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swept by.
    “That’s Ed Dillard’s new girl,” Ollie said when he saw that she’d caught my eye. “Took over from Ruth Potter. Does whatever needs doing around the house.” His eyes followed Dora as she strode beneath the flutteringawning of Bolton’s Drug Store, head bent against the wind. “She’s a pretty thing, that’s for sure. Can’t blame Ed for hiring her.”
    Ed Dillard was a retired businessman who’d once been the town’s mayor. He’d been a widower for as long as anyone could remember, and there’d never been any children, a fact that had generated a certain level of speculation as to whom his considerable fortune would go to when he died. He’d suffered a heart attack some six years before, and since then a series of local women, mostly widows from surrounding farms, had come and gone from the great house he’d built on Ocean Street three decades earlier. Some of the women had been fired, but most had quit, the common complaint being Ed’s irascible and demanding nature, along with the sheer amount of work necessary to see after such a large house, clean its many rooms, dust the scores of porcelain figurines Ed had collected over the years.
    “You could never satisfy him, or even get all the work done,” Ruth Potter told me when I came by her house, the Canadian storm bearing down upon us with its weight of snow, so that I’d had to stomp my shoes outside the door. “That’s why I was so glad to see Dora show up that day. I didn’t know a thing about her, of course. Didn’t much care either. She was willing to take the job. That was enough for me.”
    We were in the front parlor of Ruth’s house when she spoke of these things, a room crowded with overstuffed chairs and a lace-covered table cluttered with framed pictures of her son, Toby, a lanky, somewhat lazy boy who’d been blown to bits in the Great War. I remembered him as dull and slow-witted, with little to recommend him but a toothy grin. Glancing at the little mausoleum Ruth had created to his memory, it struck me how ordinary and inconsequential a person mightbe and yet inspire a deep and deathless love, the joy of Barabas’s mother that Christ would die instead.
    “Mr. Chase?”
    I tried to focus once again on the reason I’d come. “Yes, go on.”
    “Well, I’d seen that little notice she put in the paper,” Ruth continued. She was wearing a brown dress with large lemoncolored flowers and a tattered wool sweater, frayed at the cuffs. A musty smell came from her, sweet and pungent, like overripe fruit. Outside, I could hear her husband chopping firewood, grunting slightly with each blow.
    “So you contacted Dora?” I asked.
    “Left a note at the hotel, saying that I’d seen her notice in the paper and might have employment for her.” She glanced toward the window. “Say it’s gonna be a bad one. The storm. Hope we don’t get snowed in too long.”
    “Did you mention what the employment was?”
    “No, I didn’t say anything about it. I was afraid that if she knew it had to do with Old Man Dillard, she might not give it a chance. He had a reputation, you know. For being hard to deal with.”
    “What did you tell her in your note?”
    “I just wrote my name and the address. I figured if she was interested, she’d come by.”
    Which she’d done later that same afternoon.
    “I was working upstairs when I seen her come up the walk,” Ruth told me. “Mr. Dillard was in a fury over something. I kept trying to calm him down. Good heavens, I remember thinking, if he keeps carrying on like this, nobody’ll ever take this job.” She drew a weary breath. “Then I looked out and this young woman was coming up the walkway. Selling something, I figuredBibles. Something like that. It didn’t strike me that she was the one who’d put the notice in the paper.”
    “Why not?”
    Ruth thought for a moment before she answered. “Because she didn’t look like the type who’d be looking for that kind of work. Young,