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“Idiot.” I dropped the eye in the box, and replaced the lid.

I put the box on the nightstand, rose from the bed, and turned to discover Fiona Cassidy standing in the doorway.

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I was certain that I had engaged the deadbolt on the apartment door. A couple of windows were open, but she couldn’t have gotten to them either from the sixth floor or from the street.

She didn’t say anything. She stared at me, expressionless, her face lovely but robotic, as if what she did next would be decided by the application of certain algorithms and computations run on printed circuit boards. Her blue-purple eyes seemed to be luminous.

I would like to say that I was worried but not afraid, though the truth is that she scared me, the way she materialized like a ghost, the way she just stood there, staring.

Instinctively, I sensed that I shouldn’t speak first, that repaying her stare with a stare and silence with silence might unnerve her. But I couldn’t restrain myself: “What’re you doing here?”

She stepped off the threshold, into the bedroom.

“How’d you get in?”

Not deigning to answer me, she looked around the small room, paying special attention to the poster of Duke Ellington in a tuxedo—he was standing in the Cotton Club sometime in the late 1920s, with the famous murals behind him—to a framed photograph of Grandpa Teddy with Benny Goodman, to a poster of my favorite TV star, Red Skelton, dressed as Freddy the Freeloader because I hadn’t found a poster of him as Clem Kadiddlehopper, the character who made me laugh the most.

She closed the door behind her, alarming me, and I said, “You better get out of here.”

Returning her attention to me, still expressionless, she finally spoke. “Or what?”

“Huh?”

Her voice was soft and dead-flat. “I better get out of here—or what?”

“You don’t belong here.”

“Or what?” she insisted.

“You’ll be in big trouble.”

The lack of inflection in her voice chilled me more than would have any quality of threat. “What’re you going to do—scream like a lit

tle girl?”

“I don’t need to scream.”

“Because you’re so tough?”

“No. Because my mom will be home in a minute.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, she will. You’ll see.”

“Liar.”

“You’ll see.”

I began to think that her emotionless demeanor was not the truth of her, that under her surface calm was volcanic potential.

“You know what happens to little snoops?” she asked.

“I’m not a snoop.”

“Bad things happen to them.”