“I’ll call you, I’ll call you. Goodbye, Dad.”

It seemed unimaginable that this old scarecrow could have ever been a meat packer, a taciturn man’s man who spent his days alone in an icy locker hanging carcasses. Now, one minute left to himself and he was nervous as a cat.

Whenever Raymond suggested he make friends with the other residents, he’d say he didn’t feel at ease with the retired surgeons and accountants, implying that Raymond had thrown him into an elite facility as an act of perversity. He’d never sat in a real leather recliner until he moved there, or even tasted a martini—and all that was just fine; it was the looks he thought he got from the ones who marched down the halls in golf clothes as if they owned the place.

Raymond’s mother, on the other hand, would have thoroughly enjoyed Dartmoor. She would have Jazzercised with the other whitehairs every morning and played bridge every night, with nary a thought as to anyone’s background, not least of all her own. She would have loved the party buses into Manhattan to see Les Miz.

It was probably the biggest regret of Raymond’s life that he hadn’t placed them both in Dartmoor while she was still alive. His mother died an undignified death in their ramshackle Wichita duplex, choking on a piece of meatloaf during Jeopardy. His Dad had been in the other room, sleeping off a Blue Nun bender.

Raymond opened his front door. The sprinklers had stopped. The intruder’s footprints had evaporated, leaving absolutely no trace. What would be the point of calling the cops now?

He went back inside, locking himself in for the night. With a thimble of Lagavulin in his hand, he sauntered to his study to locate the damage, if any. He found himself humming, then singing a fortifying tune that his mother had sung to him as a boy:

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer

Lead us lest too far we wander

Love’s sweet voice is calling yonder . . .

He flicked on the light. His mahogany writing desk was untouched. Even the half-eaten bag of low-fat chips lay exactly where he had left it, next to his reading glasses, on top of the book on the Middle Ages he’d been perusing.

He moved to where the intruder might have been when they appeared in the window. It was a sliver of space between the desk and the pane—and the desk was too heavy to be moved. Nobody could fit in there. He peered under the desk to where his or her feet might have been—there he saw dark, red-black droplets of blood. He jumped in terror.

His teak floor!