“Finally, I calmed her down enough to put my arms around her and help her get settled in bed,” Becky said. “I thought, well, here I am, twenty-one years old on New Year’s Eve! The glitter times just never end.” But she was too worn out to even consider any of the invitations to go out dancing that friends had left on her voice mail. In the coach house, Becky took a long bath and made a deep dive under the fat goose-down comforter her grandmother had made for Rebecca’s last birthday. When she woke, it was past midnight.

“I knew something was wrong,” she said, tears filling her eyes as she took a deep draught from her mug of tea.

For just that reason, Rebecca never put her coat or boots away; she kept them next to her bed “like a farmer or a vet” so she could shove her feet and arms into them and run down the stairs and through the passage from the coach house to the main house. The main house was freezing, the front door wide open. When she looked outside, she saw that Alzy’s car was gone, although Becky had parked her own car behind it and had no idea how Alzy had maneuvered her own car around it without being able to make a Volvo station wagon fly.

“I pushed the door closed. Snow was drifted onto the floor. The door had been open for a long time. And I saw how crafty she was. Her keys were gone but so were mine. And her winter boots were missing from the hallway mat.”

Upstairs, she said, Alice’s nightgown lay curled on the floor of her bedroom. Outside, there was not a sound in the neighborhood if you didn’t count the creak of the ice on the lake. She would have to call Governor Hodge or get into a cab herself and start to search. But where first? She felt cold and sleepy.

“And I thought, I just can’t tonight. I have done this so many nights. I just can’t.”

So she went back to her still-warm bed and pulled the covers over her eyes. When she woke again, the sun was up full. It was after eleven, and Becky relaxed when she shrugged into her robe and crossed back into the big kitchen at the main house, to the smell of coffee and the subtle sounds of a morning kitchen.

“Happy New Year,” she called out, but no one answered. Not Alice, but a man was standing hunched at the sink, Alice’s husband. He looked as though he’d been beaten up, his face red and blotchy, his white fisherman-knit sweater covered with black smudges, his pants wet to the knee. He asked Becky to sit down, then gave her a cup of coffee before he recounted what happened.

And after that, Becky just finished her tea without saying a word.