, and the like.
  
  Her dream really was the management of her own mutual fund, called Mona One. She'd 
invite Mayfairs only to buy in, and she'd handpick every company in which the fund 
invested, on the basis of its environmental worthiness.
  
  Mona knew from the Wall Street Journal and from the New York Times what was going on. 
Environmentally sensitive companies were making big bucks. Somebody had invented a 
microbe that ate oil spills and could even clean up your oven for you, if you turned it 
loose inside.  This was the wave of the future. Mona One would be a legend among mutual 
funds, like Fidelity Magellan, or Nicholas II. Mona could have begun now, if anybody 
would take a chance on her. If only the Realm of Adults would open, just one tiny little 
bit, and let her in!