Noah was more frightened than he'd ever been in his life. He was a stowaway in a car he wasn't supposed to be in, and it was being driven at what felt like a hundred miles an hour by a complete lunatic, who kept shouting and using words that Noah knew from the playground but had never heard from a grownup before. And he wasn't wearing a seat-belt. He was being flung back and forth as the car shot round the curves. It was a sign of how scared he was that he didn't even ask himself whether it was centripetal or centrifugal force that he was experiencing.

Something was tickling the back of his neck, and his wooly hat, which was a little too big, had slipped down over his eyes. It did that sometimes-that was why he liked the other one better, the one he'd pinned onto that fake Noah to trick the agents into thinking he was on Sally's sled with her. He wondered now why he'd thought that was such a clever thing to do. If he hadn't done it, he wouldn't be lying in the back of a stranger's car now, blinded by his own hat and too scared to push it out of the way.

The worst thing of all would be if these crazy people-the woman sounded every bit as nuts as the man-caught him back there. Noah was not quite as innocent as his mother imagined. He knew why the President's children had to be protected by men with guns. But his understanding of that had been, as it was with most things, a purely intellectual one. He knew that there were people who might want to kidnap him or Sally so they could force his father to do things only the President had the power to do. He had never translated that intellectual fact into an emotional reality; it had existed on the same plane for him as the knowledge that light travels around the earth seven times a second: it was interesting, and nothing more.

Now he was beginning to realize that, while he didn't know what, exactly, these people might do to him if they found him, it could be something very bad indeed. Bad for him. Bad for his parents. Bad for Sally. Maybe even bad for Gressie. And he was hit full-force with a kind of fear he'd never had any reason to experience before.

His mother might have underestimated his ability to glean facts from remarkably slim hints in adult conversations he was never meant to have overheard, but she was unequivocally right when she'd told Josh and Ron Butterfield that, no matter how smart Noah might be, he was still an eight-year-old, with the emotions of an eight-year-old, and that some things were too horrible for an eight-year-old to have to deal with.

Lying there in the back of the speeding Jaguar, with a woman's lace-trimmed underpants tickling his neck and the rolled-up brim of his wooly hat rubbing into his eyes, Noah suddenly wanted to cry.

000000

Betty McCarthy walked slowly up Main Street from the Salty Dog restaurant, heavy grocery bags weighing down each arm. She was on her mid-afternoon break, and was taking some things up to the church hall for the supper after the carol sing that night.

Halfway up the hill she stopped for a moment to catch her breath. Then she pushed on. She was feeling it more than she used to, in her back and her feet. Hitting fifty a few years ago hadn't been any joke, and waitressing was hard work. It never occurred to her to complain, though. She didn't know anybody who didn't have to work just as hard, or harder.

At the top of the hill Main Street widened into a kind of square. The corners were anchored by churches-Catholic, Baptist, Congregational-and along the short streets on either side were some of the tourists' favorite businesses: the ice-cream shop, which was closed for the season, and the bakery, which was doing a roaring business selling gingerbread and hot chocolate to the families that were lining up for a last chance to see Santa and get their orders in.

On one side of the square was the park, a couple of acres of green space centered around an old-fashioned bandstand. On Sunday afternoons in summer all kinds of bands played here, some of them coming down from as far away as Saint John in New Brunswick, or Moncton, even. In December it became the undisputed seat of Santa Claus. The Lions' Club had draped the bandstand with tarpaulins to cut down on the windchill for the old man, and had set up a couple of heaters to take the edge off the cold. Bright orange electric cables snaked away through the snow to a generator, carefully situated far enough away that its noise wouldn't make it too hard for Santa to hear the children's whispered requests. In the distance one could see the little village climbing up the hill, and the thick line of woods behind that.

Betty paused again outside the bakery, setting her bags down on a bench. A young woman and a child were just getting out of a small car parked by the curb beside her. She recognized them, and smiled.

"Hello, Mariana," she said. "Merry Christmas."

The woman was unstrapping a toddler from his child seat in back. She looked up, and smiled shyly in return.

"Merry Christmas, Betty." She had a soft voice with a soft, pretty lilt to it: Spanish, Betty knew, though she wasn't sure where Mariana was from.

"Felice Maridad," Betty offered, quite bravely for her.

"Feliz Navidad," Mariana returned the greeting, without any hint of correction or laughter in her voice. Betty was the closest thing she had to a friend in the town, and she appreciated the older woman's effort, even though it was quite unnecessary: Mariana had been saying "Merry Christmas" ever since she was ten.

Betty turned to the child, a girl who could have been anywhere from second grade to fourth.

"How are you, Cathy?" she asked. "Looking forward to tomorrow?"

The girl's dark eyes looked back at her seriously.

"Not really," she said. "But I'm looking forward to this afternoon."

Betty tipped her head a little, as if seeing the girl from a different angle could help her understand this strange reply.

"She's hoping to see a friend," Mariana explained. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she looked, Betty thought, even tireder than Betty felt.

"Can I go to the park now?" the girl asked. "Of course," said her mother. "Wait for me there." The child dashed across the street.

"Is everything all right?" Betty asked. Mariana sighed. "Is it the baby? Or that man again?"

They had met at the playground in the summer, when Betty was looking after her granddaughter and Mariana had brought the toddler there. Betty knew that Mariana had been working as a maid for one of the wealthy families who vacationed in Crabapple Cove, and that they had co-opted her into being their nanny as well when the baby came. Somehow she was expected to manage both jobs, as if one wasn't enough.

"The baby's teething again," Mariana said. She had got him out of his seat now, and was holding him against her body. Drool was running down his chin, which was red and chapped-looking, and he was fussing. "The molars."

"Oh, that's always hard on them. But-the man?"

The man had been coming on to Mariana for some time now. She was a beautiful young woman.

Mariana shrugged, but the disgusted look that crossed her face told Betty everything.

"The same," she said. "I push him away. So far, he doesn't push back."

"Something is bothering you, though. Is it-" Betty hesitated. Money wasn't something she and this young woman had ever talked about. "Christmas is a hard time. My church is doing a tree for the children. If you haven't been able to get her anything, bring her there. Some of the things will be nice. There are books, too. Cathy likes to read a lot, doesn't she?" She had rarely seen the girl without a book.

Mariana's smile seemed to start somewhere deep inside her. It made her whole face glow.

"Betty," she said, "you are so kind. I have something for her, but not much. No books. And she lost one today, her favorite. Mrs. Maxwell took it from her. I hope she will give it back, but. . . ."

"Bring her to the tree, Mariana."

"If I can get away."

To be cont'd. . . .