“So now we’re going to skip ahead a few months,” Janet said to the crowd at the storytelling festival. The sweaty, rapt faces gazed up at her with wide eyes, hanging on her every word. She loved this aspect of performing here, and was grateful that there were no drunken boors determined to break the spell. At this festival, unlike her arena concerts, no one would dream of interrupting her with a request or a sexual remark.
She strummed a gentle refrain of “Handsome Mary” as she continued. “After all, the winter shuts everything down. We get ten inches of snow on the ground, and it gets colder than your boyfriend Tom when you accidentally call him Harry. So nobody does much of anything. Well, except for what I told you that troubled boy and his best friend’s sister were doing just now.”
She chuckled along with the audience’s laugh.
“But I’ll get back to them. The game warden and the paramedic settled into a relationship that fit them both like an old comfortable hand-me-down quilt you snuggle under when the wind’s howling against the windows. They saw each other when they could, talked on the phone and texted when they couldn’t. They didn’t make a big show of it, but pretty soon everyone knew about it, and they were happy for them. The paramedic had spent her whole life caring about other people, making sure they were safe and happy, fighting the fights the girl with the secrets in her head wasn’t yet ready to handle, and she’d earned this. The warden was a decent guy, not too imaginative, but far from stupid. If he noticed strange things about the paramedic or the other Tufa, he kept it to himself, content to enjoy what he had. If only more people could do that.”
Then she changed to a more chopping melody, one of her own tunes, “The I-40 Reel.” In concert she played it on a fiddle, but now she got the same feeling from her electric guitar. “The troubled boy and his best friend’s sister, though … they were different. They were young, and filled up with feelings they couldn’t put into words, or even songs.”
She segued into a “wacka-wacka” riff, mocking the cliché music found in old porn movies. The audience laughed.
“So they went at it almost every night after that first time: at her place, at his place, and at any place they could find. They discovered that they were a perfect match that way, and since they were young, and hurting, and this made them feel better, they took refuge in it. Everyone in town thought it was a fine thing. It had that symmetry about it, you know? Dead man’s sister and dead man’s best friend. There was a song in that somewhere, everyone knew, and it was just a matter of time before someone sang it at their wedding.”
She segued into the Peter Gunn theme; only a few people in the audience recognized it. “But not everyone felt that way. Since the game warden spent a lot of time with the paramedic, going to Tufa barn dances and shindigs at the Pair-A-Dice, he also had a chance to watch the troubled boy and his best friend’s sister. He still had a sneaking suspicion about the boy, something he couldn’t put into words. And so did the girl with the secrets. It wasn’t that she thought the troubled boy had killed his old girlfriend, or his best friend; there was absolutely no evidence of that. But something important hadn’t come out in the open yet, and the night winds weren’t telling, neither. So both the warden and the girl with the secrets watched, and waited, to see what it might be.”
She slowed to a steadier, even darker rhythm. “And while this was going on, the monster slept. There was a big mass hunt, with over three hundred people marching through Half Pea Hollow and over the slopes of Dunwoody Mountain, but it was all for nothing. No one saw it, no one heard it, certainly no one found it. It, too, had its mysteries, but no one had begun to discover them.
“But that didn’t keep the warden’s old friend from looking. He had no dog in this hunt, as they say around here, but that didn’t mean he was ready to walk away. He was an old man, and he felt like this was his last chance to do something that mattered. And if that monster got him in the process, then he’d go out standing up, with his boots on. So he spent every spare moment of those short winter days traipsing through Half Pea Hollow, looking for pig tracks in the snow, poking into every hole and cave, looking for the monster’s den.”
She abruptly stopped and gave the audience a sly smile. “Oh, but y’all don’t care about that pig, do you? You care about the troubled boy and his best friend’s sister, and what’s gonna happen to them, right?”
The crowd murmured its assent.
She grinned and returned to the melody of “Handsome Mary.” “Well, let me tell you. If you thought that things weighed heavily on the warden, or the girl with the secrets, you can imagine how they pressed down on that poor troubled boy. From the knowledge that he’d deliberately caused his friend’s death came the absolute certainty that he had to watch everything he said and did, to make sure he didn’t give that away. And you know what? It wears on you to live like that. It plumb grinds you down. It makes you short-tempered, and makes you seek out things to take your mind off stuff. And that’s what that boy did, even as something else he didn’t expect was just about to change his life all over again.”