On the fifth morning in a row, the Hendersons' Christmas lights were hanging on somebody else's house.
Sheriff Earl Whitaker stood on the sidewalk on Maple Street with his coffee and looked at them. Red, green, and blue bulbs, the big old-fashioned C9 kind, strung neat as you please along the porch of the Hamm rental, three doors down from where they belonged.
"Help me understand something," Earl said. "When did you last see them on your house?"
"Ten o'clock last night," said Russ Henderson, who was sixty and in his bathrobe and not happy about it. "Plugged in and burning. I got up at six and they were gone."
"Gone where you'd notice?"
"Gone off my porch and onto Ruthie Hamm's, Earl. I'd say I noticed."
It had started the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
The first morning, the lights from the Yoder place at the top of Maple Street turned up on the Bakers' hedge next door. Pete Yoder had laughed about it at the Liars' Table. Kids, he'd said.
The second morning, the Bakers' lights were gone, and they turned up on the Simmons house, one door down. The third morning, the Simmons lights moved to the Hendersons'. The fourth morning, the Hendersons' own lights vanished and reappeared on the Hamm rental.
Now it was the fifth morning, and the Hamm rental had two sets of lights, and Russ Henderson had none.
"It's a prank," Dot Kessler said, when Earl stopped at the diner. "Some teenager with too much time."
"Maybe," Earl said.
He didn't think it was a prank. Pranks were messy. Somebody pulling a prank throws a strand of lights over a bush and runs.
These lights hadn't been thrown anywhere.
At the Liars' Table, the theories were flying.
Floyd Eckert said it was raccoons, and when Pete pointed out that raccoons don't use gutter clips, Floyd said Pete had never met a smart raccoon. Gus said it was the Methodist youth group. Harlan said it was the Baptists trying to make the Methodists look bad.
"Somebody's moving them on purpose," Earl said. "And they're moving them the same direction every night."
"Which direction?" Dot asked.
"Downhill," Earl said, and finished his coffee.
Earl walked Maple Street that afternoon, slow, the way he'd walked crime scenes for twenty-nine years.
Every strand had been hung with care. The bulbs all faced the same way, out toward the street.
The wires were clipped to the gutters with the right plastic clips. Not one bulb was broken.
At the Hamm rental, he found a cardboard tube lying in the flower bed by the porch steps. It was the inside of a paper towel roll. Somebody had wound a strand of lights around it to carry them, and then dropped it.
Earl picked it up and turned it over in his hands. He knew that trick.
Plenty of people wound lights on a cardboard tube so they wouldn't tangle. He'd seen exactly one man in Pine Hollow who taped the plug end down with masking tape and wrote the number of feet on the tape in pencil.
The tape on this tube said 25 FT in careful block letters.
Lou Teel had done that. Lou had run the hardware counter at the feed store for thirty years, and every Christmas he'd put up the biggest display on Maple Street. Lou had passed away in February.
His widow, Marjorie, lived at the very bottom of Maple Street, in the last house before the creek.
Earl drove past the Teel house on his way home.
It was the only dark house on the street. Every other porch on Maple had something going, a wreath or a string of lights or a plastic Santa.
The Teel porch was bare. The big wooden star Lou used to hang over the garage was leaning against the side of the house under a tarp.
In the snow along the side of the house, there were footprints. Small ones, about a boy's size four, going back and forth between the back door and the garage.
Earl sat in the Crown Victoria and looked at June's picture on the dash for a while.
Then he went home and set his alarm for midnight.
He parked behind the Methodist church at 11:45 with the lights off and a thermos of coffee and a clear view down Maple Street.
He watched the Hamm rental. He watched the houses on either side of it. He watched every porch light and every shadow, and at two in the morning, he watched a cat cross the road.
He saw nothing else. At five-thirty, he fell asleep sitting up.
At six-fifteen, a knock on his window woke him.
It was Tyler, on his way to open the diner, trying very hard not to laugh.
"Sheriff," Tyler said. "You might want to get out and look at your car."
Earl got out.
The Crown Victoria was wrapped in Christmas lights. Red, green, and blue, the big old C9 bulbs, strung along the light bar and down both doors and around the side mirrors, neat as a department store window.
Tucked under the windshield wiper was a folded piece of notebook paper. Earl opened it.
Sorry, Sheriff, it said in pencil, in a child's careful printing. Only one more night. Please don't arrest anybody.
Earl looked down Maple Street toward the dark house at the bottom, and the Hamm porch with its two sets of lights was empty.