Divine Evil

was the big brick house that had been converted into three apartment units when she was a girl. A light shone in the top window, faint and yellow behind its shade.
    Houses, most of them old and built well off the road. Low stone walls and high curbs. Then a clutter of small businesses and more converted apartments with concrete or wooden porches and aluminum awnings.
    Now the park. She could almost see the ghost of the child she had been, running toward the empty swings that moved a bit in the easy wind.
    More houses, one or two with a light burning, most dark and silent. The occasional glare of a television against window glass. Cars parked against the curb. They would be unlocked, she thought, as the doors of most of the houses would be.
    There was Martha's Diner, the bank, the sheriff's office. She remembered how Sheriff Parker had sat outside on thestoop, smoking Camels and keeping a beady eye on law and order. Did he still? she wondered. Did Maude Poffenburger still stand behind the counter at the post office, dispensing stamps and opinions? Would she still find old men playing checkers in the park and kids running across to Abbot's General Store for Popsicles and Milky Ways? Or had it all changed?
    In the morning would she wake up and find this vital slice of her childhood was now inhabited by strangers? Clare shook the idea away and drove slowly, drinking up memories like cool, clean wine.
    More neat yards, daffodils bobbing, azaleas in bud. At Oak Leaf, she turned left. No shops here, only quiet homes and the occasional restless barking of a dog. She came to the corner of Mountain View and pulled into the sloping driveway her father had resurfaced every third year.
    She'd traveled almost the length of town without passing another car.
    Climbing out with the nightsong cheerful around her, she moved slowly, wanting to savor. The garage door had to be lifted by hand. No one had ever bothered to install one of those handy remotes. It opened with a loud keening of metal.
    It wouldn't disturb the neighbors, she thought. The closest one was across the wide street and screened by a neat bayberry hedge. She went back to her idling car and pulled it inside.
    She could have gone directly into the house from there, through the door that would lead into the laundry room, then the kitchen. But she wanted to make her entry more of an event.
    Coming outside again, she lowered the garage door,then walked all the way down to the sloping sidewalk to look at the house.
    She forgot her sleeping bag, her luggage, and remembered her purse only because it held the keys to the front and back doors. Memories flooded her as she climbed the concrete steps from sidewalk to yard. The hyacinths were blooming. She could smell them, sweet and heartbreakingly fragile.
    She stood on the flagstone walkway and looked at the house of her youth. It was three stories of wood and stone. Always the wood had been painted white with blue trim. The wide covered porch, or veranda, as her mother had called it, had open latticework at the eaves and long, slender columns. The porch swing, where she had spent so many summer evenings, was still there, at the end of the porch. Her father had always planted sweet peas nearby so that their spicy fragrance would reach out to you as you glided and dreamed.
    Emotions, both pleasant and painful, choked her as she set the key in the old brass lock. The door opened with a creak and a groan.
    She wasn't afraid of ghosts. If there were any here, they would be friendly. As if to welcome them, she stood in the dark for a full minute.
    She turned on the hall light and watched it bounce and glare off the freshly painted walls and polished oak floor. Blair had already arranged for the house to be readied for new tenants, though he hadn't suspected that the tenant would be his sister.
    It was so odd to see it empty. Somehow, she'd thought she would step inside and find it exactly as it had been, unchanged by the years-as if she'd walked home from school rather than returned after a long journey into adulthood.
    For a moment she saw it as it had been, the pretty drop-leaf table against the wall holding a green glass bowl full of violets. The antique mirror over it, its brass frame gleaming. The many-armed coatrack in the corner. The long, slender oriental carpet over the wide-planked floor. The little hodgepodge shelf that held her mother's collection of porcelain thimbles.
    But when she blinked, the hall was bare, with only a