He departed, leaving me to wonder what he had meant. He had not, after all, been named for the mass murderer Joseph Stalin.

By the time Elvis reached me, he had contorted his face into a recognizable and comic impression of the Russian.

Watching the King as he mugged for me, I realized how unusual it was that neither I nor Romanovich had mentioned either Brother Timothy being missing or the deputies swarming the grounds in search of him. In the closed world of a monastery, where deviations from routine are rare, the disturbing events of the morning ought to have been the first subject of which we spoke.

Our mutual failure to remark on Brother Timothy's disappearance, even in passing, seemed to suggest some shared perception of events, or at least a shared attitude, that made us in some important way alike. I had no idea what I meant by that, but I intuited the truth of it.

When Elvis couldn't tease a smile from me with his impression of the somber Russian, he stuck one finger up his left nostril all the way to the third knuckle, pretending to be mining deep for boogers.

Death had not relieved him of his compulsion to entertain. As a voiceless spirit, he could no longer sing or tell jokes. Sometimes he danced, remembering a simple routine from one of his movies or from his Las Vegas act, though he was no more Fred Astaire than was Abbot Bernard. Sadly, in his desperation, he sometimes resorted to juvenile humor that was not worthy of him.

He withdrew his finger from his nostril, extracting an imaginary string of snot, then pretending that it was of extraordinary length, soon pulling yard after yard of it out of his nose with both hands.

I went in search of the reference-book collection and stood for a while reading about Indianapolis.

Elvis faced me over the open book, continuing his performance, but I ignored him.

Indianapolis has eight universities and colleges, and a large public library system.

When the King gently rapped me on the head, I sighed and looked up from the book.

He had an index finger stuck in his right nostril, all the way to the third knuckle, as before, but this time the tip of the finger was impossibly protruding from his left ear. He wiggled it.

I couldn't help smiling. He so badly wants to please.

Gratified to have pried a smile from me, he took the finger from his nose and wiped both hands on my jacket, pretending that they were sticky with snot.

"It's hard to believe," I told him, "that you're the same man who sang 'Love Me Tender.'"

He pretended to use the remaining snot to smooth back his hair.

"You're not droll," I told him. "You're grotesque."

This judgment delighted him. Grinning, he performed a series of quarter bows, as though to an audience, silently mouthing the words Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.

Sitting at a library table, I read about Indianapolis, which is intersected by more highways than any other city in the U.S. They once had a thriving tire industry, but no more.

Elvis sat at a window, watching the snow fall. With his hands, he tapped out rhythms on the window sill, but he made no sound.

Later, we went to the guesthouse receiving room at the front of the abbey, to see how the sheriffs-department search was proceeding.

The receiving room, furnished like a small shabby-genteel hotel lobby, was currently unoccupied.

As I approached the front door, it opened, and Brother Rafael entered in a carousel of glittering snow, wind chasing around him and howling like a pipe organ tuned in Hell. Meeting with resistance, he forced the door shut, and the whirling snow settled to the floor, but the wind still raised a muffled groan outside.

"What a terrible thing," he said to me, his voice trembling with distress.

A cold many-legged something crawled under the skin of my scalp, down the back of my neck. "Have the police found Brother Timothy?"

"They haven't found him, but they've left anyway." His large brown eyes were so wide with disbelief that he might have been named Brother Owl. "They've left]"

"What did they say?"

"With the storm, they're shorthanded. Highway accidents, unusual demands on their manpower."

Elvis listened to this, nodding judiciously, apparently in sympathy with the authorities.

In life, he sought and received actual-as opposed to honorary-special-deputy badges from several police agencies, including from the Shelby County, Tennessee, Sheriff's Office. Among other things, the badges permitted him to carry a concealed weapon. He had always been proud of his association with law enforcement.

One night in March 1976, coming upon a two-vehicle collision on Interstate 240, he displayed his badge and helped the victims until the police arrived. Fortunately, he never accidentally shot anyone.

"They searched all the buildings?" I asked.

"Yes," Brother Rafael confirmed. "And the yards. But what if he went for a walk in the woods and something happened to him, a fall or something, and he's lying out there?"

"Some of the brothers like to walk in the woods," I said, "but not at night, and not Brother Timothy."

The monk thought about that, and then nodded. "Brother Tim is awfully sedentary."

In the current situation, applying the word sedentary to Brother Timothy might be stretching the definition to include the ultimate sedentary condition, death.

"If he's not out there in the woods, where is he?" Brother Rafael wondered. A look of dismay overcame him. "The police don't understand us at all. They don't understand anything about us. They said maybe he went AWOL."

"Absent without leave? That's ridiculous."

"More than ridiculous, worse. It's an insult," Rafael declared, indignant. "One of them said maybe Tim went to Reno for 'some R and R-rum and roulette.'"

If one of Wyatt Porter's men in Pico Mundo had said such a thing, the chief would have put him on probation without pay and, depending on the officer's response to a dressing down, might have fired him.

Brother Knuckles's suggestion that I keep a low profile with these authorities appeared to have been wise advice.

"What're we going to do?" Brother Rafael worried.

I shook my head. I didn't have an answer.

Hurrying out of the room, speaking more to himself now than to me, he repeated, "What're we going to do?"

I consulted my wristwatch and then went to a front window.

Elvis phased through the closed door and stood outside in the sheeting snow, a striking figure in his black flamenco outfit with red cummerbund.

The time was 8:40 a.m.

Only the tire tracks of the recently departed police vehicles marked the path of the driveway. Otherwise, the storm had plastered over the variety and the roughness of the land, smoothing it into a white-on-white geometry of soft planes and gentle undulations.

From the look of things, eight or ten inches had piled up in about seven and a half hours. The snow was falling much faster now than it had fallen earlier.

Outside, Elvis stood with his head tipped back and his tongue out, in a fruitless attempt to catch flakes. Of course he was but a spirit, unable to feel the cold or taste the snow. Something about the effort he made, however, charmed me… and saddened me, as well.

How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.

The previous evening, the TV weather report had predicted a minimum two-foot accumulation. Storms in the High Sierra could be prolonged, brutal, and might result in an even deeper accumulation than what had been forecast.

By this afternoon, certainly before the early winter dusk, St. Bartholomew's Abbey would be snowbound. Isolated.