The Darkest Evening of the Year

dream. I have to wear slippers to bed so I won’t be walking barefoot through the woods in my dream.
    If it’s just a dream woods, Amy replied, why wouldn’t the ground be soft?
    It’s soft but it’s cold.
    It’s a winter woods, is it?
    Uh-huh. Lots of snow.
    So dream yourself a summer woods.
    This night was in the winter. The first snow of the season had fallen the previous week, and just that afternoon, the sky had salted two fresh cold inches across the coast.
    I like the snow, said Nickie.
    Then maybe you should wear boots to bed.
    Maybe I should.
    And thick woolen socks and long johns.
    Mommy, you’re silly.
    And a mink coat and a big mink Russian hat.
    The girl giggled but then sobered. I don’t like the dream, but I don’t like the barefoot part the most.
    Amy had gotten a pair of slippers from the closet and had put them under Nickie’s pillow.
    There. Now if you dream about the woods, and if you’re barefoot again, just reach under your pillow and put them on in your sleep.
    She had tucked her daughter in for the night. She had smoothed Nickie’s hair back from her face, kissed her brow, kissed her left cheek and then her right, so her head wouldn’t be unbalanced by the weight of a kiss.
    Then Amy had spent the evening reading and had gone to bed in her own room at half past ten.
    Now, in the passenger seat of the Expedition, Brian said with awful tenderness, “Maybe I should drive.”
    Having crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, they were heading north on Highway 101.
    The clotted mass of fog that smothered the bridge had boiled off into a thin milk as they had come somewhat inland.
    “No,” she said. “It’s better if I drive, something for my hands to grip.”
    That winter night, wind had awakened her, not with its own moan and whistle, but with the disharmony that it rang from the collection of wind chimes on the balcony off the master bedroom.
    Amy looked toward a west-facing window, expecting to see the fairy dance of falling snow against the glass, but there was only the darkness and no snow.
    Although the chimes usually appealed, something in their jangle disturbed her. In her years here, this was the first wind that was not a good musician.
    As she came fully awake, instinct told her that not the chimes but some other sound had awakened her and stropped her nerves. She sat up in bed, threw aside the covers.
    A separate house was occupied by the couple—James and Ellen Avery—who managed the property and made sure that their employers’ every need was met. In addition to being a good manager, James was a strapping man, and responsible.
    In their own wing of the main house were private rooms for Lisbeth, the maid, and Caroline, the nanny.
    Each night a perimeter alarm was engaged. The breaking of a window or the forcing of a door would trigger a siren, and James Avery would come running.
    Nevertheless, Amy was impelled by animal suspicion to remain standing beside her bed.
    Head lifted, she listened intently, wishing that the wind would declare an intermission and let the chimes fall silent.
    Her bedside lamp featured a dimmer switch. She fumbled for it and eased the palest light into the room.
    Only weeks before, she’d done something that, at the time, had seemed impulsive, excessive, even foolish. Because several stories of grisly murder had recently filled the news, she had bought a pistol and had taken three lessons in its use.
    No. Not because of murder in the news.
    That was a self-deception that allowed her to go on believing her life had merely encountered a length of bad track, that it had not derailed.
    If her fear had been of homicidal strangers, she would have told someone, at least James Avery, that she had purchased the pistol and had taken lessons. She would have left the weapon in her night-stand, where it would be easy to reach—and where the maid would have seen it. She would not have hidden it in an unused purse, in the back of a bureau drawer that held a collection of purses.
    Feeling as though she moved not through the waking world but in a dream, with just enough light to avoid the furniture, she went to the bureau and withdrew the purse that served as holster.
    As Amy turned from the bureau, she heard the faint creak of the doorknob, and gasping she turned in time to see him enter, his eyes shining in the gloom, like ice on stone in moonlight. Michael.
    Supposedly in Argentina on business, he was not due back for another six days.
    He did not speak a word,