sun comes up," he agreed. "Now go back to bed and let Miss Alyssum drink her milk in peace."
"I want milk." Constance sat her skinny rear end in a kitchen chair.
Why in the name of heaven had he wanted the child to talk? It was a thousand times more peaceful when she kept her mouth shut. Axell glanced helplessly at the teacher again. How could she look even more innocent than his child?
"I believe Constance is worried about where I'm sleeping," she replied with muffled laughter, removing the cup from the microwave and pouring a portion into a smaller cup for his daughter. "Go back to bed. I'll see her back to her room."
Where she was sleeping? Axell sleepily pondered that one until heat flushed up his jaw. He hadn't realized Constance was aware of the women he occasionally entertained in his wing of the house. He tried to hustle most of them home before his daughter woke, but some had indulged their fantasies of homemaking and insisted on staying. He should have thrown them all out. With a sigh, he nodded in acknowledgment of her warning.
"All right. I'll see you in the morning. Constance, behave yourself and do as Miss Alyssum tells you." To hell with women. Staggering back down the hall, Axell left them to themselves. The one blamed day he could get a little sleep...
Chiming laughter exploded in the room he'd left behind. Confounded, know-it-all woman.
* * *
Maya wasn't laughing hours later as she cuddled a meowing Muldoon in her arms while a policeman blocked her path. Through tear-filled eyes, she glared at the blue uniform and yellow police tape cutting off her access to Matty and Cleo's home. She was used to losing homes. It really shouldn't hurt so much. But she'd sort of hoped maybe she could have this one for the baby and Matty—at least until Cleo returned. She bit her lip and tilted her chin up to fight a sob.
"It's for your own safety, miss," the officer insisted. "The place has to be torn down. Fire marshal's orders. It's a death trap. Those walls could fall any minute."
"But there are works of art in there!" she protested, praying she didn't sound whiny. "Hand made, irreplaceable... The artisans deserve compensation for their work. If I don't salvage them..."
The policeman implacably shook his head. "No can do."
Maya thought of all Matty's clothes and toys, Cleo's motley assortment of furniture, all the accouterments they'd gathered in years of careful scrounging, and the tears streamed down her cheeks. They'd been displaced so many times... The teapot! And her china cups! A wrecking ball would demolish their whole lives.
Shaking her head in denial, she hugged Muldoon and sought desperately for some argument to sway the officer. The teapot and cups were all they still owned from the home they barely remembered. She couldn't lose them.
Wiping her eyes with her shirtsleeve, she thought frantically of ways around the catastrophe. She could creep in there in the dead of night... Creep? With her two ton belly? Fat chance. And she couldn't just haul out the china when Matty needed his rabbit and his pajamas, and the artists who'd built the kaleidoscopes and wind chimes needed the income from their work and...
The CD player, with her recordings. Cleo's photographs. Their whole damned lives were in that building. She bit her lip on another hiccuping sob.
"Trouble, Miss Alyssum?"
Walking from the corner where he'd been talking with a man Maya recognized as the mayor, Axell Holm stopped beside her with that puzzled expression men assumed when confronted with female emotion. Maya glared back at him.
"Of course not, Mr. Holm," she said with sarcastic emphasis on the formal name. "Everything my family owns is going to be demolished with that wretched building. That's no trouble at all. It just makes it easier to pick up and move."
A frown knitted the bridge of his nose as he looked at the collapsed facade of the building. "That could be the mayor's intention," he replied thoughtfully.
Startled, Maya jerked her head around to look at him. "What?"
He caught her elbow and steered her away from the ears of the interested policeman. "The mayor wants your school closed, remember? If you have nowhere to live and no reason to stay, you'll close the school without his having to make what could conceivably be an unpopular political decision."
"You were just talking to the man," she exclaimed. "Did he tell you this?"
"Don't be ridiculous. If Ralph was gloating, he kept it