It was through the ornate basement entrance that I reentered Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House, its French doors already open, yawning tragically in the dim moonlight, white floor-length curtains billowing inward like beckoning valets. Between them I passed like a thief in the night, a forefinger barely tracing the outermost flutter of the curtain to my right.

I made my way about the place slowly. Here and there small battery-powered nightlights revealed meager stretches of floor and wall. Above one such illumination on the wall hung a clock which had stopped running, preserving indefinitely the instant at which the house had answered the deputy.

Of course, it was obvious to me that someone had thrown the main power switch in order to plunge the party into darkness and aid the revelers in escaping the police, but I came across no power box in the basement and, looking back now, likely made little effort, if any, to locate it. I much preferred the idea the house itself was responsible—that it had resolved to pause, freezing the downward current of its sands, as if to reflect on the events of that night, strangle the prospect of further action within its walls, and perhaps gather itself anew. Houses, I have learned, in the courses of their histories, witness many sad and happy sights, and some are more apt to forget or recall them than others. I knew even then Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House was a domicile that did not forget. Its memory was elephantine. It was one of the reasons I loved it.

As my friends were all long departed and the telephone receiver I succeeded in finding proved dead as the rest of the house when I lifted it to my ear, I made my way out as best I could, bumping a corner or chair with my hip here, toppling an empty or half-empty bottle with my foot there. Fond as I was of the place, gaining the front door was a relief, the frigid air of the late watch a blessing—not unlike a greeting from an old friend.

At the terminus of the frost-covered front yard which lay strapped by numerous tire tracks, I turned to take in the house a final time before starting down the road in the direction of a teammate’s house I knew lay two or three miles distant. But barely had I mastered a hundred paces, approaching a point where the road curved dramatically, when I became aware of headlights and the roar of an engine coming toward me at an extraordinary speed. Indeed, it seemed sound and light were almost on top of me so fast, I marveled—even amid my alarm as I leapt into the ditch—how the car could master the curve at that speed.

Yet the driver must have been extremely familiar with that stretch of road, for he not only negotiated the curve, but used it as a kind of slingshot to propel the low, sleek shape of his car, brakes wailing, skidding toward the mailbox of Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House, where it came to a stop, not two feet from it, expertly aligned.

A hand deftly flipped open the door of the box and, joined by its other, withdrew a mountain of printed material. Then the car’s engine revved, and the machine jerked into the driveway, thin metallic sound of beer cans crunching beneath it, and the hollow roll of a bottle on pavement, to which the car must have struck only a glancing blow. The driver came to a stop precisely where he must have known an automatic outside flood light would switch on, for come on it did, bathing the rumbling dark shape in a stark white light, removing the night’s mask to reveal a cherry red Camaro.