I, Richard

The disease. I drove them off. But still they came. They came and they watched me. And then I saw. They wanted very little and they were afraid too. So I offered them bits. Some bread. A sliver of meat when I had it. And so they stayed and I wasn't alone.”

“The rats…” Willow tried to keep the aversion from her voice. “They were your friends.”

“To this day,” she replied.

“But, Miss Telyegin,” Willow said, “you're an educated woman. You've read. You've studied. You must know rats carry diseases.”

“They were good to me.”

“Yes. I see you believe that. But that was then, when you were in prison and desperate. You don't need rats now. Let people take their place.”

Anfisa Telyegin lowered her head. “Invasion and killing,” she said. “Some things cannot be forgotten.”

“But they can be forgiven. And no one wants you to leave. We know… I know you had to leave your home once before. In Port Terryton. I know about what happened there. The police, the lawsuits, the courts… Miss Telyegin, you've got to see that if you move away and start over again and if you encourage rats to live on your property again… Don't you see that you'll just be back where you started? No one's going to let you choose rats over people.”

“I will not do that again,” Anfisa said. “But I cannot stay here. Not after what has happened.”

“Just as well, darlin',” Ava Downey said over her gin and tonic. Eight months had passed since the Night of the Rats, and Anfisa Telyegin was gone from their midst. The neighborhood had returned to normal and the new occupants of 1420-a family called Houston with an attorney husband, a pediatrician wife, a Danish au pair, and two well-scrubbed children of eight and ten who wore uniforms to their private school and carried their books to and from the car in neat satchels-were finally doing what the local inhabitants had long desired. For weeks on end, painters wielded their brushes, wallpaperers carried rolls into the house, wood finishers sanded and stained, drapers created mas-terworks for the windows… The chicken coop was carted off and burnt, the ivy was removed, the picket fence was replaced, and a lawn and flowerbeds were planted in front of the house while an English garden was designed for the back. And six months after that, Napier Lane was finally designated A Perfect Place to Live by the Wingate Courier, with 1420 the house that was chosen to symbolize the beauties of the neighborhood.

And there was no jealousy over that fact, although the Downeys were rather cool when the rest of the neighbors offered the Houstons their congratulations on having 1420 selected by the newspaper as the model of domiciliary perfection. After all, the Downeys had restored their own house first and Ava had from the beginning been so kind as to offer her expertise in inte rior design to Madeline Houston… No matter that Madeline had chosen to ignore virtually all of those suggestions, common courtesy demanded that the Houstons decline the pictorial honor presented to them, passing it along to the Downeys who were-if nothing else-mentors to everyone when it came to restoration and interior decoration. But the Houstons apparently didn't see it that way, so they posed happily at the gate of 1420 when the newspaper photographers came to call and they framed the subsequent front page of the Wingate Courier and placed it in their front hallway so everyone-including the green-eyed Downeys- could see it when they came to call.

So “Just as well, darlin',” was said with some mixed feelings by Ava Downey when Willow McKenna stopped to chat in the midst of a walk with little Cooper snoozing in his stroller. Ava was sitting in her faux wicker rocking chair on the front porch, celebrating a warm spring day with her first outdoor gin and tonic of the season. She was referring to the departure of Anfisa Telyegin from their midst, something that Willow herself hadn't quite come to terms with, despite the advent of the Houstons who-with their children, their au pair, and their commitment to home improvement-were so much more suited to Napier Lane. “C'n you imagine what we'd be goin' through right now if we hadn't taken steps to deal with the problem?” Ava asked.

“But if you'd seen her that night…” Willow couldn't remove from her mind the image of the Russian woman as she'd been on her knees, weeping in the ivy. “And then to learn about what the rats meant to her… I just feel so-”

“Extended postpartum,” Ava said. “That's what this is. What you need is a drink. Beau! Beau, honey, you in there, darlin'? Fix Willow here-”

“Oh no. I've got to get dinner. And the kids're alone. And… It's just I can't stop feeling sad about it all. It's like we drove her off, and I never thought I'd do something like that, Ava.”

