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you and your friends.”
    “I don’t need—” I began to explain that I didn’t need food for anyone but myself, but the baker had already disappeared into the back room. A man’s voice—a rich bass that sounded as if it belonged to a golden-age radio announcer—asked, “Is she the one who went into Dee’s yesterday?”
    The baker’s murmured reply was impossible to make out, but whatever it was seemed to startle the man. “The swan?” he boomed. “The black swan?”
    I looked down at the swan signet ring on my right hand. That’s what the baker had been looking at. It was also what the jeweler—
John Dee, where had I heard that name before?
—had noticed yesterday. But what could an old signet ring my mother gave me have to do with anything?
    The baker returned with two large brown bags. I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet but the baker shook her head. “It’s on the house. Savory tea pies,” she said, holding up the bag in her right hand, “and scones,” holding up the one in her left. Before I could object, she pressed both bags into my arms. They were warm and deliciously fragrant.
    “Thank you, it’s awfully kind of you . . .” I fell silent because I was afraid I might start to cry.
    “No, no, no!” she said, waving her arms. “Please don’t thank me. You need some sustenance after what you’ve been through.”
    I was about to ask her how she knew that I’d been
through
anything, but the
ting
of an oven timer summoned her away. No doubt I looked as if I’d been through hell, I told myself, and really, I had been. Now, though, I just felt drained andexhausted . . . and hungry. I needed to go home and try to make sense of what I’d learned and then figure out a way to track down this John Dee fellow. As I turned to go, I remembered where I’d seen the name John Dee before. It had been on the Wikipedia list of famous alchemists I’d looked up when I brought home the silver box. John Dee was a famous alchemist and astronomer.
An Elizabethan alchemist and astronomer.
The original John Dee had been dead for nearly four hundred years.
    I walked back to the town house, cradling the warm bags in my arms. I was so weak with hunger that I almost sat down on a curb to eat the contents right there, but I was only a few blocks away. When I got to the town house, I was relieved to see that Maia, whom I had called earlier, had put a notice on the gallery door informing our patrons that the gallery was temporarily closed for repairs. I let myself into the house and started back toward the kitchen . . . but froze when I heard a loud crash from the back of the house. An image of the black-clad shadowmen came back to me. It was all I could do to force myself down the hall, clutching the warm bakery bags to my chest as if they could protect me.
    Instead of burglars, though, I found Becky Jones and Jay Fine, my two best friends since high school. Jay was on his knees by the safe door scrubbing the floor. Becky was sweeping up broken pottery. The back door to the garden was propped open by a kitchen chair, which had toppled over—no doubt the source of the crash I’d heard. As soon as she saw me, Becky dropped the broom and held out her arms. I barely had time toput the bags on the table before Becky wrapped her arms around me, her chin hitting my armpit. She squeezed tight and then took a step back and swatted me hard on the arm.
    “Why didn’t you call us?” she asked. “And why don’t you have your cell phone on?” Like most of our generation Becky couldn’t imagine going five minutes without checking her cell phone. Maybe because I had grown up with older parents who had a more old-world sensibility in a house with windup clocks and record-playing phonographs, I wasn’t quite as attached to the new technology. Becky accused me of being a Luddite; Jay thought it was kind of cool and steampunk.
    “I forgot my phone when I went back to the hospital,” I said. “And I was going to