It had been warmer at the point when they had been singing the “Far Away and at Night” song. Elli didn’t know where it had come from, but the melody exuded the sultry sentiment of a 1940s love song – the kind that would be playing when a handsome Gary Cooper-like character looked meaningfully into the wide, sparkling eyes of a beautiful woman in a shoulder-padded dress and hairdo with rolled bangs – just like her mother’s – in one of the “Five-O’Clock Movietime” shows her father watched when he got home from work.

“Let’s sing your song,” their mother had said to Mark, huddled in another army blanket in the back seat, his face leaning against the frost-encrusted window as they passed through a grim paper town that was roughly halfway between home and the Vermont ski town where they’d spent the long Washington’s Birthday weekend. According to family legend, Mark had given the song its name –deftly capturing the feeling and moment of the tune’s singing, at some precocious age, perhaps three. Only their father seemed to know the words so Elli, Mark and their mother just sang, “Dah daaah de daah de daaaaah.” The fact that they didn’t know the words added to the song’s mournfulness. Elli was glad Mark had joined in – she’d been feeling guilty for getting the coziest spot for the ride home. At the end of the day, they’d raced, galumphing in their heavy ski boots, from the ski lodge across the parking lot to get to the car first, and even though Mark had beaten her by a yard, their father had told Mark to let Elli sit up front. Mark had given up easily, only muttering a half-hearted protest.

“Baby.”

When she felt her father brake gently in the lightly-falling snow and saw the reflected glow of red from a stoplight on the window – usually he braked with a mild jerk, as if he were surprised by the lights – she knew they were at the last stoplight before home, one nearest to the center of town, at the intersection of the Boston Post Road and School Street.

Soon, she would have to steel herself for the ordeal of sitting up, putting on her boots, getting out of the car into the frigid night and rushing for the breezeway door, and bed. But, not quite yet. She snuggled deeper into her father’s lap and pulled the blanket closer around her chin. In the eleven minutes it took to drive from the flower pot in the center of town – now topped with a several-foot deep dollop of snow – to home, Elli drifted in and out of consciousness several times. She loved the familiarity of this part of the trip. Without looking, she knew by the sharpness of the curves and the lengths of the straightaways and the rises and falls of the pavement exactly where they were. When the car rounded the gentle bend onto Webster Road, it climbed the long hill that curved up alongside the majestic 18th century tavern with the high hedges, immaculate paint job and dark green doors with gold-colored, museum-like hardware. Whenever they passed, she wondered whether someone actually live there. At the top of the hill was where Sandy Fuller lived – a kindergarten friend whose house, almost as big as the tavern, seemed out of Pippi Longstocking or Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, with at least four floors and innumerable rooms and nooks under staircases and closets to hide in. Right across the road was the Rocking Horse Nursery School – where Elli’s and her classmate’s cubbies had always been filled with hand-made Valentines, of doilies glued to colored construction paper hearts, from every member of the class on Valentine’s Day and where every recess time, there was a race for first on the swings. The road then plunged down a steep hill to the rickety wooden bridge with the high arch over the railroad tracks and six-inch high wooden sides that Elli feared wouldn’t stop even the slowest moving car from careening over the edge if it slid out of control on ice. “Bumpety, bumpety, bump” they all said, even the adults, every time they went over the bridge. Past the mailbox and the long driveway of, according to their mother, Margaret Mead. Elli had gotten the message that this woman was important and groundbreaking, particularly for women, and vilified by anti-intellectuals, and so particularly to be emulated. Elli dreamed of becoming one of her mother’s idols, but she felt both inspired and threatened by the doing of something unpopular that seemed to be a necessary part of accomplishing that.

