There are towns that host dignified charity events.

Agnes Wibble did not live in one of them.

The St. Bartholomew's Summer Relief Fair opened at noon with bunting, brass music, and a coconut shy so aggressively overbuilt that Felix could identify it from half a field away as a future problem. He hovered above the church lawn in active dread while Agnes arrived carrying a tray of sponge cakes and wearing a straw hat tied under her chin with blue ribbon.

"Lovely day for civic peril," Felix said.

Agnes smiled at the vicar's wife, stepped around a dog, and narrowly avoided being clotheslined by a maypole streamer. She did this without noticing, which remained one of the more upsetting aspects of the assignment.

For three weeks Felix had followed her through market squares, bus stops, libraries, and one extremely compromised miniature golf course. He had become quite good at redirecting small disasters. He could topple a broom at strategic moments, provoke helpful gusts, and produce a warning chill strong enough to make Agnes pause before opening doors with hostile intent.

What he still lacked was authority.

Whenever he filed for greater intervention privileges, the Afterlife Probation Office sent back forms requesting "evidence of mature restraint." This was difficult to provide because Agnes's life continued to resemble a slapstick vendetta.

At the fair entrance a banner read:

WELCOME TO SUMMER GENEROSITY DAY

MIND THE FERRET TENT

"Why is there a ferret tent?" Felix asked.

Nearby, Muriel materialized on top of the raffle table, swinging her legs.

"Cross-program placement," she said. "Unrelated to your case. Unless the ferrets get loose."

"Can they?"

Muriel shrugged. "Everything can."

Agnes delivered her cakes to the baking stall and was immediately recruited into helping wherever a smiling volunteer saw weakness. Within minutes she had been given change to hold, raffle tickets to sort, and an urgent instruction to carry six paper rosettes to the judging enclosure by "the thing with the coconuts."

Felix turned slowly toward the coconut shy.

A local businessman named Trevor Plunket had decided that a regular coconut shy lacked ambition. He had therefore constructed a towering tropical tableau complete with painted palm fronds, bamboo lattice, decorative parrots, and a launch mechanism that purported to "reset the coconuts automatically for speed." Even from a distance it looked like something prohibited by several peace treaties.

"Tell me that violates at least two heavenly safety standards," Felix said.

Muriel checked her clipboard.

"Only one heavenly standard. Four terrestrial ones. Very good odds of paperwork."

Agnes approached the stall just as Trevor gave the side of the machine a hearty slap.

"There she goes!" he cried.

The mechanism answered with a metallic cough.

One coconut dropped into place. A second jammed. A third rolled off the feeder track and vanished into the workings with a noise that made Felix instinctively duck.

"No," Felix said. "Absolutely no."

Agnes paused beside the bamboo rail. "Mr. Plunket, your palm tree is smoking."

"Decoration," said Trevor, already lying.

Felix swooped lower. Smoke was indeed curling from the machine's left side. A belt was slipping. A lever trembled under strain. Above the stall, one of the painted parrots had come loose and was rotating slowly on a nail like a moral warning.

Muriel looked interested.

"Chain event?"

"Don't sound pleased."

"I admire craftsmanship."

Agnes took one step backward, which would have been encouraging if that step had not placed her squarely under the suspended crate of consolation prizes: rubber balls, sherbet packets, and one ornamental garden gnome wearing sunglasses.

Trevor Plunket yanked another lever.

The shy exploded into productivity.

Three coconuts shot upward. One landed properly on its peg. One flew clean over the backboard and into the duck pond. The third ricocheted off the painted palm, struck the parrot, and changed direction with crisp homicidal clarity toward Agnes's hat.

Felix had seven minutes of accumulated intervention credit stored in his badge. He had been saving it for a genuine emergency, perhaps involving buses. But there are moments in a guardian spirit's career when one must accept that destiny has chosen to express itself through tropical fruit.

He triggered the whole reserve at once.

Time did not stop. That would have been useful and therefore unavailable. Instead, everything around Agnes seemed briefly to hesitate, as though reality itself had taken a sharp breath.

Felix threw his weight against the rosette tray in Agnes's hands.

The tray jerked upward.

Blue and red paper rosettes burst into the air like startled medalists.

The incoming coconut hit the tray edge, changed course, smashed into the consolation-prize crate, and brought down the entire lot in a rain of rubber balls, sherbet dust, and the sunglasses gnome, which struck Trevor Plunket on the shoulder with surreal precision.

The crowd gasped.

Then the jammed mechanism finished whatever deranged thought it had been having and launched the remaining coconuts in every available direction.

One shattered the lemonade sign.

One bounced off the brass band's bass drum, producing a note of such apocalyptic confidence that three toddlers burst into tears.

One flew straight upward, disappeared into the church yew tree, and remained there, presumably to haunt someone later.

Agnes crouched by instinct as prize balls bounced around her ankles. She looked up into the fluttering rosettes and said, with admirable calm, "I don't think this is the judged portion."

Muriel, now standing atop the raffle tombola, shouted over the chaos, "Excellent use of reserve credit! Very theatrical."

"I would prefer less theatre!" Felix shouted back.

At last the machine died with a sigh of smoking surrender.

Trevor Plunket sat down hard in the grass, still holding the lever. The gnome lay faceup beside him, sunglasses intact, wearing the expression of a creature that had seen too much.

Agnes helped an elderly woman out from under a banner pole, returned three escaped raffle strips, and handed a child back his sherbet with the soothing apology of somebody who had once again been positioned at the center of an event without technically causing it.

Felix drifted lower, exhausted in a manner that was now more metaphysical than physical.

"Do you ever suspect anything?" he asked her.

Agnes dusted coconut fibers off her sleeve.

"Honestly," she said to the empty air, "sometimes I think the universe just gets bored."

Felix froze.

Muriel's pen halted above her clipboard.

"Did she just nearly hear you?" Felix asked.

"Possibly," Muriel said. "High-risk mortals sometimes get porous around repeated intervention."

"Porous is not a reassuring term."

Agnes bent to retrieve one of the fallen rosettes. It was blue, slightly crumpled, and had picked up a line of icing from a cake casualty on the way down.

"Best in show," she read from the center, then laughed. "For what?"

Felix, who had just saved her from being brained by a civic coconut battery, folded his arms.

"Guardianship under difficult conditions," he said.

Somewhere behind them, the ferret tent came open.