First Frost by Sarah Addison Allen Page A

man?” Patrice said.
    â€œThere was an elderly man standing here a moment ago,” Claire said. “He had silver hair. He was wearing a silver suit.”
    â€œThere was no one here,” Tara said. Tara was older than Patrice and not fighting it as well, in large part because Tara didn’t have the kind of money Patrice married into. Her hair was darker, and she wore tunics covering a perfectly acceptable middle-aged belly, hiding it from her go-to-the-gym-every-day sister.
    â€œHe was right here,” Claire said, getting frustrated. “Right where I’m standing.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Claire,” Patrice said. “We haven’t seen anyone like that.”
    â€œYou were talking to him,” Claire said, frowning.
    â€œWe were talking, but just to each other,” Tara said. “What was it we were saying?”
    â€œI don’t remember,” Patrice said.
    Tara laughed. “That’s funny, I don’t remember, either.”
    â€œWe came out of the store, and you walked up to us. I thought we’d been talking about you, but I suppose we hadn’t.” Patrice shrugged.
    Claire said good-bye and walked away, leaving Patrice and Tara staring off into space, as if someone had put them in a trance.
    Someone who smelled like smoke.

 
    6
    Back at the Pendland Street Inn, Anne Ainsley stood outside room number six with a set of fresh sheets in her arms.
    â€œMr. Zahler?” she called as she knocked.
    He didn’t answer. She knew he wouldn’t. She’d seen him leave for downtown after breakfast.
    She unlocked his bedroom door and entered.
    In every one of Anne’s three marriages, she’d found herself surprised by her husbands’ lies. Genuinely, knocked-off-her-feet surprised. After her third husband cheated on her and emptied her bank account of the last of the money she’d inherited from her parents, she swore she would never allow herself to be surprised like that ever again. Men lied. She accepted that now. They couldn’t help it. It was their default position. They denied it, but that just proved her point.
    Russell Zahler was lying about something. And she truly didn’t care. It actually gave her some satisfaction that Andrew was being conned. But she was curious and bored. Andrew didn’t let her have a television in her room. There wasn’t a television in the whole damn inn. It isn’t authentic to the house, Andrew would say. Sometimes she wanted to say, What about electricity, Andrew? That’s not authentic to the house, either. God, he was so much like their father sometimes. So, Anne had to find her own entertainment.
    Her entertainment mostly consisted of the Internet on the front-desk computer, and spying on guests and rifling through their things when she cleaned their rooms. She never stole anything. Andrew would toss her out in a millisecond if she did that. She just liked to see what people brought from their homes, what their perfumes smelled like and what sizes they wore. She liked the stories she would make up about them.
    Anne had always been a bit of a sneak. She knew that about herself. Anne and Andrew’s father had been an optometrist and their mother had run his office, but their mother had also secretly sold naughty lingerie in her spare time, mostly to the Clark women in town, who were known for their sexual prowess and always married well because of it. Their father had never known about their mother’s side business. And Andrew had been aghast when he’d found their mother’s catalogs and wares after she died.
    But Anne had known all about it. She’d found the stuff when she was ten, after discovering the locked trunk in the back of her mother’s closet. She’d searched all over the house until she’d found the key to it hidden in the toilet tank.
    Their parents had died on their first road trip after they retired. They’d saved a fortune and had