“Would you mind staying with Lizzy for a few minutes? I need to take care of some business.”

“I can keep watch.”

“Thank you.” He turned to go.

“Lieutenant? If your business gets too complicated, we can simplify it for you.”

He didn’t look back, didn’t dare make even a noncommittal sound that she might interpret as tacit permission to kill his brother.

He arrived at the Liaison’s Office just as Pete reached the upstairs landing and had his key in the outer door.

“How official are we?” Pete asked when they were inside his office. He opened the small fridge and held up two bottles of beer.

“Not official enough that I would refuse one of those,” Monty replied.

Pete opened the bottles, handed one to Monty, then sat in one of the chairs in his waiting area.

Monty settled in the other chair, took a long pull of his beer, then told Pete everything Lizzy had told him.

“So far it’s just verbal abuse,” Monty began, then remembered the pinching. Hard to say where that would fall on a scale between sibling squabbles and abuse. “Mostly.”

“Just verbal abuse?” Pete made air quotes as he repeated the words. “You know better than that.”

He rubbed his forehead with the cold bottle. “Yes, I know better. Words can do as much damage as fists.” He drank more of the beer. “The motto in my parents’ house was ‘no unkind words, no unkind deeds.’ And if you were unkind, even unintentionally, you were expected to at least try to make things right.”

“Your brother doesn’t seem to have embraced your family’s motto.”

“No. But he learned how to avoid being caught too often for misbehavior, and when he was caught, he always tried to shift the blame to someone else—or persuade the other person to deny there was any wrongdoing.” Monty put the bottle on a coaster Pete provided. “He certainly trained Sissy to be collusive in what he took from her when we were children—and nothing I said to either of them seemed to make a difference.”

Monty hesitated, then wondered why, since he had asked for this meeting. Pete had already formed opinions about members of his family. He doubted anything he said now would alter those opinions—or shock an attorney. “The man Sissy was involved with, the girls’ father. He was a nice guy, steady. And he really loved her. I only met him a few times, but I liked him. He was happy when she became pregnant with Carrie, and he and Sissy talked about getting married. Then something happened, and he wasn’t talking about marriage anymore. But they stayed together, and despite him backing away a bit, things seemed to settle down.”

“You didn’t marry Lizzy’s mother,” Pete said gently.

“I wanted to get married. Elayne didn’t. Or, more to the point, her mother didn’t want her to marry a social and financial inferior.”

“What happened with Sierra?”

“We never knew. He walked out on her and the girls about a year after Bonnie was born. The one time I confronted him after he left, he said he didn’t mind working long hours to support his own children, but he’d be damned if he’d break his back for a moocher. I didn’t understand at the time. Now, having seen Jimmy and Sissy together here, I think about how her partner paid some of the bills directly, or bought clothes and toys for the girls, or brought over a bag of groceries when he came to visit his children. But he wouldn’t give Sissy any money.”

“Jimmy was taking a share of the house money, and Sierra’s partner figured out why they were having trouble paying bills.” Pete sighed. “She probably promised to stop giving her brother money, and things would settle down for a while.”

Monty nodded. “Then Jimmy would show up again and wear her down. And when she broke one promise too many, her partner left.”

“Do you know where to find him?”

He shook his head. “Mama might know. Doesn’t matter now. Sissy is out of Jimmy’s reach. But Frances . . .”

“You can’t take a child away from her parents because you were told about something that happened in another city,” Pete said. “There is no proof that Clarence coerced Frances to do anything, and it would be his word against hers.”

“Human courts couldn’t, and wouldn’t, take Frances away from her parents on hearsay, but human law doesn’t apply in the Courtyard,” Monty said. “I wouldn’t need to convince a judge that Frances was endangered.”

Pete leaned forward. “There was enough of an age gap between you and Sierra to provide some distance, but brothers and sisters close to the same age don’t always get along. If you have any doubts about that, I’ll let you spend an afternoon with Sarah and Robert when they’re being the bane of each other’s existence. Monty, if this is a tempest in a teapot, if Frances has embellished a sibling quarrel and added a dramatic flourish for sympathy, and you convince Simon Wolfgard to act on it, there is no going back. You have more experience with the Others than I do, but having observed how the adults let the kids scrap to settle things among themselves and only step in when it looks like one of them will get hurt, they’ll take your word that the threat is serious enough to remove the child. But what happens if Simon or Vlad or Henry decides Frances should be relocated? You won’t be able to withdraw your request, won’t be able to soft-pedal what you told them in order to keep her in Lakeside.”