I have two mysteries.

First, this book has disappeared from my bedside. Utterly vanished.

It was there one day, and the next, it was gone. I am fairly certain that it was there one morning and gone that afternoon, but I cannot swear to that.

It’s the fifth in L. M. Boston’s gentle and intriguing Green Knowe fantasy series, and I had checked it out to begin reading it. I had it perched on top of a row of books on the bedside table, meaning to start it as my “churn through the children’s book” reading.

But it vanished. It would be insane to think that our housekeepers picked it up, but I have no other plausible explanation. I have no memory at all of taking it from its place to somewhere else where I hoped to begin reading it, and it is nowhere in our house. I have searched top to bottom, study to basement. It’s gone.

Anyone have a clue about this one?

The second mystery is even weirder.

This CD, Ed DeGenaro’s Dog House, was in the CD player in the kitchen. There is no case. Neither of us know the artist at all, and the music is not familiar to us even from a cursory listening.

Did one of you bring it over to play for me and simply forgot it?

Did one of our house sitters put on his favorite music one night and forget to take it home with him?

Maybe it belongs to the housekeepers.

Or maybe it’s all owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy, and I am the victim of its clumsy arrangements.