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the trees at the lawn next door and the two women mowing it.
    Well, only one was mowing the lawn, he supposed. The sister named Alex. The other, the woman he recognized as being the clumsy Sam, was following along beside her, madly waving a dish towel and fly swatter about her sister's head.
    When he'd first spotted the pair, Mortimer thought Sam was attacking Alex, but the mad waving continued while the two women walked in sync. Mortimer then watched perplexed as the clumsy Sam staggered along, stumbling over her own feet as she madly flailed her items. She was mostly wielding them about Alex's head, but stopped every few minutes to flail them around her own before chasing after the mower to wave them around Alex again.
    As he watched, Mortimer's irritation slowly turned to concern. He was quite positive that one of these times, in her mad dash after the lawn mower, Sam would stumble and fall right into it. She really was the clumsiest creature he'd ever seen. As unsteady on her feet as a new foal… or a drunk, he supposed, and frowned. Surely it was too early in the day to be drinking.
    He glanced to his wrist, but had taken his watch off before crawling into bed and hadn't thought to retrieve it when the lawn mower noise had woken him.
    "What the hell is she doing?" Decker breathed with dismay.
    Mortimer glanced back out to see that Sam had once again paused to wave the dish towel and fly swatter about her own head. He wasn't surprised at Decker's shock. The woman looked spastic… The first time she'd done that he'd thought she was having some sort of seizure. "I think she's trying to chase off mosquitoes or something."
    "Ah." Decker nodded, but said, "Probably deerflies."
    "What about deerflies?"
    Both men turned to see Bricker as he stepped off the stairs and crossed the carpet toward them.
    "They tend to be pests up here for the mortals," Decker explained. Insects generally left immortals alone. It had been hypothesized that immortals secreted some hormone that either confused or was unattractive to them. "I guess they're bothering our neighbor while she's mowing the lawn."
    Bricker nodded at the explanation and paused next to them to peer out the window too. He watched Sam's antics for a moment, his expression becoming increasingly perplexed, but merely asked, "Do you know them?"
    "No," Decker said. "The Realtor gave me a short rundown of the neighbors when I bought this place, but I've avoided the whole getting-to-know-the-neighbors thing."
    Mortimer wasn't surprised to hear this. Getting to know the neighbors would limit how long Decker could keep the cottage. The best possible scenario was that he didn't see them at all.
    "So what did the Realtor say about them?" Bricker asked curiously.
    Decker's expression turned thoughtful as he tried to recall the information. "They're three sisters. I think the family name is Willan, but I don't remember their given names. The Realtor told me, but…" He shrugged with indifference. "Their parents bought or built the cottage when the girls were just kids and the family spent a lot of summers up here. The parents died a couple of years ago—some kind of accident—and they left the cottage to the three sisters."
    Mortimer saw his gaze narrow on the women on the lawn, and then Decker admitted, "In the two years since I bought the cottage, this is the first time I've been here during high season. I usually only come up in fall, winter, and spring. It's pretty quiet then, with just a handful of year-round residents, who are generally easy to avoid. On the rare occasions I haven't been able to avoid them, I simply took control of their minds and sent them on their way."
    A moment of silence passed, and then Decker glanced at Bricker and asked, "Did the lawn mower wake you up as well?"
    "Yeah," the younger immortal admitted, irritation wreathing his face. "These walls are paper-thin, Decker. What did they build them out of? Toilet tissue?"
    "I don't think that would be up to code,"