Now Phoebe gazed hard at Sophia’s unit, where the living room window blinds were perpetually drawn. That was strange, too, she thought. And all the comings and goings . . . But that was the way of young girls, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she been forever on the go in her twenties? There had been a day when Phoebe was head of the Tri-City Twirlers in high school, a beauty who could toss a whirling baton twenty feet into the air and catch it in a swooping spin without once scuffing the white boots that were part of the twirling team’s uniform. She’d been forever on the go with this friend and that boyfriend. “A whirlwind of a social butterfly,” that’s what her mother had called her. Who would have thought Phoebe O’Malley would be single and content to knit for hours and actually look forward to outsmarting those idiot contestants on Jeopardy?

“The folly of youth,” she said, scratching Larry behind his big ears and peering into the snow-covered lot again. “Oh, for the love of St. Peter!” The asphalt was covered with a blanket of white, and that no-account renter in unit 4, Phil Dabrowski, who got a hundred dollars off his rent every month for keeping the parking lot clear of leaves, gravel, ice, snow, and whatever trash floated in, hadn’t been out salting and shoveling the parking area.

And here came Sophia again, wheeling into the lot in her little gray car and sliding to a stop in front of her unit. She hadn’t been gone but half an hour, and now she was back again. What was she up to?

Larry stiffened and gave a quick round of sharp barks as the girl—well, woman, really—unlocked the door of her unit and slammed the door shut behind her. Even though Sophia worked at Cahill’s Christmas tree farm and the hotel attached to it, she didn’t seem to have regular hours. But that was the way of it these days, lots of people actually worked from home, on their laptop computers, eating Cheetos and watching The Bachelorette or some other television show while they were “working.” The world had changed.

She sat down in her favorite Queen Anne chair with her knitting, one eye on the window, and nearly called Dabrowski when she spied him, hunting cap with ear flaps buckled tight over his round head, a heavy camo-patterned jacket seeming to add another twenty pounds to his already rotund girth, crossing the parking lot. In one gloved hand, he held a bag of salt, and he started shaking it onto the icy lot just as the door to Sophia Russo’s apartment opened again and she appeared. She’d changed quickly, out of jeans and a long gray jacket to a short skirt, tights, boots, and a tunic-like sweater. A long coat was slung over one arm, a large bag swinging from the other.