As we drive in late at night on the 21st, the town seems angelic. Christmas lights hang from poles along main street. There are few cars on the road. I have not been home for three years. I point out to my children familiar landmarks — the toy factory I worked in one summer before a round of layoffs, the bus depot where I left for Basic Training only a few months before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the first Gulf War began, the golf course where I worked for several years while failing at college.

The snow comes Christmas Day. Sleet in the early afternoon that soon turns to snow. By nightfall the roads are blanked out, grass and trees thick with snow. Under the snow, everything looks fine.

We have been on the road all day and are bone-tired from the drive, but instead of turning toward my parents’ house, I keep driving, past the hospital both my grandfathers died in, past the new addition at the edge of town and the old addition across the street from it where a high school friend had a basketball goal in his driveway and missed shots landed on his mother’s car, past dirt roads we often turned down on cool October nights with only the dash light on our faces, rabbits fleeing in the headlights before us, past a landscape I watched everyday for close to fifteen years on my way to and from school, the windows of the bus and the fields out the window all frosted over, like they are now, as we drive, past old weathered barns and old and new houses in changing landscape, past the house where I used to live, past rural country churches where the signs say “He is Risen” and “This is the day that the Lord hath made; Let us rejoice, and be glad in it.”

The snow comes Christmas Day. Sleet in the early afternoon that soon turns to snow. By nightfall the roads are blanked out, grass and trees thick with snow. Under the snow, everything looks fine. The town lies quiet as a blanket. The lights come on all along the streets and the snow streaks through the streetlights in myriad prisms. Soft light falls from the windows of the houses, Christmas lights strung up under the eaves. Thin wires of smoke tether themselves to the chimneys down main street, where the old houses used to look rich, but now sag groundward. Still, the snow erases the past, negates the years of neglect around the windows of the houses, makes everything fine again, almost new. If you are driving, or walking through, if you squint your eyes or ignore the empty sockets of the abandoned houses, if you refuse to look for the husked-out shells where fire has wrought its damage when the chemicals got out of control, you can forget that something immense lurks beneath the surface here, something you only talk about in whispers, late at night, in full rooms with all the lights on.

Full dark I walk down the hill to my grandmother’s house. The snow is three to four inches deep. My feet slide under me, the surface slick and suspicious. The church bell chimes the hour. Smoke from chimneys melts into the falling snow, disappearing into the night. I wonder if there will be fires. Wrapped in the cold and snow I walk, the wind blowing in my face, snow settling in my eyelashes and hair. The house grows closer. Inside there will be warmth and light and food and laughter, but for just a moment I wish to keep walking, to hold this silence, hold this place in my heart just a few minutes longer.

My stepfather did not know what was in the little plastic bags. My mother suspected, and called the police. Within minutes the drug enforcement officer — a man I went to high school with — for the county had arrived. When he heard the story he said it must have been a drop-off, and someone would be looking for it.

The next day he set up surveillance cameras in the trees and brush where the flashlight had been. He came every morning to check them. He told my parents he would keep watch. He told them not to worry.

A few days later the cameras took a picture of a man the police knew kicking through the weeds near where the flashlight had been. He was wanted in a county north of ours for drug manufacturing and distributing, but was long gone by the time the police got the camera. The local agent stopped by my parents’ house to tell them the news. When he left, he told them to report anything suspicious they saw in the area. He said there was nothing else they could do.

Christmas night a house burns in an adjacent town. When we drive back to North Carolina, the ashes are still smoldering, melting the newly-fallen snow.