Ava shrugged and rattled her ice cubes. “All for the best,” she noted.

What Leslie Gilbert said darkly was, “Sure Ava would feel that way. Southerners are used to driving people off their property. It's one of their sports.” But she said this mostly because she'd watched Ava zero in on Owen at the New Year's Eve party. She hadn't yet forgotten that they'd used their tongues when they'd kissed, although Owen was still denying that fact.

Willow said, “But she didn't need to leave. I'd forgiven her. Hadn't you?”

“Sure. But when someone's ashamed… What're they supposed to do?”

Ashamed was how Willow herself felt. Ashamed that she'd panicked, ashamed that she'd tracked down Anfisa's previous residence, and ashamed most of all that, having tracked down the truth in Port Terryton, she hadn't given the Russian woman the chance to rectify matters before the men acted. Had she done that, had she told Anfisa what she'd unearthed about her, surely Anfisa would have taken steps to make sure that what had happened in Port Terryton didn't happen in East Wingate.

“I didn't really give her a chance,” she told Scott. “I should have told her what we intended to do if she wouldn't bring in the exterminators. I think I should tell her that now: that what we did was right but how we did it was wrong. I think I'll feel better if I do that, Scott.”

Scott McKenna thought no explanations to Anfisa Telyegin were necessary. But he knew Willow. She wouldn't rest until she'd made whatever peace she felt she needed to make with their erstwhile neighbor. He personally considered it a waste of her time, but the truth was that he was so caught up in meeting the needs of-praise God- the twelve clients he had now at McKenna Computing Designs that he really didn't do more than murmur, “Whatever you think's right, Will,” when his wife at last mentioned going to see Anfisa.

“She was in prison,” Willow reminded him. “In a concentration camp. If we'd known that at the time, I'm sure we would have done things differently. Wouldn't we?”

Scott was only half listening, so he said, “Yeah. I guess.”

Which Willow took for agreement.

It wasn't difficult to trace Anfisa. Willow did it through the community college, where a sympathetic secretary in Human Resources met her for coffee and slipped across the table to her an address in Lower Waterford, one hundred and fifteen miles away.

Willow didn't take Leslie Gilbert this time. Instead she asked if she would baby-sit Cooper for a day. Since Cooper was at the stage where he slept, ate, eliminated, and spent the rest of the time cooing at the mobiles above his crib, Leslie knew that she'd not be distracted from her daily intake of talk shows, so she agreed. And since she'd been looking forward to the topic of the day on her favorite show-I Had Group Sex With My Son's Friends-she didn't ask Willow where she was going, why she was going there, or if she wanted company.

This was just as well. Willow wanted to talk to Anfisa Telyegin alone.

She found Anfisa's new house on Rosebloom Court in Lower Waterford, and when she saw it, she felt a new onslaught of guilt, comparing it to her previous homes both in Port Terryton and on Napier Lane. Those houses were both historical properties. This was not. They had been reflective of the time period during which they'd been built. This was reflective of nothing more than a tract-home designer's desire to make as much money as he could from as little creative effort as possible. It was the sort of place families had moved into in droves after World War II: with stucco walls, a concrete driveway with a crack down the middle from which weeds grew, and a tarpaper roof. Willow's spirits sank when she saw it.

She sat in her car and regretted everything, but most of all she regretted her propensity to panic. If she hadn't panicked when she saw the first rat, if she hadn't panicked when she found the droppings in her vegetable garden, if she hadn't panicked when she learned about Anfisa's trouble in Port Terryton, perhaps she wouldn't have condemned the poor woman to life in this dismal cul-de-sac with its barren one-tree lawns, its warped garage doors that dominated the house fronts, and its patchy, uneven sidewalks.

“It was her choice, darlin',” Ava Downey would have said. “And let's not forget the chicken coop, Willow. She