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an odd scent in the air. Almost like stale smoke; a little bitter, like ashes tamped down and extinguished, but with a peculiarly sweet overtone.
    She went up the stairs and into every room of all three floors, and then she realized that all through the house was the lingering odor of finally completed chores: clothes ironed, wool sweaters blocked and dried, then put away with moth balls, books packed up, shelves wiped down. It wasn’t the smell of a temporarily empty house, where there would be dirty clothes waiting to be laundered, oranges or apples left out for the taking, the oddly pleasant banana scent of shoe polish and brushes left lying by a bedroom chair, the medicinal odor—which Agnes always tasted as well as smelled—of fingernail polish remover. The clothes were clean and starched and ironed, the shoes polished, the fruit eaten, the books gone—what had caught Agnes’s attention was the vaguely sweet but sooty scent of her house from which the longtime occupants had permanently departed.
    That particular night it had been so new to Agnes that she had searched for its source. But for months her children’s absence manifested itself now and then through a waft of perfume from a drawer, closets that emanated a chilly drift of mothballs and damp wool. Even the scent of talcum from the nursery-cum-storage room occasionally wound its way through the upstairs hall and down and around two flights of stairs to startle Agnes as she was winding the tall clock in the front hall.
    About eight o’clock on New Year’s Eve 1944, Agnes realized that she had been sitting stone-still in the kitchen for almost an hour with a bowl of tomato soup and a turkey sandwich on a plate in front of her. She set herself briskly into motion before self-pity could catch hold of her, pushing back her chair and hurrying to the hall to telephone Will Dameron. “I know I thought I would just have a quiet night, Will, but now I’m feeling awfully sorry for myself. I begged off supper and bridge with Lily and Robert, too. Is there any chance we can still see each other tonight? All I can offer you is some dry sherry to toast the new year, but it’s good dry sherry. I’ll tell you, the house feels enormous to me—so empty! I’d really like to see you. I’ve got dry wood in. I could get a nice fire going.”
    In the bay window of the chilly front parlor she sat and watched for his car, only allowing her thoughts to browse across the glistening yard, where the snow had melted in the morning’s sun and refrozen during the cloudy, windy afternoon into a pattern of flattened, overlapping waves. The tall trees lining the street had been painted white halfway up so that in blackout conditions drivers could see them, even with the top half of their headlights painted over. It had become a matter of civic pride that Washburn, Ohio, was one of the first targets the Germans would hit because of the production of Scofield engines, and the Civil Defense warden was very strict about even a sliver of unnecessary light escaping into the camouflage of darkness. Agnes couldn’t imagine how German planes were expected to reach Ohio, and Robert said it was just a way to keep up morale, to let people feel as though they were doing something useful.
    Gazing out the window, though, Agnes decided that it couldn’t have been the local Civil Defense warden who thought it would be a good idea to paint the trees. It must have been someone in a place where it never snowed who had come up with that notion, because, with the white ground beneath them, the trunks of the trees disappeared, and their leafless crowns seemed to be suspended spiderlike in the night sky. Will’s car pulled in, and even without lights the radiance of the snow illuminated him clearly as he bent to retrieve something from the backseat.
    Agnes and Will had known each other all their lives, had played together as children. The habit of knowing Will was so deep-rooted that it hadn’t occurred