The one in the middle, the boy in the red jacket, lifted his mitten and pointed past her with total conviction.
"He did it!"
Lena turned. The man by the station wagon had just set down another box on the tailgate, and he straightened up to find a stranger in a sweater dress glaring at him across a lawn full of snow. He was tall, about thirty, with short dark hair and a day or two of dark stubble along his jaw. He wore a long black wool overcoat that fell past his knees and a dark scarf knotted at the throat, and against the white yard and the wood-paneled flank of the station wagon he looked like an exclamation point.
He raised both hands, palms out, the universal sign of the falsely accused.
"What?"
Lena looked at him for one long second. Then she marched the rest of the way across the lawn, set the silver present and the red present side by side on the hood of the station wagon, where the snow had melted off in a ghostly patch above the engine, bent down, and scooped up two handfuls of snow. She packed it hard, the way her father had taught her when she was six, turning it in her palms until it squeaked. She did not take her eyes off him.
He saw it coming. He had time to say "Wait—" and then the snowball hit him square in the chest and burst against the black wool in a white star.
He looked down at his coat. He looked back up at her. One corner of his mouth went up, slowly, the way a garage door goes up, revealing something that had been put away in there for a long time.