The dying wind carried the scents of Christmas that lingered from the village shops, of baking, of nutmeg and ginger and hot cinnamon, all mixed, now, with the stink of death. Away across the roofs behind Kit, the courthouse clock struck midnight. Twelve solemn tolls that, tonight, were death tolls.

This afternoon the village and plaza had been crowded with hurrying shoppers, the park across the street filled with white-robed carolers and with the velvet soprano of Cora Lee French, “…rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…” And now there was no one but a little abandoned child and, somewhere unseen, a killer with a gun, for surely that was a gun shot wound. What else could it be? Kit was alone in the night with a dead man and a lost little girl, and an unseen killer. Nervously she washed one mottled black-and-brown paw, trying to get centered, trying with calming licks to soothe her frightened inner cat.

And then she spun around and bolted away across the rooftops racing to bring help.

C ORA LEE FRENCH heard the sirens shortly after midnight as she undressed in her upstairs bedroom. She had arrived home late from choir practice, driving slowly on the wet streets although the storm had almost passed. As she pulled into the drive, the house was dark above her, one of her housemates gone for the holidays, and Mavity most likely having read herself to sleep with a romance novel. Gabrielle was probably out on a date with Cora Lee’s cousin, and that made her smile, that Donnie had found someone to console him and ease his hurt. Gabrielle was good for him, and no one said you couldn’t have a hot romance at sixty-some. Whatever the outcome, Cora Lee was pleased that Gabrielle’s charm and attentions took Donnie’s mind off his loneliness, even if only for a little while.

Letting herself into the main house, she had turned on a lamp and gone upstairs to make sure young Lori was safe, in her third-floor room next to Cora Lee’s. Lori didn’t wake, but the two big dogs looked up at her-knowing the sound of her car, and her step, they hadn’t barked. She spoke softly to them, and they wagged and smiled and laid their heads down again. If she’d been an intruder, they would have raised all kinds of hell; the deep voices of the standard poodle and the Dalmatian, alone, would drive away a prowler, thundering barks that would be backed up with businesslike teeth and powerful lunges.

There weren’t many twelve-year-olds Cora Lee would leave alone for the evening, with only Mavity downstairs. But Lori had the dogs, and she was a resourceful kid, a child who would be quick to call 911 at anything unusual, and she knew how to use Cora Lee’s canister of pepper spray, too, if she needed more than canine protection.

Going back downstairs to the kitchen, Cora Lee saw that Gabrielle’s bedroom door was closed, so maybe her housemate was home after all. She fixed a mug of cocoa, and brought it upstairs with her, setting it on her nightstand beside her bed. The big white room was filled with the bright colors of her paintings and of the handwoven rugs she liked to collect, and the bright covers of a wall full of favorite books, among them many dog-eared picture books from her childhood. Cora Lee had never had children, but she treasured her own tender past. And now, of course, she had Lori, the kind of child who, though she was reading adult classics, was never too old for good picture books-she had Lori, she thought uneasily, until the child’s father got out of prison. Cora Lee dreaded that parting, and tried not to think about it.

Cora Lee was a tall woman, still slim for her sixty years, her black short hair turning to salt and pepper but her café au lait complexion still clear and smooth as a girl’s. As she undressed, slipping on a creamy fleece gown, she heard a rescue unit heading out from the fire station, and then the higher scream of police cars. She paused, listening, dismayed by the possibility of some disaster so near to Christmas.

This was a quiet village, where any ugliness seemed more shocking than in a large city, seemed far more startling than on the crowded streets of New Orleans ’s French Quarter, where she grew up. And now, during the gentle, homey aura of Christmas in the village, the prospect of violence was all the more upsetting.

The sirens whooped for some time, then the night was shockingly quiet. Before slipping into bed, Cora Lee removed Donnie’s three letters from the drawer of her nightstand and set them beside the cocoa. Because the sirens had unnerved her, she checked on Lori again, then moved down the hall to the high-raftered room filled with her paintings. Builder Ryan Flannery had added the tall studio, designing it in such a way that it lent a finishing charm to the flat roofs of the original house.

Looking out the bay window, down the hills toward Ocean Avenue, she could see the red lights flashing, and again she shivered-but maybe it would turn out to be a wreck with no injuries, or an overexcited call about a bear up a tree. That had happened one evening right in the middle of the village, a disoriented young bear with no territory of its own, wandering down from the open hills, lost and afraid.

Or maybe the sirens were responding to a false alarm, she thought hopefully. She wanted Christmas to be peaceful, wanted to see around her only renewal and joy. Saying a little silent Hail Mary in case someone out in the stormy night might be hurt, she returned to her room and slid into bed beneath her down comforter. But the violence of the sirens, though silenced now, echoed in her head for some time, mixed with the Christmas carols she had practiced earlier, sending a cold chill through her own soprano solos.

Propping three pillows behind her, she opened Donnie’s creased, linenlike pages that bore the logo of a Days Inn in Texas. And as she reread his letters, the sirens and the carols all vanished, and she felt again only his terror and the pain of his shocking loss in the hurricane.

Donnie’s letters said far more to her than Donnie himself had even told her, since his arrival a month ago, more than he wanted to talk about, and she understood that. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, his loneliness shone far more clearly in the letters he had written to her than he let anyone glimpse in his daily banter and quiet good cheer-perhaps this was why, though her cousin had been in the village for over a month, she still found herself returning to his written words to make real for her that shocking time-an entire population homeless; injured, sick, or dead; or escaping the city like rats from a doomed ship.

Donnie’s letters stirred too realistically the thunder of hurricane winds and the crashing of gigantic waves, the rending of collapsed levees and of twisted, falling buildings. It was all there in his careful handwriting, so vivid that it frightened her anew each time she read his words; but she was glad she had the letters when she saw how difficult it was for him to talk about that time-as if the gentle cousin who had come to spend Christmas with her could be known, truly, only by the anguish of his written words, never by the quiet and cheerful facade he so carefully nurtured for others to see.

Until three weeks ago, she hadn’t seen Donnie since they were young children. Since Donnie’s family left New Orleans for the coast of Arkansas, when she and Donnie were nine. To little kids who were best buddies, Arkansas had seemed continents away; and they hadn’t been in touch since. The ugly row had parted their families irrevocably.

Never borrow from relatives, the old adage went. But she and Donnie had been only children, they hadn’t been responsible or really understood about bankruptcy and inability to pay, and the resulting bitter feelings.

But now, in their sixties, suddenly Donnie had needed her again, had needed her badly enough to write his first letter to her in over fifty years. Had needed to reconnect with the only family he had left, after his children died in the flood, and with his wife already dead from cancer. Had needed to be with the only close blood relative he had left.