Phantoms

waiting room. And the bank owns more of it than I do. But it sure does have character, doesn’t it?”
    “Tons,” Lisa said.
    They got out of the car, and Jenny discovered that the setting sun had given rise to a chilly wind. She was wearing a long-sleeved, green sweater with her jeans, but she shivered anyway. Autumn in the Sierras was a succession of splendid days and contrastingly crisp nights.
    She stretched, uncramping muscles that had knotted up during the long drive, then pushed the door shut. The sound echoed off the mountain above and through the town below. It was the only sound in the twilight stillness.
    At the rear of the Trans Am, she paused for a moment, staring down Skyline Road, into the center of Snowfield. Nothing moved.
    “I could stay here forever,” Lisa declared, hugging herself as she happily surveyed the town below.
    Jenny listened. The echo of the slammed car door faded away—and was replaced by no other sound except the soft soughing of the wind.
    There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor, which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower’s lonely bedroom. To Jenny, it seemed curiously as if there were cause for grieving in Snowfield’s silence; however, she didn’t know why she felt that way or even why such a peculiar thought had occurred to her in the first place. She thought of the silence of a gentle summer night, too, which isn’t actually a silence at all, but a subtle chorus of moth wings tapping on windows, crickets moving in the grass, and porch swings ever-so-faintly sighing and creaking. Snowfield’s soundless slumber was imbued with some of that quality, too, a hint of fevered activity—voices, movement, struggle—just beyond the reach of the senses. But it was more than that. There is also the silence of a winter night, deep and cold and heartless, but containing an expectation of the bustling, growing noises of spring. This silence was filled with expectation, too, and it made Jenny nervous.
    She wanted to call out, ask if anyone was here. But she didn’t because her neighbors might come out, startled by her cry, all of them safe and sound and bewildered by her apprehension, and then she would look foolish. A doctor who behaved foolishly in public on Monday was a doctor without patients on Tuesday.
    “… stay here forever and ever and ever,” Lisa was saying, still swooning over the beauty of the mountain village.
    “It doesn’t make you… uneasy?” Jenny asked.
    “What?”
    “The silence.”
    “Oh, I love it. It’s so peaceful.”
    It was peaceful. There was no sign of trouble.
    So why am I so damned jumpy? Jenny wondered.
    She opened the trunk of the car and lifted out one of Lisa’s suitcases, then another.
    Lisa took the second suitcase and reached into the trunk for a book bag.
    “Don’t overload yourself,” Jenny said. “We’ve got to make a couple of more trips, anyway.”
    They crossed the lawn to a stone walkway and followed that to the front porch, where, in response to the amber-purple sunset, shadows were rising and opening petals as if they were night-blooming flowers.
    Jenny opened the front door, and stepped into the dark foyer. “Hilda, we’re home!”
    There was no answer.
    The only light in the house was at the far end of the hall, beyond the open kitchen door.
    Jenny put down the suitcase and switched on the hall light. “Hilda?”
    “Who’s Hilda?” Lisa asked, dropping her suitcase and the book bag.
    “My housekeeper. She knew what time we expected to arrive. I thought she’d be starting dinner about now.”
    “Wow, a housekeeper! You mean, a live-in?”
    “She has the apartment above the garage,” Jenny said, putting her purse and car keys on the small foyer table that stood beneath a large, brass-framed mirror.
    Lisa was impressed. “Hey, are you rich or something?”
    Jenny laughed. “Hardly. I can’t really afford Hilda—but I can’t afford to be without her, either.”
    Wondering why the kitchen light was on if Hilda wasn’t here, Jenny headed down the hall, with Lisa following close behind.
    “What with keeping regular office hours and making emergency house calls to three other towns in these mountains, I’d never eat more than cheese sandwiches and doughnuts if it wasn’t for Hilda.”
    “Is she a good cook?” Lisa asked.
    “Marvelous. Too good when it