5

Amity stood at the kitchen table with Snowball perched on her right shoulder. The mouse nibbled a peanut held in his forepaws.

The box stood on the table. It was a soiled, yellowed nothing of a box—and yet it looked ominous.

She asked, "What's in it?"

"I don't know," her dad said as he popped the cap off a bottle of beer. "And I promised not to open it."

"Maybe it's an eight-inch Madagascar hissing cockroach, like the plague of bugs that witch conjured into her enemy's castle."

"That was in a novel. In the real world, people don't curse each other with giant hissing cockroaches. Anyway, Ed is evidently losing it, but he's not a bad guy."

"If he doesn't come back for a year, will you really put it in a barrel with cement and drop it in the ocean?"

Her father shrugged. "I sort of promised." He sat at the table, smiled ruefully, and shook his head. "Seventy-six billion dollars."

"You don't really think anything that fits in such a little box could be worth so much, do you?" Amity wondered.

Snowball would fit in the box. Because she loved the little dude, he was worth a lot more to her than what they had paid for him, though he wasn't worth thousands of millions of dollars. No offense intended toward the beloved mouse or toward mousekind in general. On the other hand, Daddy was for sure worth that much. If someday her father was kidnapped, and if the bad guys demanded seventy-six billion, and if by then Amity had that much money, she would pay the ransom; she really and truly would. However, unlike Snowball, Daddy wouldn't fit in this box.

"Whatever it contains," her father said, "it's not worth ten cents to anyone but Ed. The poor man is losing his way. His mind has turned traitor on him. From things he's said ... I think maybe he was a college professor once, probably a great one. But now ... he's a very sad case. Well, whatever this thing is, he'll be back for it tomorrow or the next day or a week from now."

Amity took Snowball from her shoulder and cradled him in her hands. He was just a mouse, but he was hers to keep safe in a world where nothing lasted forever, not even who you were.