'Tis the Season Read Free

road in front and bordered by a forest in back. Children spying through her windows would not have simply come upon the house while passing by.
    She hoped they hadn’t committed any acts of vandalism. She observed no damage on the back porch, no broken windows, no spray-painted walls. Descending the steps, she peered into the forest, and saw nothing but leafless trees mixed with pine and spruce above a carpet of dead leaves and browning ivy. She tramped around to the side of the house, where she thought she’d glimpsed some activity through the window. She found more fingerprints on a windowsill—a young child’s stubby hands—and below the window, lying in the grass, a small pink barrette in the shape of a butterfly.
    All right, then. Children must have been peeking through the windows. No harm in that, she supposed.
    That her childhood home would have attracted otherchildren pleased her in an odd way. Maybe they felt drawn to the house the way she had as a child. Maybe they liked to romp in the sun and cool off on the porch. Maybe they played hide-and-seek under the steps, in the holly bushes and behind the old shed that served as a garage at the end of the gravel driveway. Maybe, like Filomena, they understood the specialness of this grand old house.
    She scooped up the barrette, then turned and walked back to the porch, her lungs filling with the raw mid-November air. Behind her the woods whispered in the wind.
    Closing her fingers around the barrette, she found herself hoping that the children would come back.

CHAPTER TWO
    I F E VAN M YERS ’ S LIFE were a movie, this would be the scene in which he pounded his fists on a locked door and screamed, “Let me out of here!”
    He wasn’t in a movie, though. He was in what had to be the most tedious meeting he’d ever endured—and since it had been arranged for his supposed benefit, he couldn’t very well rise from his chair, yawn loudly and saunter out of the room. Being the boss meant having to behave himself. After all, the gentlemen making their presentation at the other end of the conference table had traveled all the way from Atlanta just to explain, earnestly and at great length, why Champion Sports ought to stock their cushioned insoles in all its stores. Rudeness wasn’t called for.
    Did everyone from Georgia talk so slowly? Evan wondered.
    They’d brought charts with them. They’d brought slides, too, but Evan had declined to provide an overhead projector, so they were making do with an easel, a pointer and about a hundred meticulous poster-board renderings. The chart on display at the moment allegedly demonstrated that the cushioning of Pep Insoles, when inserted inside standard running shoes, reduced the likelihood of a runner’s developing shinsplints by thirty-seven percent.
    â€œThirty-seven percent?” Evan interjected. If he kepthis mouth shut, the presentation might move along faster, but he couldn’t resist. “How do you know it’s thirty-seven percent, as opposed to, say, thirty-five percent? Or forty percent?”
    Unfortunately, the gentlemen from Atlanta had an answer. In fact, they had a chart. “As you can see,” one of them drawled, propping the relevant chart on the easel, “we calculated thirty-seven percent through our performance tests. We tested a group of one hundred recreational runners using the Pep Insoles and a control group of one hundred recreational runners not using them. After both groups had jogged five miles a day for eight weeks on a crushed-asphalt track, we compared the number of shinsplint sufferers who’d been using Pep Insoles with the number in the control group who experienced shinsplints, and this produced the figure we’ve supplied—thirty-seven percent.”
    Well, Evan had to give them points for precision.
    â€œBut we’d like to emphasize that the reduction in shinsplints is not the primary function of Pep