Niceville

influence.”
    Finally, heartsick, she had turned the television off and was now listening to Ofra Harnoy play a series of Vivaldi sonatas—glacial, precise, and perfectly depressing—music to slice your wrists to, but oddly soothing.
    The doorbell had a low vibrating bronze note, rather like a cello, so it took a moment for the sound to register.
    She sighed, looked at the clock above the fireplace, set her scotch down carefully, picked up the television remote, turned the set on, and switched the input to CAMERA ONE .
    A pretty young girl of an indeterminate age, late teens or perhaps older, perhaps not, auburn curls, nicely curved, unlike the current crop of praying-mantis girls. She was wearing an old-fashioned light cotton sundress, pale green, and shiny red slippers like Dorothy’s. She was waiting on the verandah, lit by the glow of Delia’s porch light, staring intently at the front door, apparently unaware of the camera.
    Her pale and heart-shaped face was solemn, her pale hazel eyes unsmiling. She was holding Delia’s Maine Coon cat, Mildred Pierce, in her arms, the huge animal almost too much for her to lift, struggling in her grip, the cat’s dense striped fur matted and wet-looking.
    Blood?
    Delia touched a button by her chair.
    Her voice, coming from a speaker by the door, seemed to startle the girl.
    “Child, what are you doing with my cat?”
    The girl jumped, and Mildred Pierce writhed in her arms, but she did not release her. Delia, knowing Mildred Pierce, thought the girl was stronger than she looked.
    “Miss Cotton? I’m Clara, from across the way? I think your cat got in a fight?”
    Delia knew the people across the way only as recent arrivals, renters, from out of state, a young married couple who had taken over the old Freitag place on Woodcrest after the last of that uppity bunch of stiff-necked Prussians had finally died two months ago. Delia did not know the renters at all, did not know they had a child, but since each house in The Chase sat on almost two acres of lawn and forest, well back from the road, the houses often gated and walled, it was quite usual for even longtime neighbors to know little if anything about the people living near them.
    Delia looked at the image in the television, saw what looked like blood on the girl’s arms and on her pretty green dress. Delia had no affection for Mildred Pierce, a cranky and disputatious cat with imperious ways, but her heart went out to the girl, who was getting the cat’s blood on her pretty green dress.
    “Wait there …”
    “Clara,” said the girl, lifting her chin and shifting the weight of the cat in her arms.
    “Clara,” said Delia, softly repeating the name as if trying to remember other Claras she had known, feeling a slight flutter of something strange, something
wrong
, in the back of her mind, a fleeting wisp of an ancient sin, a shameful family event buried somewhere in the distant past, connected to the girl’s name. But the memory, or the thought, or the fancy, slipped away from her like a koi in a pond. She sighed, turning off the TV and getting slowly to her feet.
    “I’ll be right there.”
    “Good,” said Clara, smiling sweetly up into the camera now, although Delia could no longer see her. Which was too bad, because if Delia had seen Clara smile and seen the light that was in her hazel eyes she might not have opened the door.

Charlie Danziger and Merle Zane Disagree
    Two and a half miles into the brown foothills of the Belfair Range, as you run south on the winding pitted asphalt of Route 311, there’s a rutted track on the right, hidden in the brush, that leads off the highway and into the cool green darkness of the old forest, a dense mix of alders and oaks and pines. The track curves away around a bend and seems to dissolve into the trees.
    After a few hundred yards, the track breaks out into a clearing, in the middle of which stands—or stood—an old pale blue barn, sagging under the weight of all the years since the Great Depression, during which it finally ceased to operate as the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery.
    The sheet-metal roof of the barn had collapsed in several places, exposing square-cut beams a hundred and fifty years old, slick with mold and rot. The interior was dim and hot and reeked of spilled oil and manure and decades of accumulated bat scat.
    Merle Zane and Charlie Danziger had been sitting inside this barn for three hours, breathing through their mouths, patiently