Rachel hung up, turned off the light, and fell asleep. She woke later, the fog was still thick against the window, and it must have turned cold because crystals of ice had formed in the corners of the windows. She sat up and listened. She thought she heard Levy’s door close, and she got out of bed, wide-­awake all at once, and opened her door. She felt the tail end of a draft and went downstairs; the foyer floor was freezing, she felt the cold through her slippers. She bent down and touched the tile. It was damp, too, but the heat was on; she could hear the furnace and the radiator was hot. Levy must just have opened the door. She opened it and looked out. The fog was freezing and so dense she could barely see. A light from his bedroom made a halo in the mist above her, and as she looked up the light went out. Fog settled on her hair, but something kept her on the doorstep with the door open, listening. It was just a feeling—the fog, the cold, the sense of the water on one side and the woods on the other. Willa was right, it was creepy. Fog moved on the road and she went in and shut the door.

She didn’t fall asleep until three, and again the phone woke her; it was five and on the other end Golda was screaming; her voice mad, “They’re dead, oh my God, they’re all dead!”

“Who?” Rachel screamed back.

“Willa—the boys . . .”

Rachel slammed the phone and ran down the stairs. She flung her raincoat over her nightgown and ran across lawns and around hedges. The fog was gone, a cold wind blew off the Sound through her coat and nightclothes and she shook and sobbed as she ran. She had to stop to catch her breath, and when she did she realized that Golda had been hysterical. They might not all be dead. One of the boys might have lived. Or Willa. Or all of them. What could kill three people all at once? Fire; but there was no fire. She’d have heard the truck, seen the blaze. What else? The furnace exploded; but she’d have heard that too. What else? Plague. Mother and two sons dead of plague on Long Island. She kept sobbing but she had enough breath to run the rest of the way, and she knew as soon as she saw the house, even from a distance, that no one was alive in there. It was a dead house; the door hung loose, the front windows were broken. The house had aged a hundred years overnight and was haunted now. A ghost house in six hours.