One is Wi-fi service (bring your iPads and laptops!) and last but not least, here’s the biggie—a new stylist, Ms. Shirlene Hatfield, formerly of The Hair Loft in Bristol, Tennessee, and a sister of Ms. Skinner!

Ms. Skinner says Ms. Hatfield will offer a full-compliment of beauty services including spray tanning. In a phone interview with the Muse, Ms. Hatfield said: “I will be proud to introduce spraytan to Mitford. With spraytan, everybody in the mountains can look like they just drove up from Florida.”

Not a good marketing tactic. Mountain folk wouldn’t aspire to looking like the tanned horde arriving from Florida every May to take up all the parking spaces.

A hearty Mitford welcome to Ms. Hatfield! See below for the “Shirlene Hatfield $2.00-off haircut coupon” from the popular Cut Above Hair Salon where walk-ins are always welcome. Another $$$- saving bonus from the Muse—we print GOOD news!!

No expiration date on the coupon; he would clip it for Dooley’s long weekend home in October. A coupon in the Muse was as rare as hen’s teeth; the Wesley weekly was eating J.C.’s lunch by giving readers an entire page of coupons every Friday, not to mention a crossword.

In his shirt pocket, his cell phone did its marching band number, very festive.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey, Dad . . .’

Static.

‘Dooley? Can you hear me?’

‘ . . . out . . . thinking . . . got to . . .’

‘Dooley, you’re breaking up. Can you . . . ?’

Gone.

They were pretty high on the mountain, no service up here, he supposed. He hated to miss a call from his boy.

Chelsea TEA shop Adds Children’s Plate

He refolded the newspaper, read on.

Clearly, the tea shop was being forced to go with the times and expand their customer base. Only yesterday, he’d heard the new ownership said there would be no more fancy names the average customer couldn’t pronounce, including croissant. More to the point, the ruffled pink curtains had vanished during their Ireland trip, the flowered wallpaper had disappeared under a coat of green paint, and the radio was tuned to Top 40 instead of Easy Listening. Now here was the children’s plate, which he hoped grown-ups would feel free to order when short on cash or not very hungry. But the real work had yet to be done—in his opinion, they needed to dump the name of the place, pronto, give it more of a family flavor. Who took their kids to tea? Nobody that he knew of.

Cynthia appeared at the car window.

‘She’s not in the garden, and the front door is open. I went in and called, but no answer, and I looked in her studio out back.’

‘There’s a car in the garage.’ He’d seen it as they drew up to the hedge.

‘That’s not her car, it’s Chester’s. I wonder if I should go upstairs and look for her.’

‘Maybe she’s in town, or visiting a neighbor.’

‘Remember what happened to Norma Jenkins.’

Norma’s front door had stood open for two days as she lay upstairs following a stroke, unable to cry for help and paralyzed throughout her left side.

‘I’m sure she’s fine,’ he said. How many times had he left his own doors wide open as he worked in the backyard or the basement? Of course, those were his early years in Mitford; things were different now, as they were everywhere.

‘I don’t think she’s the sort to leave her door open if she isn’t home.’

‘You seem to know her pretty well,’ he said.

‘We’ve had three art classes together. I taught two of them, she taught the other.’

‘What about household help?’

‘Her housekeeper goes back to Florida around the first of September, she said, and Irene goes back late October.’

‘I have an idea—why don’t we head to the Local and forget Chester’s tux? I’ll rent one from Charlotte, they could put it on the plane to Hickory.’

She wasn’t listening. ‘I’m going inside and look for her, I feel creepy about this.’

He glanced farther along Bishop’s Lane. Only one neighboring house in view, perhaps half a block away.

‘Go in with me,’ she said. ‘Remember what happened to Norma.’

‘Okay. I’ll wait downstairs and make feeble excuses when she comes home.’

But she didn’t come home. While Cynthia called Irene’s name upstairs and down, he ambled about the living room off the foyer, peering at a series of five large oil paintings of what appeared to be the same young girl, signed Irene McGraw. He saw in the faces an interesting detail so small that he surprised himself by noticing it at all. The eyes of each subject contained a subtle, but compelling, reflection: the nearly minuscule image of the subject. He adjusted his glasses and leaned close. It was as if the large subject were looking at herself dressed in different clothing—a yellow dress. The painted pupil was a miniature gem—to render such a feat required inordinate skill and, perhaps, the merest hair of a sable.

He looked at his watch, heard Cynthia calling Irene’s name.

On the grand piano, family photographs in silver frames. A lot of grandchildren, a perfect flock of them. He had missed having grandchildren, but Puny’s two sets of twins had stood in the gap very well.

He thought of his brother, Henry, so recently known to him after all these years, and of what they’d gone through together in Memphis and Holly Springs, and wondered what his Kavanagh family portrait would look like now, with Henry among them.

In a large photograph of the McGraws in this very room, the couple was surrounded by roughly two dozen good-looking progeny dressed to the nines. A life had been lived here—all those grandchildren tumbling and laughing, someone shouting, Don’t run in the hall, someone playing the piano, cousins kicking around a football. Like a lot of people who also live in tropical places, they probably spent Christmas and Thanksgiving here, hoping for snow. Now one was missing from this glad company. As for Irene, she would go on and things would be good again—but different, very different.

He’d always thought Irene an unusually attractive woman, but with a subtle air of sorrow or distraction, as if she were actually living elsewhere and had beamed in a likeness for a fund-raiser. He remembered that she played tennis and wore what his mother had called ‘good’ pearls.

He was turning away from the photograph when he realized that Chester—ha!—was sporting the much-talked-about tuxedo.

He moved into the hall as his wife came downstairs.

‘She’s not here.’

‘I think we should go,’ he said. ‘You could call later.’

‘This doesn’t feel right, Timothy. You should see her bedroom. Things thrown all over the place. Not like her. Come and look.’

Clothes tossed on an unmade bed, drawers pulled out, closet doors standing open, clothing on the floor, an exercise mat with an open bottle of water beside it.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘This is the way a lot of people’s bedrooms look.’ Dooley’s room in the early days of living at the rectory, for instance.

‘It doesn’t feel like Irene, she’s fastidious. Always cleans her brushes and palette and puts them away in her carryall.’

‘She’s plenty gifted,’ he said. ‘The paintings . . .’

‘Yes, and she’s never shown or sold anything. I was thrilled when she said she’d consider the Children’s Hospital benefit.’

‘Who’s her best friend?’ he asked. ‘We could call somebody.’

‘Everyone likes her, but I don’t know about best friends.’

He looked around again, paying attention. Message light blinking on a phone by the bed, windows raised a few inches, empty hangers on a closet door pull. They walked into the bathroom. Windows open a couple of inches. Drops of moisture on the glass door of the shower. A towel on the floor.

He stooped and felt the towel—damp—then looked out to the rear lawn. That would be the studio, surrounded by a fairly ambitious garden with an open potting shed. Beyond, a dense thicket of rhododendron and oaks.