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be in a second or two, as it thrust its powerful legs to propel itself away. You couldn’t hold onto a slippery frog, Reggie had learned, unless you got hold of its extended legs. That was the frog’s vulnerability. You clamped your fist tight around those long, bony legs.
    And he would have done so, except for a rustling in the brush behind him. A shadow fell across the scummy water, reaching to the widening hole opened in the green algae where Reggie’s hand had plunged through.
    In the rippling water Reggie saw a reflection.
    A face.
    Grotesquely distorted.
    Almost the face of a huge, nightmarish frog.

Chapter Eleven
    The face staring back at Edwin startled him. It looked old and haunted. How could that be his own reflection in the dark windowpane? Only yesterday he’d been a schoolboy, savoring the long summer of freedom still ahead. He told himself he was just tired from hiking around without enough sleep.
    He closed the blackout curtains in the living room, noticing a framed photograph sitting on the side table by the window. Grace. No, he realized, turning the photo to catch the lamplight. It was an older picture of another young, broad-faced woman with dark eyes and hair.
    â€œMy daughter, Mae. Grace’s mother.” Martha came into the room.
    Edwin moved his hand away from the photo, feeling like a guilty child caught in the act of…what? Looking more closely at a photograph? But hadn’t he heard a note of disapproval in Martha’s tone?
    Martha dropped into the chair closest to the cold fireplace. She let out a grunt and pulled a potato out of a pocket in her baggy, mud-colored cardigan.
    â€œGuards against the rheumatics,” Martha explained to him, shoving the potato into a more comfortable pocket. “Grace refuses to carry one with her when it’s chilly. She’ll be sorry. Stubborn girl. Takes after her mother. I tried to teach her all my secrets but she never wanted to know.”
    â€œWhere is Grace?” Edwin had abandoned his quest for the barrows after his run-ins with Jack Chapman and Harry Wainman. He returned to find an apparently empty house, until Martha emerged from her room.
    Martha buttoned her cardigan. “Must be out on patrol. That’s where she usually is, when she isn’t home. Unless she’s got a boyfriend.”
    Edwin ignored the last remark. Hadn’t Grace said that Martha’s mental facilities were not what they once were? “It’s very late,” he said. The country was on war time and darkness came at a totally unreasonable hour.
    Martha stared at Edwin so intently he wondered whether her eyesight was failing, though the pale blue eyes looked clear enough. “You’re here to study the Guardians, aren’t you?”
    â€œThat’s right. You offered tell me about local folklore.”
    Martha looked flattered. “Get your notebook, then.”
    Soon Edwin was scribbling snippets of herbal lore and Noddweir superstitions, hardly able to keep up with Martha’s torrent of words.
    â€œLavender, now,” she said. “A few drops of lavender oil in a bowl of hot water is what you want. Stick your feet in, it’ll perk you up when you’re tired. It were an evil day when we heard we were supposed to dig up flowers to plant vegetables. Dig for victory, you know. But we managed to keep lavender.”
    She rubbed arthritic hands together. “Horehound tea, that’s the stuff for coughs. Ragwort will rid you of sciatica.”
    She ruminated for a moment. “’Course, you can’t get lemons these days. The juice did miracles in stopping hiccups. Did you ever have raspberry tea? Good for gargling, that is. My preparations are better than that rubbish they sell at chemists, but people don’t believe. The old ways are dying. I done my best to pass along knowledge to Issy. I wish there was news of her.”
    For a moment she fell silent. Her small hands stopped darting