The six separated and went visiting.
Rusty Billingham sang softly as he walked home through the snow. Rusty lived to sing. He wrote his own songs, and people seemed to like them. He played guitar well, but he also played a synthesizer and could make himself sound like a combo. From time to time he did a bar gig, a wedding, a birthday party. He didn’t make much money at it, but he didn’t expect to make much, so he wasn’t disappointed.
A booker who was scouting for talent heard Rusty one night at Pickin’ and Grinnin’, the roadhouse owned by Mayor Potter, and said he could get him regular work across four states. But Rusty didn’t like traveling. He had gone away to war in the Mideast for a few years, and that cured him of wanting to see new places. At twenty-seven, he came back home to Rainbow Falls, and now at thirty, he planned to stay here until he needed an undertaker.
The booker gave recordings of Rusty’s songs to a talent agent, and the agent wanted Rusty to come to Nashville, all expenses paid, to discuss his future. Rusty said thanks but no thanks. He had no illusions about himself. He could write music and sing, but he didn’t have the looks to go big-time professional. He was as not- handsome as Montana was not-Afghanistan. In fact, he was a little goofy-looking, goofy in a nice way but goofy nonetheless. The days of non-handsome country stars were all but gone. Anyway, he could play for locals, people who grew up here, who knew him or knew his folks, but when he played for a room of total strangers, his shyness kicked in, and he couldn’t look much at the audience or do patter between songs.
He made a decent living with carpentry and cabinetmaking, crafts he learned from his dad. He always had work, and there was nearly as much satisfaction to be had from doing good joinery and hand-rubbed finishes as from making music. And nobody cared what a cabinetmaker looked like. Currently he had a kitchen-remodel under way, only six blocks from home, so he could leave his tools there and walk back and forth.
As long as he could remember, he liked to walk this town, pretty as it was, but especially since he came home from war. Rusty knew men who returned with one leg or none. Every day he gave thanks for his legs, and he proved his gratitude by using them. He didn’t feel guilty that he walked away from war while others were carried, but he felt the iniquity of it, the gross injustice, and sorrowed sometimes late at night.
He was half a block past the old courthouse, nearing the corner, when he thought he heard a man scream. He stopped to listen, but the cry had been brief and muffled, as if it had come from inside one of the big old houses. It might have been less a scream than a shout.
Rusty turned in a circle, studying the street in the lamplight, the houses with their deep porches, the bare- limbed trees black where the snow had not painted them. The second scream, a woman’s, was not as brief, but also muffled. The snow played tricks with sound, too, and he couldn’t pinpoint the source of the cry before it abruptly cut off.
No traffic moved on the main street, as far as the falling snow allowed the eye to see. When he took three steps to the corner, he saw that the cross street was likewise deserted. The storm harried people home early and kept them there, but Montanans were a hardy lot and not easily deterred by inclement weather. With four inches accumulated, there would usually be a few people out on skis, poling along streets where the plows hadn’t yet scraped the pavement, not to mention kids building snow forts or dragging their sleds behind them toward the nearest open hill, laughing and calling excitedly to one another. Rusty saw no one, heard no children.
He realized that no snowplows growled in the distance, either. The city maintenance-department crews should have been hard at work. In and around the courthouse was one of the neighborhoods where they usually started in a storm.
When Rusty first came home from war, his nerves were frayed and taut, easily strummed but slow to quiet. The peace of small-town Montana had seemed illusory. Sometimes he found it easy to believe that stealthy assassins were at work in the night, slitting throats of sleepers. And at odd moments, for no apparent reason, he froze in expectation of explosions that never came. But those days were more than two years in the past. He didn’t suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. His nerves were knit, and even when he sat up in bed suddenly at three in the morning, unsure what had awakened him, they no longer throbbed with arpeggios of fear.
He took seriously, therefore, his sense of foreboding. Something was wrong. The two muffled cries — screams or shouts — had been real. The deserted streets, the childless yards, the quiet here and the stillness even into the distance, were unusual if not strange.
He turned left, walking slowly north on the cross street, alert for any sound and for any moving thing other than the gently driven snow. A few of the lovely old houses were dark, but most appeared warm and welcoming with lights in their windows. Indeed, the street was no less picturesque, no less charming than a winter painting by Thomas Kinkade, in which every French pane was a jewel and even trees and some expanses of snow seemed to be filled with inner light.
You could call it magical, this part of town at this moment, but it didn’t feel as good as it looked. He couldn’t understand how a sense of menace could arise from a scene that, in its every aspect, charmed the eye. He wondered about himself, about whether he might be sliding back into the perpetual uneasiness that troubled him during the six months immediately after he left the battlefield.
When he worked late, as he had this day, he walked home by this route because it brought him past the house of Corrina Ringwald. They became best friends their senior year in high school, when she lost her little sister to leukemia and fell into a depression that neither drugs nor counseling could cure. Rusty made her well with music. He wrote songs for her, recorded them, and put them in her mailbox. He wasn’t courting her, and she knew he wasn’t; it just hurt him to see her in such pain. They remained best friends all these years later. Both of them wanted a closer relationship, but both of them feared that if they failed as lovers, they would feel awkward with each other and would then be less close as friends. Their friendship was such an important part of their lives that they were loath to risk damaging it. As often as not, when he passed Corrina’s home at the end of the day, the porch light was on, which was a signal to him. If the light glowed, she didn’t have any prep work for the next day’s classes — she was a teacher — and wanted him to come in for dinner.
Rusty was still more than two blocks from Corrina’s place when he heard another scream, a woman’s. This one lasted longer than the previous two and couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than what it was: a cry of abject terror. He halted, turned, trying to home in on the voice, and just as the scream cut off, he decided it came from one of two houses, both with bright windows, on the farther side of the street.
He hurried across to the other sidewalk and stood there, under a streetlamp, looking back and forth from a white Victorian with pastel blue trim to a pale gray Victorian with black trim, waiting for another scream or a clue of any kind. The sole sound was the faintest oscillating shush of the gentle wind in the trees, a wind too weak to stir a bough or branch. Nothing moved except the snow unraveling from a sky unseen. This familiar street had become as enigmatic as any far, foreign place first glimpsed. So eerie was the mood that even his shadow on the lamplit snow seemed sinister, as if it might rise up against him.
In one of the first-floor rooms of the gray-and-black house, movement caught Rusty’s attention. Quick past a window, someone, something, a suggestion of violent action. He followed the front walk to the porch steps, not sure what he should do: ring the bell, just try the door and enter unannounced, look more closely through the window.… As he reached the top of the steps, a woman called out—“Can you help me?”—but her voice came from behind him and from a distance.
He turned and saw her in the street, in the center of the nearer intersection, perhaps seventy feet north of him. In the crosslight of the four corner lamps but at the farthest limit of each rather than in the direct glow of any of them, she looked lost. She wore what appeared to be a silk robe, short and sapphire-blue; the breeze molded it to her and riffled the hem.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Help me,” she replied, but only stood there in the middle of the intersection, as though oblivious of the biting cold and in a state of shock.
He glanced at the house where he had been about to ring the bell or try the door. Nothing moved past the windows. No sound arose from within.
Perhaps he had come to the wrong house. Perhaps the woman in the crosslight was the one who had screamed, and then had fled into the cold and snow.
Rusty descended the porch steps and followed the walkway to the street.
The thin wrap the woman wore revealed that she was shapely. The whispering breeze and the lamplight made a lambent flame of her long flaxen hair. He suspected that on closer inspection she would prove to be singularly beautiful. In the shower of snow like thrown rice, in the provocative silk robe, she might have been a vision of a bride on her wedding night.
