He never thought he’d hear himself say it. ‘Go work on your book, Kav’na.’

‘Okay,’ she said, obliging, and turned and disappeared down the hall with her cat.

He couldn’t believe she was actually doing something that wasn’t her idea. This woman could take charge of his life like a house afire, but she had the poignant and childlike side, too, that moved his heart every time.

•   •   •

IT WAS QUIET next door.

After he and Cynthia remodeled the yellow house a few years ago and moved through the hedge from the rectory he’d purchased from the diocese, he had rented the place to Hélène Pringle. Hélène was a French-born piano teacher and, to his everlasting surprise, a half-sister of the deceased Sadie Baxter—a circumstance which turned out to be more rose than thorn, thanks be to God.

Subleasing the basement apartment from Hélène was Harley Welch, a sixtysomething reformed moonshine runner and gem of a mountain fellow, who once acted as self-appointed guardian to Lace Turner before her adoption by Hoppy and Olivia Harper—all that being an opera of considerable magnitude with many arias yet to be sung. Indeed, the basement had become home, also, to Dooley’s two younger brothers, Sammy, seventeen, and the nineteen-year-old Kenny, recently returned from the four winds to which they’d been flung as children.

Suffice it to say, the trio made the occasional racket. In addition to the keyboard melodies pouring from Miss Pringle’s studio windows, ten until four, there was the racing of the engine of a derelict pickup on which the tenants labored into the night. No less clamorous was the hammering at the back stair treads which were slowly but surely being replaced. Through it all ran the threnody of country music from a boom box, turned full blast while reclaiming a rectory toolshed formerly lost to briars.

It was the stuff of life over there, though something of a blow to the neighborhood.

How the seemingly prim Hélène Pringle could bear all this, he didn’t know. She said a few weeks ago, when he found her weeding along her side of the hedge, that ‘they’ kept things ‘cheerful, more like a home.’

‘Pardon moi, Father, but before they congregated down there, I found the old place a bit . . .’ She looked up at him, apologetic. ‘. . . morose,’ she said in the French way.

Now you could hear a pin drop. Before they arrived home from Ireland, Harley had taken the boys to visit a branch of the Kentucky Welches, and Hélène had flown to Boston to settle her mother’s estate.

He found himself pacing the floor, as if waiting for something unknown.

•   •   •

HE PORED OVER HIS CALENDAR and a stash of notes scribbled to himself.

A Rotary meeting. A Kiwanis Club dinner. Cleanup day on the lawns at Children’s Hospital.

Return the call from the mayor—he was pretty sure Andrew Gregory wanted him to run for town council, an idea he’d dodged for years.

A request to speak to a clergy group in Holding.

The cure in Hendersonville looking to fill their pulpit for a month.

And there, of course, was the unopened letter from the new bishop. The new bishop. He had liked the old bishop.

He wasn’t busy enough, pure and simple. And yet such a list didn’t engage him at all. Dashing uphill and down, his tongue hung forth like a terrier’s, had lost its luster.

In the years he was heaped with responsibility and a flock that buzzed about him like bees, he’d been fine—except, of course, for the two diabetic comas. He had never lacked for something to do, some problem to solve, someone to try and make happy. Then came the course in clergy counseling, and the contemporary notion that he couldn’t possibly make someone else happy, such business was entirely up to the other person.

He wished, albeit briefly, that Emma Newland was still his erstwhile secretary. She would call around and cancel or decline as he directed, and leave most of them afraid to try again.

In sum, he wanted more out of life than meetings and dinners and confabulations of every sort and kind. He had thought Holly Springs and Ireland might give him some answers, but both seemed only to emphasize the questions, What now? What next?

He supposed he would do as he had always done—he would perform whatever duty his calendar dictated, and he would try to like it.

•   •   •

SHE MADE YET ANOTHER CALL AT SIX-THIRTY.

‘Still no answer,’ she said. ‘I left a message.’

‘The towel was damp when we were there this morning around nine,’ he said, musing.

‘So let’s say she left soon after. It’s six-thirty now; that would be—at least nine hours. Would you leave our front door open for nine hours?’

‘Only if I forgot it was open when I went out through the kitchen to the garage and drove somewhere.’

‘Maybe she drove to the airport and is gone for two weeks to . . .’ She threw up her hands, unable to think of a destination.

‘Ibiza,’ he said.

‘Do you think we should call the police?’

‘I do not. You know Rodney Underwood. He would rope off the house with yellow tape, and such a crowd of squad cars and theatrics you’d never see again. The poor woman couldn’t get in her own driveway when she comes home.’

‘It’s a good thing there’s a glass storm door, at least the bugs and squirrels can’t get in.’

He opened the Muse to finish what he had started hours ago.

‘But since it will be dark soon,’ she said, ‘don’t you think we should go up and close her door? Wouldn’t that be the neighborly thing to do?’

Here was his all-time favorite Muse column, Mayhew’s Mitford. Worth the cost of the paper right there, as Hessie Mayhew knew everybody’s business and wasn’t afraid to tell it.

‘Timothy?’

He glanced up.

‘This is Mitford, after all. Remember what we say about ourselves.’

‘“Mitford takes care of its own!”’ He quoted their longtime, albeit former, mayor’s classic slogan.

She made a beeline for the key rack. ‘I’m going up there.’

‘I’ll just get my shoes on,’ he said.

•   •   •

THEY HAD HOPED for the welcome surprise of seeing Irene’s car garaged next to Chester’s, but it wasn’t there. They pulled into the driveway. In the approaching dusk, a nearly full moon had risen; the house had a vaguely lost look.

‘We should have called the post office and asked if she put a stop on her mail.’

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘about the message light that was blinking. Maybe there’s a phone message that would give us a clue.’

‘We could try it. Should we?’

‘Maybe,’ he said, getting out of the car.

They stood on the front stoop, indecisive. There was a definite drop in temperature, as often happened when the sun dipped behind the mountains.

They stepped into the dark entrance hall. He wasn’t feeling so good; something in the pit of his stomach. What was it about an empty house, any empty house where the human or even canine spirit was absent? He looked up to the stair landing, nearly vanished in the shadows.

‘I just remembered,’ he said. ‘We don’t have a password to pick up her messages. Besides, I don’t really want to go up those stairs.’ They were not his stairs to go up.

‘How about her windows being open? What if it rains? Did you hear a weather forecast? It’s hurricane season.’

‘They were up maybe two inches, for Pete’s sake.’ He was curt without meaning to be.

She looked at him, wounded. ‘Sometimes rain blows sideways.’

She appeared twelve years old in the diminished light. Though she’d recently had her sixty-fourth birthday, she was occasionally mistaken for his daughter.

‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘This is it for me.’ He took her arm, felt her stiffen.

‘Did you see that?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Something moved out there.’

‘Like what?’

‘A person, maybe. To the right, in the driveway.’

They were fresh from a burglary in Ireland, and a lawless freak jumping from the armoire in their room . . .