On past the dense swamp, up another rise past the rolling meadow, apple trees and neat but seemingly uninhabited farmhouse; then the Goetz’s, among her family’s best friends, even though they were German, and Mr. Goetz, evenings and weekends, was usually in their driveway, polishing his beloved Porsche or Mercedes; Annie, Hans, Mark and Elli had spent countless hours together, playing cowboys and Indians [sic] in their large wooded back yards, sledding and riding flying saucers down Elli and Mark’s driveway in winter, swimming in Annie and Hans’s handkerchief-size pool, fighting and having dinner at each other’s houses; bland Karen Finneran’s house, on a flat and uninteresting lot; a lone split-level, tech-built house, outside the enclave of them inhabited by the town’s liberals, in another part of town; and the final major turn onto Pheasant Run Road, more apple trees, a curve to the right, a dip, a left fork up a little rise past the big field – watch out for cars coming the other way around the bend – a gentle hill down the other side, great for coasting on your bike. Now time to start getting momentum to get up the driveway, the final dip and up they go. At this point, Elli sat up and grasped her father’s thigh on the left and her mother’s on the right, to hold steady and to influence the car’s path through the force of her will, through the piled-up snow and underlying ice, away from the towering pines in the middle of their circular drive. The back wheels fishtailed to the right as the car approached the fork in the drive. Her father accelerated through the skid, steered the car up the long slightly less steep fork, the car swaying to the right and left as they went. They made it to the top and her father accelerated one more time up the last incline and into the garage, with a final swerve, just missing her mother’s car, parked in its spot on the right.

Then Elli realized there had been something that she hadn’t expected about the house. At least six inches of snow had fallen since they’d left three days earlier, and there were tire tracks in the drive. The person who plowed only came when there was over a foot, and it was clear he hadn’t plowed.

“I wonder who’s been here,” her mother remarked, sounding unconcerned but curious.

“I’ll go look,” Elli said. Suddenly, braving the cold didn’t seem so awful. Imagining herself Nancy Drew, she pulled on her boots, zipped up her parka and ran around to the front steps where she found footprints leading to the front door. There was something white – it looked like an envelope – jammed between the door and the frame, just above the knob of the heavy wooden door. The night was bright from the powdery snow and the three-quarters moon and she was only 50 feet from the garage. But no one in her family was in sight at that moment and suddenly it seemed quite likely that someone would spring from around the other side of the house, haul her away and murder her. She grabbed the envelope and ran as fast as she could across the snowy lawn back towards the garage. When she nearly ran into her mother coming out to take in more bags and equipment from the car, she tried to pretend that she hadn’t been running and wasn’t winded.

“This was in the door,” she said, giving her mother the envelope, noticing as she did that her family’s name and address were scrawled across the front of it and that the return address,

Wilton Police Department
Town Hall
Wilton, Mass.

was printed in the upper left-hand corner. Her mother took the envelope, almost disinterestedly.

“Go inside and get ready for bed.”

Elli tried to imagine why the police would be leaving her family an envelope. Her parents couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. Then she thought of all the times she’d heard her father arguing on the phone with someone, insisting that he’d already “put a check in the mail” or that he would do it by the end of the week. Maybe he was in trouble for not paying one of his subcontractors, the lumberyard or the concrete layer. Or it could be much worse. A roundup of Jews. Who knew? It could happen here. Their parents had never said it. They didn’t seem to live in fear. But Elli thought of it, though she never said anything about what she sometimes imagined. It seemed shameful to waste the freedom that they enjoyed from all that horror by even thinking of it.

When Elli’s mother came in from the breezeway, she went straight to hers and their father’s bedroom and closed the door. A few minutes later, Elli’s father came in to say goodnight.

“What was in the envelope?” Elli asked.

“It was from the police department.”

“I know.”

“Nothing you need to worry about. Did you have fun skiing? I felt like I was doing a little better. Someday I’m going to be able to keep up with Mark. What do you think?”

“You’re getting to be a speed demon. Good night. See you in the morning.”

“Leave the door open, like that, a little wider,” Elli said as her father went out. Lying on her back, trying to keep one eye open to watch the crack in the door, she put her big stuffed dog on her chest to protect herself from the Boston strangler.