But even that far down Dawson Street, Emily could hear the brass band from the high school, and from the porch she could see a golden glow in the sky from downtown. Who would be wearing the fawn corduroy dress with the half-finished feather stitching? she wondered. Would they wear the snoods on the capes up or down? Ned was sound asleep in his portable crib in the living room, and Mrs. Nash was dozing in the rocking chair. If she went straight up Dawson and cut through the Flemings’ backyard, it would only take two minutes, Emily thought. She would just stand for a little while behind Mr. Zalumis’s peanut cart, where Lucille would never see her.

She was out of breath when she got there, and she stood for a minute in the shadow of the awning on the peanut cart, huffing and puffing. The town looked so different with no cars on the streets, and beautiful—the twinkling lights shining through the red leaves on the trees, and the steady golden glow of the streetlamps highlighting the architectural details of the tall, old storefronts, their corbeled tops and bay windows silhouetted against an indigo sky. The whole town was like one of those charming stereopticon scenes described in the old Sears catalog.

There! Emily saw a handsome, dark-haired woman wearing the sage-green wool dress where she had had to miter in a length of piping in the bodice seam, and a teenaged girl in the royal blue corduroy; she had had to sew in tissue paper to keep the fabric from crawling on that one. She was glad to see the seams lying flat and smooth, the skirts swaying gracefully, and the wide ribbon borders on the hems unfurling so beautifully around the folds. She saw Ned’s mother, Cindy, wearing the brown velveteen cape, smiling and laughing and feeding her boyfriend a piece of sweet-potato pie. Even with her bad ways she had given in to the spirit of Victorian Christmas and covered up the Celtic tattoo on her arm with a long-sleeved white shirt. Then suddenly there was Lucille standing in the middle of Broad Street talking on a cell phone. Emily ducked behind Mr. Zalumis. Lucille stood still with her head down, listening.

“That can’t be,” she said into the telephone. “There are no carriages with tops. And they don’t go down Dawson; they go from Broad to Jackson, then left on Remington, and come back up Monroe. I told them to pause at the Culpepper-Bailey house if they get ahead of time so they don’t pile up in front of the library, but there would never be a reason for them to go down Dawson.”

“That’s a hard-driving woman,” said Mr. Zalumis, the peanut man.

“She’s my sister,” whispered Emily.